I’m just here, with my hand on her face, her fist in my shirt, and her mouth destroying what is left of me.
Chapter 10
Skylar
He kisses me.
Not slowly or sweetly.
There is no careful slide back into what we used to be, no tentative testing of the temperature of now. His mouth crashes into mine, and everything I have been carrying—the anger, the grief, the want and every stupid lie I have told myself about being over him—bursts open between us all at once.
I should push him away.
That is the first thought I have. The smart one. The sane one. The one wearing sensible shoes and carrying a clipboard with a very long list of reasons why kissing Zane Rivera is a fucking catastrophic idea.
I have the list memorized. I wrote most of it in the dark at three in the morning, in an apartment that never felt like mine,lying beside a man who never once made me feel the way I do in the first second of this kiss.
His hand comes up to my jaw. Warm. Rough. Certain in a way so familiar it moves through me like a key finding a lock it was cut for. Every sensible thought I had dissolves before it even forms.
My body remembers him before my pride has a chance to.
That has always been the problem with Zane. My mind can build walls, stack them high, and reinforce them with every ugly word he ever said to me and every night I spent putting myself back together after each one. But none of it matters when he is close.
My body has never once listened to reason when he is concerned. It recognizes him beneath the harder jaw, the broader shoulders, and the man carved from the boy. It knows him the way it has always known him, completely and without asking permission.
His mouth is hot and desperate against mine. He kisses me like he has been starving for it. Like all those years of distance have reduced him to this single point of contact and he is trying to make it last forever.
I grip the front of his shirt with both hands because I need something solid under my fingers. Something to keep the ground from dissolving beneath me.
He is solid. More than he was before. Broader across the chest and shoulders, but under my hands, under all that muscle and heat and tension, he is still Zane. The one I have never stopped loving, no matter how many reasons he gave me to try.
His tongue slides against mine and a sound escapes me. It’s small and humiliating. Needy in a way that makes a stubborn, self-preserving part of me want to die right here in the parking lot of Rainer’s Custom Restorations.
His hand tightens at my waist.
Enough to tell me he registered it, remembers exactly what that sound means, and is not going to pretend otherwise.
Fuck.
I kiss him back harder because if I’m already making this mistake, I might as well make it completely, with both hands in his shirt and his mouth taking the last sensible breath I had.
Everything about him overwhelms me all at once.
The heat radiating off his body. The scrape of his stubble against my skin. The faint taste of coffee on his tongue, so ordinary and so him, does something to my chest I can’t name. My fingers curl tighter in his shirt, and his chest rumbles with a low sound that goes straight through me and settles somewhere deep and inconvenient.
God. That sound.
I have dreamt about that sound.
Hated myself for dreaming about it. Woken up beside Damien in that cold, expensive apartment, with the echo of it still burning somewhere I couldn’t reach, couldn’t explain, and couldn’t make stop.
I should have forgotten this by now. I should have forgotten him. Instead, I remember everything.
The way he kisses with his whole body, nothing held back.
The way he crowds me without ever making me feel trapped. That specific quality he has always had of making me feel surrounded and free at the same time.
His thumb strokes along my jaw. That small tenderness in the middle of all this heat nearly undoes me more than any of the rest of it, because that is the thing about Zane I could never reconcile and never get over. He always did that. Anyone can want someone. Not everyone can make them feel, in the same breath, like they are both burning and held.
