He always made me feel safe. He still does even after everything we’ve been through.
He backs me up a half step before he abruptly halts himself, and I sense the war inside him. His body is tight against mine, his breath ragged and uneven against my mouth. His cock is hard against me, thick and unmistakable, and that knowledge sends heat spilling low through my stomach in a way that is not helpful and I’m not going to be able to pretend I didn’t notice.
A sharp, reckless part of me wants to press closer. To feel exactly what I have done to him. To punish us both with the proof of it.
His mouth leaves mine. Not far, only enough for air.
We stand here, breathing. Hard and uneven, entirely exposed.
The city continues on around us as if nothing has happened. As if the entire world hasn’t tilted on its axis and settled somewhere different from where it was before.
His forehead lowers to mine and stays there. I let him, because I don’t have the strength right now to take that from him.
A second passes. Then another.
“Fuck,” he whispers, low and honest.
A slight tremor moves through him.
Not weakness. Zane has never been weak, not even at eighteen, with blood on his knuckles and nowhere to put them. This is restraint. The kind that costs a person something real. I know it because I can see how much he wants to keep going and how much it is costing him not to.
I want it too.
That is what frightens me. How easily I could lean back into him. How willing my body already is to forgive what my heart has not yet survived. Heat pulses through every place he touched.
I want his hands under my shirt.
I want his mouth on my throat.
I want to be the girl in his bed again, the one who wrote that note in the dark because saying it out loud was too terrifying.
I’m not scared of you. I’m afraid of what I feel.
God. I was right to be afraid after feeling him ruin me once. Feeling him again might finish the job.
I pull back. It takes everything I’ve got.
His hand falls from my face the moment I decide, as if he had sensed the decision before I made it.
His eyes open. Storm gray. Darker now, full of heat, hunger, guilt, and something so raw and unguarded that I have to look away.
I take another step back and build the wall myself, brick by brick, because nobody else is going to do it for me.
“That can’t happen,” I say, my voice steady.
He nods once. “Yeah.”
That almost makes me angry.
The old Zane would have smirked, said something filthy and perfectly aimed. Something meant to make my knees weak and my hand itch, turning the whole moment into a dare just to watch me rise to it.
This Zane just stands there, takes it, nods, and doesn’t fight me over a single syllable.
I don’t know what to do with a man who no longer throws every truth back at me with interest. It’s somehow harder. Harder than the smirk would have been.
“I understand why you felt you had to do it,” I say.
His eyes flicker. I hate that I can see how badly he needed to hear it. I hate that part of me wanted to give it to him anyway.
