“You won’t,” he said. He swallowed, something animalistic in it. “You never did. Ain’t any hope for it now.”
We were to congregate in the foyer, and Patrick and I walked the stairwell in torturous silence, limbs taut, a scent of wildness emanating from each of us—those desires not yet dispersing in the aftermath.
On the last landing, he gestured I go ahead of him. This was a mistake.
My body came too close to his as I passed. I felt his inhale, felt the planes of his chest expand. I paused there.
I thought of him and I in a different stairwell, the steps flexing beneath our feet as his fingers pressed into my hips, anchoring themselves there, his mouth skirting over the pulse at my neck, drinking in the rush of blood beneath my flesh.
Everything had changed. Nothing had changed.
I lifted my head slowly to look up at him, meeting the hunger in his eyes with my own.
“Don’t,” he said, but it came out as a groan. He stared down at me, that hunger intensifying. His eyelids lowered. “Just keep on walkin’.”
But I didn’t move—couldn’t, perhaps. Not when his mouth was inchesfrom mine, close enough that I could rise on the tips of my toes and meet it.
Perhaps it was base to still feel this sort of spiraling desire with such wreckage in our wake and a gulf of trouble ahead.
But longing reigned, and it was nice to feel… something. Something good.
“You’d let me, wouldn’t you?” he said as his eyes roamed over me, and though his hands remained in his pockets, I felt his touch everywhere. “You wouldn’t slap my hands away if I pulled this skirt up,” he murmured, his gaze moving down to my hips, “and fucked you right here.”
I stopped breathing altogether, heat coalescing in my middle, spreading to my inner thighs, climbing my chest.
“Is that what you intended when you put it on?” he asked darkly, and he seemed impossibly close now. “To torture me?”
I shook my head slowly, barely aware of my surroundings, of anything but his scent.
He watched the shake of my head and lifted an eyebrow. “To torture every man in the room tonight, then.”
Lord, I wished he’d touch me. I’d have any excuse to touch him back.
“That’s what’ll happen when you cross that threshold,” he told me. “You’ll turn ’em all into sweatin’, pantin’ oafs.” His hands clenched in his pockets. I rose on my toes despite myself, but he didn’t grant me his lips. “Ah, but they don’t know how you taste, do they? They don’t know the sounds you make when you come.”
His voice slid over me like smoke. My hands reached for the lapels of his coat, but still, he held himself away.
Hewas the one torturingmenow.
“That’ll be my consolation, I think, knowin’ that you’ll never give them what you gave me. They’ll only ever imagine it, and even a fuckin’ swank don’t got imagination enough for that.”
“Patrick.”
“Off your toes, Scurry girl. Keep walkin’.”
Slowly, as though falling out of a trance, I dropped back onto my heels, thoughhis face continued to swim around mine. I would have done anything he asked.
“You don’t belong to anyone, Nina,” he said. “Not a single fuckin’ one of ’em.”
I blinked, and he frowned. “Say it.”
“I don’t belong to them,” I repeated, heart stuttering.
His gaze held me captive. “Theybelong toyou.” His fingers withdrew from his pocket and pressed something cool into mine.
There was a shot of darkest blue amid the cerulean of his eyes, and I was lost to them, with no mind to the minutes passing. Awareness only flickered in when Patrick moved away, descending the last flight and disappearing into the foyer below, leaving me to my own burning. I looked down at my hands, which felt detached from the rest of me. In one of them was a vial.
Patrick’s voice remained in my middle ear, hammering against the bone until it etched, letter by letter.
