“What else do you want, Sawyer?” I asked.
His eyes sparked again.Dangerous, dangerous, dangerous.
A hazardous question for an already precarious situation.
“Eleanor, I—” He cut himself off, rubbing his jaw before continuing. “I don’t know. I feel like I was pretty clear about what I want.” The way his gaze roved over me made heat spark in my belly, something I hadn’t felt in so very long. Not from a glance, certainly. “I feel like I’vealwaysbeen pretty clear about what I want.”
My breath caught in my throat, likely snagging on my heart, which was lodged there. If I never found air again, I wanted the record to show that it would be this man’s fault. All I could do was shake my head and try to swallow past the pain.
This was a million times worse than anything I expected to happen when I agreed to come to Boston knowing that Sully would be here, too. I thought, as long as I was on my best behavior, which I’d been really trying to be, we might be forced into a group conversation together, surrounded by his family members while avoiding eye contact.
But Sully’s stare was direct now.
I stared back, heart beating in my throat. Words still hard to produce. But as much as it was torture, it also feltgood. To feel again, even if the emotions swirling inside me were a mix of agony, confusion, and awakened fervor. I deserved the pain, and I longed for the heat.
I’d spent years walking around with a hollowness in my heart. It remained unmoved by anyone or anything, and suddenly, it filled. For once, not with turmoil or anger at my own body but an awareness of it. A burning licked my insides, spurring parts of me to life that had been dormant. Just because I inhaled a whiff of cedar and amber.
“Your hair is shorter,” he said, when I didn’t respond. The lull in conversation had likely been torturing him. His brain moved faster than mine.
I nodded, hating how I could both feel the old rhythm between us and also how disrupted it was. The moments of awkwardness that intercepted it. “It is.”
“You, uh, look good,” he added, taking me aback. Mostlybecause there was gruffness in the way he murmured it. His eyes rounded, a slight flare. As though my presence, and the way I looked, were a dare. And he wasannoyedabout it.
“Thank you.” I raised a brow. “Although you’re making me feel like I should be apologizing.”
“Yeah, well, it is a little bit infuriating.” His eyes trailed over me, making my knees feel like they might give out. “How good you look.”
Maybe I should be annoyed, but I muttered, “I can understand.”
“Can you?”
I pushed a breath between my lips. Shit, this was not going well.
“Can we not do this, Sawyer?”
“What?”
“This.” I toggled my finger between us. “This conversation.”
He gestured to the elevator doors. “We’ve established that I’m not holding you hostage.”
No, he wasn’t. It had never been his style.
And still, I wasn’t leaving.
Heavy silence lingered, thinly veiling a sense of want.
“If you don’t want to talk…” Sully ventured, his words both hesitant and anticipatory, “is there something youdofeel like doing in this elevator?”
Sully’s voice was huskier when he spoke, and it scrambled my insides. I knew that voice, and I knew what it meant when he used it.
“With you?”
A flash of irritation crossed his face, as though it would be absurd to consider anyonebuthim. Which, I supposed, it was, considering we were the only ones here.
“With me, Eleanor.”
There was a possessiveness in his tone that I had to assume my brain concocted on its own. Years had passed, and I’d neveronce heard from Sully after the breakup. I’d assumed he wanted nothing to do with me, and yet…
