Page 29 of Sting of Sin

Like it wasn’t the single most undoing sentence anybody had ever said to me.

“Bee.” My voice came out wrecked. I didn’t try to fix it.

Her gaze dropped to my hands. One still held the lace of my boot. The other was braced on the mattress hard enough that the tendons stood out across the back of it.

She saw everything.

She always did.

“You don’t have to be afraid of wanting me,” she said.

A hard, breathless laugh left me. “I’m not afraid of wanting you.”

“No?”

“I’m afraid of what wanting you does to me.”

That almost-smile touched her mouth then. Small. Unsteady. Real. “What does it do?”

I looked at her.

At the bare line of her legs below my shirt. At her hair falling around her shoulders. At the pulse fluttering in the hollow of her throat.

Then I forced my eyes back to hers. “Makes careful feel like the hardest thing I’ve ever done.”

Her breath changed. Just slightly. But I heard it. The room was quiet enough to hear everything.

She crossed to me slowly.

I stayed where I was, because with her you always let her set the pace. You never closed the distance she had chosen to cross herself.

She stopped between my knees where I sat. Close enough that the fabric of the shirt brushed my forearms. Close enough that the warmth of her reached me before her hands did.

Then she put them on either side of my face like I was the fragile one.

Her palms were cool.

Her thumbs rested against the roughness of my jaw.

She looked at me for a long time.

“You’ve been so careful with me,” she said quietly. “This whole time. On the floor. On top of the blanket. Two fingers at my wrist when I couldn’t breathe. Never reaching. Never taking more space than I gave you.”

I swallowed. “You set the pace.”

Her thumb moved once along my cheek. “Always,” I said. “That’s not gonna change tonight or any night.”

“I know.”

Something shifted in her face.

It wasn’t fear.

It was almost a smile and almost grief and all the way brave. “That’s why it’s you,” she said. “That’s why it could only ever have been you.” She leaned her forehead down to mine. Her hair curtained us in. “I’m setting it right now, Eli.” Her mouth was close enough that the words warmed my lips. “I’m coming the rest of the way.”

And I couldn’t hold the thing in my chest one second longer.

I had carried it so many years it had gone heavy as a stone, buried under duty and silence and every promise I had made myself about what I would never ask of her. I had never once let it past my teeth.