Page 268 of What We Burn

I reach down and unbuckle my belt. The sound makes Micah’s gaze drop to my hands. Then lower.

His throat works.

“You look terrifying right now,” he says softly.

“Does that worry you?”

He shakes his head, and I pull the belt free in one smooth motion, tossing it aside. It lands somewhere near the dresser with a dull slap. Micah flinches at the sound. Not fear—if he were afraid, I’d already be backing off. The air in the room has burned down to something thin and combustible.

I kneel on the bed beside him.

“Do you need me to stop?” I say.

He shakes his head immediately. “No. I don’t want you to stop.”

“Good.” I hook my fingers in his waistband. “Then don’t fucking flinch when I give you what you’ve been wanting.”

His breath catches. “What I’ve been⁠—”

“What you’ve been wanting,” I repeat, dragging him down the bed by his hips until his body is exactly where I want it. “You think I haven’t seen it? Haven’t felt you going quiet every time I touch Sage? Every time I leave your bed to go to hers? You think I don’t know what it does to you when I pull away?”

Color floods his face. Shame, maybe. Exposure. Micah has always been easy with other people’s feelings and impossibly tender with their hurt. His own, though—his own he folds into tiny neat squares and hides under the mattress.

“Eli—”

I grab his jaw and make him look at me.

“Don’t lie to me in this room.”

His lashes flutter. “I wasn’t.”

“No?” My thumb slides over his bottom lip, still damp from the kiss I stole downstairs. “Then say it.”

His eyes stay locked on mine. He’s so beautiful it pisses me off a little. Soft mouth. Big, wrecked eyes. A body made for gentleness and somehow taking all this too.

“I love you,” he whispers. “I want you to love me back.”

The words hit me like a blade sliding between ribs.

It’s not like I didn’t know. I knew. I’ve known in all the quiet ways you can know something but be too cowardly to touch it. In the way Micah watches me when he thinks I’m not looking. In the way he makes space for me everywhere—on couches, in kitchens, in conversation, in his fucking bedroom. In the way he gives and gives and gives and never once asks for more than what I hand him.

And I have been taking it like an asshole. Like a man who convinced himself that because Micah is gentle, he’ll survive any kind of deprivation.

My grip on his jaw loosens.

For one second, I just look at him. His mouth trembling a little under my thumb. His eyes too bright. Brave enough to say it, even now. Even with me half on top of him, half feral, breathing anger and want into his face like they’re the same thing.

“You think I don’t?” I ask.

His breath catches. “Eli⁠—”

“You think I don’t love you?”

Micah goes very still. Not frozen. Waiting. Like he’s learned the hard way that hope has to be approached carefully or it bolts.

I lean down until my forehead presses to his.

“I do,” I say, and my voice comes out so wrecked and unguarded I don’t even recognize it. “I just didn’t think I was allowed.”