Page 154 of Power Play

Her mouth tightened. “Don’t bring my mother into this.”

“She’s already in it.”

“No, she isn’t.”

“She is when you can tell me what Crystal thinks before you can tell me what you think.”

Charm looked away, and I kept going because stopping now would leave us exactly where we had been.

“You order shit you think people expect you to order. You change clothes because you’re worried somebody might think the first thing was wrong. You apologize before you disagree. You’re constantly watching everybody else for signs that you fucked something up, and half the time I ask what you want, you look at me like I handed you an exam.”

“That’s who I am.”

“No, it isn’t.”

Her eyes came back to mine.

“That’s who you were trained to be.”

She went still.

We had talked about this before in bookstores, at her table, and over Victorian literature. Every earlier conversation involved something small enough that she could laugh when I called her out.

This wasn’t low stakes anymore.

“You want to know who I think you are?” I asked. “I think you’re the woman who argues with me until two in the morning because she thinks Heathcliff gets too much sympathy. You’re funny as hell when you forget to be polite. You’re mean when you’re comfortable, you swear at your sewing machine, and you snort when you laugh hard enough.”

“I do not snort.”

“You absolutely fucking do.”

Her mouth almost moved.

I stepped closer. “I see you when you forget everybody else exists. I see it with Bliss, Aura, and me.”

My voice roughened before I could stop it because the truth was already breaking through every boundary I thought I had control of.

“That’s the woman I’m falling for.”

Charm’s breath caught.

I heard the words after they left me.

So did she.

For a second, all the fight went out of her face.

“You’re what?”

I should’ve walked it back. Saying it gave her more than I knew how to protect, but pretending I hadn’t meant it would’ve been another kind of cowardice.

“I said I’m falling for you.”

Her eyes flooded completely. “Then why won’t you let me give you this?”

She grabbed the edges of her jacket and pulled them apart, standing in front of me in lace while tears threatened to ruin makeup she probably spent an hour perfecting.

The sight should’ve turned my brain off again.