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He continued to play. “Fucking come back to me…”
I thrust a hand toward the closed studio door. “Peter's going to be—”
“I know I’ll be loving you still.”
He was finished, plonking the guitar down beside the armchair with finality. With my fists clenched to pierce my palms with nails intended for him, I stared through a watery mist as he stood, my chest heaving with every furious breath.
“Why would you sing that to me?” I demanded to know.
“Because I thought you deserved to hear it before the album comes out,” he replied easily, like he hadn't just decimated what was left of my ability to walk away from him and everything that had happened between us.
He had told me earlier that day that he wouldn't confirm his love for me, so why the change of heart?
Why tell menow, when he knows I have to get back to my boyfriend and he’s mere hours away from leaving for months?
What am I going to do without him for that long?
“I wasn’t going to listen to the damn album in the first place,” I lied, disputing his explanation.
“I think you’re lying,” he argued in a tone so calm that it was maddening. “I think you’ll listen to it the second it releases. It would drive you crazy not to.”
“You have no fucking idea what you’re talking about,” I gritted through clenched teeth.
“Okay, fair enough,” he reasoned, nodding thoughtfully. “But what I do know is, if you had found out that I was fucking in love with you at the same time as millions and millions of other people, it would’ve pissed you off, even more than you are right now. It would’ve hurt you, and that’s not what I want to do. I’ve never wanted to hurt you—ever. So, you can be mad at me—that’s fine—but I did the right thing, and I think you know it too.”
The echo of my heart reverberated in my eardrums as I stared at him, chest lifting and dropping heavily with every labored breath. I didn’t care if he was right; I didn’t care if every word out of his mouth was everything I’d ever wanted to hear. He was doing thisnow, when our lives were pulling us in two different directions, and how he saw anything right in that I couldn’t begin to understand.
“I need to leave,” I said, forcing the words past a chest of lead.
Brow furrowed, he responded with a short nod and propelled forward with purpose toward the door. I stayed out of his way, sensing his own radiating anger and hurt, and waited for his hand to turn the knob.
But instead, he stopped, dropping his hand before he could grip the metal reflecting the light from the ceiling fan. He seemed to stare at the door, eyes aimed at the paneling and soundproofing.
“Dylan?”
It was my voice that broke the spell, and he turned, facing me with somber eyes and a clenched jaw.
“I just want you to remember something,” he said, his voice low and gravelly.
“Yeah?”
The heat seeping from his pores permeated the air between us with something primal, mixing with his scent of leather and sandalwood. He towered over me, standing tall and harnessing that power I’d first sensed when he picked me up earlier. My body responded in ways I wasn't proud of—with the insatiable need to refresh the memory of what it had felt like to mold my curves against his. I had to leave this room, to stretch the distance between us, to remember why I needed to forget.
“You were mine before you were his.”
My lips fell open with my pained exhale, emptying my lungs until they burned. The words hung heavy in the room, laced with jealousy and need.
He shouldn't have said it. He knows better,my brain said, starting as a whisper and ending in a shout that went ignored as I rushed toward him to grasp his face between my palms and pull his mouth down to mine.
My lips parted on contact, inviting him in with the falsehood that this was okay. He hesitated, knowing that it wasn't, but as my tongue reached out to touch his lips, all of his resolve to do the right thing was momentarily forgotten.
The moment his tongue entered my mouth to remind me of how he tasted of peppermint, I released a sound I hadn't heard since the last time we had been together, and he responded with a deprived groan. The fingers of one hand knotted into my hair while the other trickled down the length of my spine to rest at the small of my back. Mouths opened wider, tongues delved deeper, and bodies moved in a lewd tango that would've been pornographic had we been naked.
This might be the last time you ever kiss him, see him, touch him…
Frantic fingers left his face, dropping to the hem of his shirt. My hands dipped beneath the soft fabric in search of his jeans button, undoing it and pulling the zipper down in one deft tug.
“Baby,” he muttered against my lips, the term of endearment coming as a warning.
