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Lana’s is the loudest, going on about our family curse and how I’ve thrown enough of my life away. There’s no time to waste having a workplace affair.
Harmony, wherever she is in the world, is definitely throwing up a fist pump. She’d tell me to “get some” and “live a little” and “make sure he goes down on you.”
And then there’s Alexis, waxing philosophical about how monogamy is bullshit.
But I don’t hear the only voice I want to hear. The one I went to for advice my entire life: my mom.
That scares me more than anything. How much longer before I never hear her again?
Kirill slides his hands under my sweater, stretching his long fingers across my rib cage. His fingertips brush the undersides of my breasts, teasing me with the promise of more.
“What do you want, Rayne?”
I want you to touch me.
“I… I don’t know.”
He frowns, brooding. “You just can’t believe things can be that simple. But they are. The only thing that matters is what you want.”
He nips at my collarbone, and I whimper in frustration. “How do you do that? How do you know what I’m thinking all the time?”
He rests on his elbows, his arms bracketing my head. I’m caged in by his heat and the woodsy smell of him. If someone could bottle this along with the ocean breeze, they’d have a bestseller on their hands. I’d buy every sample just to remember this moment.
He presses kisses to my jawline, working his way to my lips. The way he’s touching me isn’t fair. None of this is. “I’d say I know everything, but truthfully, you’re just easy to read.”
“I’m not that easy to read.”
“Don’t lie to me,” he retorts, studying my face. “You know you’re easy to read, but you wish you weren’t. I, for one, love it. Because it means that I know exactly how much you like this…”
Kirill grinds his hips against me. The friction is devastating. I whimper and do my best not to dissolve into a puddle of need. For the most part, I’m unsuccessful.
“But,” Kirill pulls away, leaving me cold in the sand, “I’m not that desperate.”
I feel the urge to cross my arms and try to cover myself, but I’m still clothed. I’m just emotionally naked, I guess.
“Wh-what does that mean? We aren’t—You don’t want to do this anymore?”
“It means you have to take what you want, Rayne. You have to say it. You have to choose it.”
“How the hell am I supposed to know that?” I laugh in disbelief. “I’m a mess. I don’t know anything.”
“You know,” he says with so much certainty that I start to believe him. “You know exactly what you want. What you deserve. You just need to give yourself permission to take it.”
I frown. “You don’t think I—well, doesn’t it seem like I, kind of, stumble through life?”
Lana’s words sting even when they come out of my mouth. The realization that my entire family thinks I’m an aimless fuck-up hurts worse than I ever expected it would.
His eyes glow in the night. “I wouldn’t put up with all of your shit if you weren’t someone exceptional.”
I’d say his words were a slap in the face, but really, they’re more like an unexpected kiss on the curve of your neck. Something soft and jarring and lovely and abrupt all at once.
“Mitchell and Lana, Alexis and Dustan… they aren’t wrong,” I murmur. “I don’t have a house or a long-term relationship. I don’t even have a permanent job.”
“Fuck them. They’re crows on a telephone wire, Rayne. Just background noise, whining in the wind. So fuck them, fuck them all, fuck them forever. What does your heart tell you? What does your head tell you? That’s the only shit that matters.”
His words settle somewhere deep in my chest. And they ring familiar. Like a story I’ve heard before.
And then it hits me.
