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“It’s okay, you know,” he says softly.
I turn slightly. He’s staring at the ceiling too. “What’s okay?”
“Needing some help.”
I narrow my eyes. It’s like he can read my mind. “I’m fine.”
“You’re not.” He doesn’t sound like he’s accusing me of anything though. “You went through something tonight. That’s why I was still awake out there. I thought you might want to talk. It’s okay to be a little fucked up from what happened.”
“I’m not—” I clear my throat. “I’m fine, okay? You don’t need to stay awake for me. Let’s just go to sleep.”
“Right.” He keeps looking at the ceiling like he’s pretending I’m not watching him. “I know what you’re feeling though. We all go through it.”
“What’s that mean?”
“When I was young, I saw something.” He glances at me. “You don’t need the details.”
“You’re right, I don’t.” My voice is quiet and my body feels pinned to the bed, but I can’t look away from him right now.
“It was ugly. Violent, bloody, not the sort of thing a seventeen-year-old kid should witness, and I was fucked up over it for days. When you do what I do, you get used to that sort of thing after a while, but back then I was still new to this life. I felt unsafe, and you know what’s funny about that? I was unsafe, every single day of my life, but I didn’t feel it until that moment.”
“What happened? I mean, what did you do?”
“I didn’t have any choice. I kept going. I woke up and I went out to the streets and I met my boys and I sold my drugs. I had no other options, but you know what? You do, Sara.”
I shake my head and put an arm across my face. “I wish I did.”
“No, you really do. You can turn around and walk away from this job any time you want. If it gets too hard, you can move on. Let me and Carmine figure this shit out with some other overpriced lawyer with a stupid degree that doesn’t give a fuck about Nicolas.”
“You make lawyers sound so lovely.”
“It’s the truth. You don’t need this. Walk away.”
I don’t say anything. He lapses into silence. Could I really do it? Could I leave him, forget about this case and this opportunity, give up on Nicolas and this whole mystery? Angelo’s right, I could do it—Brice would understand and she’d make Carmine forgive me.
I want to help them and I want to make my money and I need to get ahead at the firm—especially with a baby on the way—but do I need to kill myself over it?
“I just can’t,” I say, and he adjusts himself, leaning over toward me. I look at him and stare into his eyes. “You want to hear the worst part of all this?”
“Yeah. I do.”
“I believe Nicolas. I believe he’s innocent. Can I really walk away from him, knowing that?”
“It’s not on you.”
“It’s on me now.”
He nods slowly. His hand comes across the bed and I don’t flinch away when he brushes his knuckles gently across my cheek. An electric arc slices down into my core and he doesn’t let my eyes go, he keeps on looking as his palm moves back into my hair. I let out a soft breath, and a gentle whimper, and he comes closer with those lips and those eyes and that tongue, all of it coalescing into something I want to taste again, something I need to feel one more time.
I don’t stop him when he presses himself against me. I don’t say no when his grip tightens in my hair. And I don’t push him away when his mouth grazes mine and that tingle tears up from my middle and out into my limbs and my heart does a double beat and my eyelids flutter.
But I do moan when he kisses me.
His tongue slips past my lips and his taste floods me. Whiskey, dark chocolate, coffee. Something bitter and harsh and lovely.
He holds me back against the bed, half pinning me down, and he kisses me like he wants to devour me, like he’s been thinking about this kiss for weeks.
It’s the kind of kiss I’ll think about for the rest of my life, an all-consuming kiss, a kiss where I’m left different at the end of it.
I want more, so much more. I dive into that kiss. I fall into his taste, his lips, his hands in my hair, the smell of him.
I’m afraid, so fucking afraid, of whoever ripped apart my apartment, but I’m also terrified of Angelo and what it means having him back in my life, and terrified of this baby and what the baby’s going to mean for my life once they’re here. Most of all, I’m afraid that I won’t be the same person at the end of all this, that I’ll somehow lose myself in the twist of Angelo’s smirk, in his tongue brushing mine, in the frantic early months of raising an infant.
