“Yes, you are.” Her tone cuts clean. “You’re acting like the jealous ex, and news flash, Nate: you’re not. You’re not my boyfriend, and you never were. You’re not anything.”
Need and desperation mix in my gut, a live wire sparking out of control. “You’re right,” I snarl. “I’m not your anything. Not now. But don’t you dare tell me we were nothing to each other.” I jerk my chin toward where Daniel vanished. “That guy? He doesn’t know a damn thing about you. He doesn’t know your favorite color, your tells, your wants. And you were about to let him put his hands on you? Beinsideyou?”
She lets out a bitter laugh. “Yes, Nate, that’s how a good fuck works. There is penetration. I’m sure you are familiar with the concept. So spare me the hypocrisy. You were about to beinsidethat girl that just escaped your lunacy.” She pauses, taking a deep inhale. “Doyouknow Camille’s favorite color? Or perhaps that was on the Q&A before you headed upstairs to spend some timeinsideher?”
I lean in, close enough to feel her pulsating rage whirling around her like a tornado, my voice cracking with the force of what’s breaking out of me. “No, I don’t know Camille’s favorite color. But yours? Yours is green.”
Her lips part, but I don’t let her speak. “You wore Jade by Chanel nail polish that whole summer I turned sixteen—the one you bought with money from selling bracelets. Most of your swimsuits were a shade of green. Your favorite teddy bear was green too, and you slept with him every night until you turned fifteen. You called him Greenbeary.” Her breath catches. “And you only ever ate green grapes. Never red.You’d pick them out one by one.” My voice drops, rough and broken. “I remember because I watched you. Every summer, every moment I could get away with it, I watched you. Don’t you dare tell me we were nothing. That I don’t know you.”
For a heartbeat, the bar is gone. Her eyes flare—shock, hurt, and want that she slams a lid on. Then she locks it down, trembling and fierce. “You don’t get to swoop back in after ten years and decide who I am or what I do. You lost that right.”
My fists tighten until the bone protests as ten years of questions press at my throat—why no calls, why no games, why she wouldn’t meet my eyes at Leo’s, why I never got a shot—but I push them back.
Not now.
Now I want her under my hands—door shut, just us. My place, hers; I don’t care. I want to show her what ten years of missing her did to me. I want her yes. I want my name on her lips.
The words tear out of me, raw and reckless. “Maybe I lost the right to be your friend. But if what you want is to blow off steam, if what you need is somebody to take you upstairs and ruin you, then let me be that man.”
The proposal hangs between us. Eden freezes. Her breath hitches, and I know she feels it—the pull between us, the thing that’s been burning me alive since she walked back into my world. But then her eyes shift. A flash. Not of want, but something sharper.
Fear. The punch of it is brutal.
Is she scared of me?
“You don’t know what you’re saying.” I can barely hear her. She’s trembling, clinging to the last shred of control.
“I know exactly what I’m saying.” My tone is raw, almost feral, scraped from somewhere deep and dark. “I’d do itbetter than that guy ever could. I’d give you everything you want. Everything you ask for. Everything you need.” I shift closer, the last words rasping out—a vow and a curse all at once. “And if that’s what you’re after, then no strings. No drama.”
She swallows hard, eyes shining—pain, want, anger—and shakes her head. She clutches her bag and pushes to her feet.
“You don’t have a say in who deserves me,” she whispers, her glare cutting through me.
I stand to meet her. “No. But I know who doesn’t.”
For a breath, it’s only us; the air sharp, my pulse loud. She looks at me—want and fear in equal measure—then lifts her chin, slides past me and heads for the door.
I move without thinking. My hand hooks her wrist, and I tug her back. She whirls, eyes bright, and then we’re in the same breath. Her mouth is parted, color high in her cheeks. Every instinct I have says “take.”
“Tell me to let go,” I growl.
She doesn’t. Her fingers catch my shirt. Her throat works. Her gaze holds.
To hell with consequences. To hell with smart.
I yank her the rest of the way into me. She stumbles against my chest with a startled gasp, and before she can change her mind, my mouth crashes onto hers. It isn’t gentle—it’s brutal, hungry, every ounce of regret and want and ten years of silence poured into this kiss. My hand fists in her hair, dragging her closer, the other banded tight around her back. My tongue demands, sliding along the seam of her lips, needing to taste what I’ve been starving for.
And God, those vermilion lips part on a shudder of breath. Not resistance. Surrender. Our tongues tangle, silk and heat and promise, and I nearly lose my mind. She tastesof memory and everything I can’t stop wanting. It’s pure fucking ruin, and I don’t care.
“Come upstairs with me,” I say against her mouth, words ripped raw—defiant, reckless, hungry. “Say yes. Let me show you what you mean to me. Let me prove you’re safe with me.”
Her whole body jolts. She shoves my chest; her breath breaks; her eyes go wide—fury and fear, plain as daylight. Her lips are swollen, her face flushed, her hands shaking. I drop my hands and step back.
For a heartbeat, I think she’ll say it. Hope spikes.
She doesn’t. She tears free and turns—head high, shoulders rigid—leaving me standing there, chest heaving, burned alive in the wreckage of what I just did.
By the timeI get back to my place, the whiskey burn’s gone cold, replaced by the gnawing sense I just lit a match in a fireworks warehouse. I shove it down, crash for a few hours, but when I wake, my phone’s buzzing like a pissed-off hornet.
