So instead of ripping her clothes off the way I want to, I put her down on the passenger seat and clip on her seatbelt because I know she won’t do it herself.
“Are you gonna slap me again?” I lean over the passenger seat so our faces are close. I wonder if she notices that I’m out of breath.
Her eyes burn with rage. She presses her lips into a line.
“Is that a request?”
“Maybe,” I smirk, tracing my fingers over the place where her hand made contact that night in the bar.
“Then no.” She smiles at me sweetly, kicks me back, then slams the car door shut.
As I drive her home, all I want is to reach over that center console and pull her onto my lap. Instead, I keep driving in silence.
When I pull up to her place, we both sit there for a beat.
“Are you ever going to let me in again?”
The question’s out before I’ve thought it through.
I never speak without thinking. But Nina makes me lose my grip on convention.
For her, I will say anything, do anything.
I hear her breath hitch. Her eyes are wide. That look of fear again. There’s something she’s scared of, that wasn’t there before.
“I can’t,” she says. “You know why I can’t.”
She wrenches the car door open, but I follow, leaving the keys in the ignition.
A passerby is welcome to my sports car.
All that matters right now is getting inside Nina’s infuriating mind.
She’s almost at the door of the apartment by the time I catch her.
I grab her by the shoulder and spin her around. She goes still, her breath fogging in the cold air, her chin tilted up.
I have to make her understand. “Nothing changed. Nothing at all, except that you left.”
“I don’t understand why you keep lying about this.”
“Nina… I lied about a lot of things. But not this.”
“Well, that’s it then.”
She grabs my coat collar. But she pauses with her hand there, wrapped in the fabric, looking up at me. Her brown eyes meet mine and go wide.
Something stops her from pushing me away.
“Kiss me,” she whispers. “Before I change my mind.”
I can’t resist that. I could never resist her lips.
I don’t want to be gentle. Not when she has deprived me of this for so long. I am starved of her.
I push Nina back until we are leaning against the entrance of the apartment building. Nowhere for her to hide.
Her lips part as she looks up at me. My hand wraps around her throat, and I pin her in place against the brick wall.
