Call me a greedy bastard, but I want all of her. That’s why I sought her out. Why I’m sitting here with her when I shouldn’t be. I pick up her journal again and flip through it.
“What are you doing?” she asks.
“I want your face, but if I can’t have it, I’ll take this instead.”
“I don’t understand.”
I’m careful with the pages, as if I’m handling a relic. I hardly know where to start. I want to take a picture that matches how her words make me feel. Sensual, suggestive, unsettled in a way.
I know the passage when I see it. I spread the book and give it to her. “This one.”
“This one what?”
I pick up her coffee mug. It’s empty to the last drop, so I take it in the kitchen, refill it, and return to the doorway. Halston traces her fingertip over the open page. Her blonde hair drapes on both sides of her face, hiding her from me. My couch looks bigger than I remember, she’s so small in the middle of it.
“Read it to me.”
She looks up. “Seriously?”
Steam curls up from the mug. The coffee maker drips behind me. I nod.
“I can’t. I never have, not aloud.”
“Really?”
“When would I have? Nobody knows it exists, except you.”
My lungs inflate. No shit. I’m the first? Not even her boyfriend? I’ve built the journal up so much in my mind, this is like . . . like watching a flower open or witnessing her first orgasm. It’s getting to see something nobody else has, bringing down a wall, and now I want it even more. “Try. Please.”
She looks at the coffee in my hand like I’m holding it hostage. I don’t give it to her.
Dropping her eyes again, she scans the page a few times and begins. “‘Rough me up, dark as . . .’” She reads slowly, her voice raspy. With a short shake of her head, she tries to pass the journal back to me. “I can’t. You do it.”
I walk by her to the other side of the room. If I stand still, she’ll notice how much a single sentence, not even a sentence, affects me. I could’ve guessed listening to her read would be sexy, but her bashfulness about it is making my pants uncomfortably tight. The girl who wrote these things was supposed to be bold. Daring. Walking sex. Halston is subtle, nuanced. Beautiful, but in a quiet way that draws me in.
“Keep reading,” I say, pacing.
She sighs. “‘Rough me up, dark as coffee. Burrow deep, make me drip with it, get me so high, I forget how it feels to . . . crash.’”
Neither of us speaks.
“There,” she says finally. “Happy?”
Happy? I could eat the words like candy, right off her tongue.
“What’s wrong?” she asks. “Did I do it wrong?”
Words aren’t my strong suit, and I can’t describe how hers make me feel. That’s why I have the camera. The mug burns my palm. I offer it to her. “Hold it in your lap.”
She looks from me to the coffee, obviously wary. She takes it, lowering it like I told her to, and shifts against the cushion. “It’s hot.”
I have to bite my tongue to keep from asking how that intense heat feels against the tops of her thighs. I shouldn’t be so turned on by someone I can’t have, but it’s the first time in a year I’ve needed something more than air. I pick up my camera.
“What do you want me to do?” she asks when I aim it at her.
“Nothing.” I study her through the lens a few seconds. I desperately want to capture her confused, timid, curious expression, but I promised—not her face. “Show me your palm, just the right.”
She balances the mug with one hand and opens the other.
