And I wasn’t waitin’ anymore.
I reached out slow, giving her every chance to pull away. She didn’t.
My fingers brushed her jaw, thumb tracing the edge of her cheek.
“You ever feel the change in me when you walk into the room?” I said. “Like you stole every single breath my from body.”
She swallowed, lips parting.
“You ever notice how I can’t stop watchin’ you? How we feel each other without touchin’?”
That made her blink , once, then twice, like she didn’t trust what she heard.
And then she moved — fast, sudden, like the part of her holdin’ back finally gave way. Her hands fisted in the front of my cut, yankin’ me down as her mouth crushed into mine.
Fuck.
She tasted like cherries and sin and the kind of kiss that rewrites the goddamn rules. I kissed her back with every ounce of the heat I’d held in check for weeks. Let herfeelit — how badly I’d wanted this. Wantedher.
But even then, I didn’t press her against the wall. Didn’t grip her too tight. I let her lead. Let her take what she needed.
When she pulled back, breath ragged, her fingers still in my cut, I stayed close.
“I’m not afraid of you,” she whispered.
“You shouldn’t be.”
“But I am afraid of what this could mean.”
I nodded, lips brushin’ her forehead. “Yeah,” I murmured. “Me too. But sometimes you just gotta let it happen.”
We stood there, wrapped in somethin’ too fragile to name, too fierce to ignore.
And I knew, whatever this was between us, it wasn’t just fire. It was fuel.
***
SHE DIDN’T RELEASEher grip on me as I guided her back into the office, her fingers still curled in the fabric like lettin'go would mean admittin' this wasn’t gonna happen, like any distance between us might break the fragile thread of heat that had stretched too long and tight between us already.
She didn’t retreat after the kiss either, just stood there, chest risin' in shallow bursts, her eyes locked on mine with a gaze that held no fear, only the raw uncertainty of someone tryin' to decide whether the thing in front of her would wreck her completely or pull her out of whatever wreck she’d already been survivin'.
But I wasn’t here to do either—I wasn’t here to save her, and I sure as hell didn’t come to break her. The truth was simpler, rougher. I wanted her—needed her—in a way that went far beyond impulse, beyond logic, beyond anything I could talk myself out of. And she wanted me too. That was written in the set of her jaw, the tremble in her breath, the way her body leaned into the gravity of mine without hesitation.
"I can’t help but want you," she murmured, her voice raw, the edges frayed like it had scraped its way out of her throat from someplace buried and unspoken.
My hand found her waist, slow and deliberate, groundin' her without pressure, offerin' contact without control.
"Darlin'," I said as I shrugged outta my cut, my voice low and rough with the weight of restraint, "the wordwantis too fuckin' tame for what I feel."
Her bottom lip trembled—not a sob, not fear, just the smallest crack in a wall she’d kept up too long—and then her hands were movin' again, slidin' under the hem of my shirt, draggin' it up with slow insistence, her fingers grazin' my skin like she was relearnin' what it meant to be allowed to touch, to take.
She wasn’t here to talk. She was here to forget—to lose herself in somethin' visceral and real and impossible to fake.
And I was here to let her.
I pulled the shirt over my head and let it fall behind me, not givin' a damn where it landed. Her hands didn’t pause. They moved across my chest, over the ink and the raised lines of old mistakes, tracin' the landscape of a man who hadn’t always made the right calls but who knew exactly what this was—whatshewas.
She touched me like I wasn’t some temporary fix or fleeting distraction, but like I was the thing anchoring her in this exact moment, the only solid thing she could hold on to when everythin' else was pullin' her under.
