I pulled back from his grip, ready to push him away. My heart slammed in my chest, and my breath came out in short, erratic puffs.
“What are you doing?” I demanded. Why was he ruining our perfectly good day?
Maxx’s hand curled around the back of my neck, his fingers threading into the hair at the base of my skull, the slight pressure causing my pulse to race.
“Don’t tell me to stop. I just want to remember what it feels like to get lost in you, back when it all made a crazy sort of sense,” he begged, pulling me toward him, capturing my lips before I could object.
I startled in response, tensing, ready to pull away again.
“Please, Aubrey. You can deny what’s between us later. You can tell yourself that you’ve moved on. That you want nothing to do with me. But you and I both know that’s not the truth. And I had hoped we had finally stopped lying to each other,” Maxx murmured against my mouth.
Then he was kissing me again, and I didn’t stop him.
The fight left me. The anger, the bitterness, the purposeful isolation disintegrated instantly.
Kissing Maxx was like waking up. Like stepping through the mist into a clearing. It was love and lust and passion. It was pain and anguish and gut-wrenching turmoil.
It was everything.
My lips parted almost involuntarily, and his tongue swept in, tangling with mine. He moaned, intense and low, and wove his fingers in my hair, burying deep. I couldn’t help my body’s response as I melted into him.
My lips had missed kissing him.
My fingers had missed touching him.
My heart missed beating only for him.
I gave up fighting the inevitable and wrapped my arms around him, holding him as tightly as he held me.
The feel of him in my mouth was familiar and intoxicating.
This is what oblivion tasted like.
Slowly, his lips became less frantic until he stopped kissing me altogether and he rested his forehead against mine.
“I know you’ve said you don’t want this. But I’m all in, Aubrey. I always have been.”
I closed my eyes and tried to get my breathing under control.
“I have to go,” I whispered, trying to move and failing. Finally, I was able to unwrap my arms from around Maxx and pulled myself away.
With shaking hands I opened the door of his car and got out. I walked up the steps to my apartment building, escaping to the safety of my own four walls.
Escaping the truth that reverberated through my body.
I loved Maxx.
What was I going to do with that?
chapter
twenty-one
maxx
ididn’t want Aubrey to go home. I knew that if I let her leave when I felt like this, I couldn’t trust myself alone. Having my hours cut at the stable had left me reeling—I had no idea how I was going to manage to scrape by without that money. My immediate thought after receiving the unwanted news was that I wanted to get high. Really fucking high. And forget about how much my life sucked.
I could have called a hotline or one of the numbers the counselors at Barton House had given me. But I didn’t want to call a fucking hotline.
