“You left your pack with your emotional support animal at the Ball.” He holds the duck out like it might bite him, eyes avoiding mine. “Figured you’d want it.”
I try to hide the flush plastered across my face, but god, I’m still warm everywhere. Still aching from what I didn’t finish. Luckily, his gaze is locked on the floor in front of him not on me.
“Thanks,” I say, aiming for calm, casual, missing both. “You can leave it on the desk. I don’t need it anymore.” I nod to my right, directly across the room from him.
He hesitates, but then steps inside. Careful, like he's still not sure if he should be here.
The moment he gets to the table, when his back is to me, I rise. Throw off the blanket and brush the creases from my dress. Smooth a hand down the front like it might erase the heat still humming in my skin. As if I don’t still feel the press of my own fingers. As if I wasn’t just in this bed fantasising about his mouth.
He sets my pack and the duck down. Doesn’t speak, just turns, quiet and quick, already heading for the door. But before he leaves, he looks up. His eyes lock on me, and something in him stalls.
He shakes his head once, then again, like he’s trying to reset a thought spiralling in his brain. Force it back down. It doesn’t work. “You’ve been wearingthatall night?” His voice dips, not teasing.Not safe.
I don’t answer, can’t. Because his eyes are already tracking lower—dragging from the hem pooled at my ankles, up the slit still high on my thigh, over the stretch of fabric pulled tight across my chest. Then back to my face.
And I feel that look—sharp and heavy—landingright between my legs, exactly where my fingers were a second ago before he knocked.
“This was a mistake,” he sighs, gripping the doorframe like he needs something solid to stop him from moving. “I shouldn’t have come.”
“Then why did you?” I ask. “Don’t tell me it was to bring the duck. You hate that bloody thing.”
“You don't think I asked myself the same thing the whole way over?” One hand lifts to the back of his neck, shoulders tight like he’s holding something in, then he lets out a soft breath—not quite a laugh, but close.
“Maybe it’s because I went back to my room and couldn’t stop seeing you walk away with Ezzy. Maybe it’s because the second you were gone, every part of me wished I’d stopped you. That I’d just…reached out and pulled you back.”
He breaks off, swallows hard, then looks up, eyes darker, voice thinning to a rasp.
“Maybe it's because I can’t stop thinking about it.” He continues, straining like the words hurt. “About the kiss, about you, about the fact that I can touch you now, about all the things I’d do if you’d let me. All the things I couldn’t let myself want before… and how I shouldn’t want any of it, and yet still—” He exhales, shaky, defeated. “Fuck, Lyra, I just wanted to see you. I thought maybe that would be enough to get you out of my head.”A faint, almost helpless shake of his head. “It didn’t.”
His eyes find mine, and everything in me clenches—my throat, my chest, my core. The space between us is thick with it. Burning. The unfinished ache I’ve been dragging around for months. The same ache I tried to work out of my body minutes ago.
“I should go,” he says.
Do I let him leave, end it here? Safer, simpler. No expectations, no aftermath. Just a door that closes, and the weight of him shoved somewhere I don’t have to deal with.
But if I let him stay, am I letting him in? I don’t trust him, not fully. Still, trust and want aren’t the same thing; I can separate them, I have before.
He just doesn’t get to have all of me—my thoughts, my feelings. Those stay mine, locked down. But my body? That’s different. That’s choice, not surrender. It’s control.
I step closer, one breath away, close enough to feel the heat of him. The tension bleeding from his skin.
Then I lean in, just past him.
“Stay.”
I don’t wait for an answer.
Just hold his gaze.
Fingers brush the edge of the door?—
And I close it.
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
The latch hasn’t even caught before I’m on my toes, my mouth crashing into his, all heat and need and seven months of unravelling in one kiss.
He doesn’t hesitate, doesn’t breathe. Just yanks me forward with a sound torn straight from his throat—low, guttural,starved. Then spins and pins me, my spine hitting the door with a deep thud.
