“Then take it out.”
Jesus. I obeyed. I shifted back from the wall, spine pressed to the rough concrete. My belt rasped quietly in the dark as I unbuckled, unzipped, and wrapped my fist around myself untilpressure built to the point of turning to pain. My jaw clenched. My fingers felt clumsy, all that hard-won discipline evaporating under the weight of a girl in a third-floor window telling me to misbehave. I could hear her breathing too, faint through the line. Not shaky, not anymore. Measured. Intent.
“Halo?”
“What?”
My hand tightened reflexively. Heat flared sharp and heavy, pooling low. I dragged a slow breath through my nose, trying to keep some kind of distance between her voice and my body. It didn’t work.
“You sound different,” she said. “Is that because you’re touching yourself?”
I let my breath ghost across the speaker as I stroked myself slowly, teeth gritted. I wasn’t looking at her anymore, but I could still imagine her standing there, clothed only in shadow. Maybe she was touching herself too. The picture lodged in my skull, vicious and sweet: her head tipped back, lips parted, whispering my name like a sin she wanted to keep committing. A faint sound reached me through the line. Barely there. A soft, unguarded intake of breath she hadn’t meant for me to hear.
“Are you…?” I started, then stopped myself.
“Am I what?” she asked innocently.
Her breathing wasn’t steady anymore. It hitched, just slightly, then smoothed out like she was trying to pretend she hadn’t done it. My hips shifted involuntarily. I cursed under my breath.
“Are you thinking about my mouth?” she asked, voice barely audible.
A low grunt escaped before I could stop it. I didn’t answer. I couldn’t have formulated a coherent sentence if I wanted to. I was already close, too close, but I forced myself to slow down. Pain sharpened me, grounded me.
“You’re not answering me,” she said, voice soft but pointed. The kind of tone that made you want to confess things you had no business saying out loud.
My breath ghosted across the speaker. I stroked slowly, wrist flexing, thumb grazing over the head, smearing slick across overheated skin. My spine arched off the wall, jaw clenched so tight my teeth ached.
“Are you imagining what I’d taste like?” she breathed. “How soft I’d be for you? How deep I’d let you—”
“Stop,” I growled and let my head fall back against the wall. The concrete was merciless against my skull, an anchor. I focused on the sting, tried to drag myself back into the cold, tactical world, where things made sense.
It didn’t work.
In my mind, she was still in that window, lit in blue, bare, and defiant. I could see her as clearly as if I had a scope on her: the tilt of her neck, the arch of her spine, the way her fingers might be skating over her own skin, unhurried, curious.
“Do you?” she pressed, quieter now. “Imagine it?”
“Yes,” I said finally, because lying felt pointless and she’d probably hear it anyway. The word scraped its way out of me, raw. “Yes.”
A soft exhale brushed my ear. Not quite a moan, not quite a laugh. Something in between that made my stomach knot.
“I liked when you looked at me like that this morning, but I couldn’t tell if you liked what you saw last night or not.”
I did.
The wind picked up, flinging grit against my boots. Somewhere, a siren wailed and faded. My whole world narrowed to a phone pressed to my ear and the girl on the other end.
“Tell me,” she whispered, “what it’s like right now.”
“Dangerous,” I said. It was the only word that felt safe enough to touch.
“That’s not what I meant.”
“I know exactly what you meant.” My eyes closed again, not to sleep, but because it was easier to picture her that way.
It should have infuriated me, how casual she sounded. How she could pivot from fear to this. But under it was something tremoring and brave, the same reckless streak that had made her face down men who wanted her dead and yet still return to the café for work the next morning.
I’d thought that stubbornness would get her killed. I hadn’t planned for it to take me apart first.
