"Not that I'm complaining, but why?" he murmurs.
I still have that lump in my throat that won't let me verbalize everything I want to tell him, so I take his face in my hands and kiss him again.
And I hope he understands through this kiss everything I can't verbalize now.
My hands slide down to his back and I pull him closer to me, earning a growl from him. Then he pulls away.
"I can't," he tells me, his breathing ragged.
"What?" I ask with wide eyes and cheeks burning with embarrassment.
"If I don't stop, Roxanne, in the next few seconds you'll find yourself in my arms, going up the stairs to that damn bed. I can't control myself anymore when you're this close. When every day I have to burn every instinct that begs me to lean closer to you. Because that's what I want to do. Consume you. For there not to be a single pore of you that doesn't know how to speak to every pore of me. For you not to know where you begin and where I end, and it's killing me. It's killing me that I have to keep my distance so I don't force your hand. I know what I said when I proposed this arrangement, but I'll be damned if I'm not tempted to take back my promise not to cross any line. For you I'd cross them all, and I know I wouldn't regret it."
I watch him pant, looking at me with so much torment, and my chest contracts.
"Don't even think about carrying me up those stairs to bed," I tell him, and he freezes for a second. "I, unlike you, remember that you have a wound in your abdomen, and I swear, Damien, if I see one more drop of blood on that bandage, I'll be a widow by my own hand because I'll strangle you myself."
His eyes narrow at me, so I have no choice but to continue.
"I'll walk up those stairs myself, and you'll follow me. Because you promised me a wedding night and you still owe it to me. Do you think it's easy for me to get up next to you every morning? Your body is practically four hundred degrees, and all I want to do is melt into it. Not to mention you always smell like musk and leather, something my brain apparently craves every second bythe obsessive way I can't stop smelling you. Ask me what body wash I used this morning. Actually, don't. I'll tell you. Yours. Because I knew you'd leave this morning and I wanted to carry you with me, at least for a few hours. I don't know how to do this—trust, put my heart on a platter, leave myself exposed like this—but I want to try...for you," and I release the breath that had been trapped in my chest.
"For me," he says back to me softly, and his eyes sparkle with something new, something intense, something that burns.
"For you," I whisper.
That's all I manage to say before my ex-husband, because I'm going to kill him, picks me up and carries me up the stairs.
"DAMIEN! YOUR WOUND BARELY CLOSED!" I scream, and I'm sure the whole house hears us.
His response: he laughs.
A laugh that I feel like a velvet embrace, and my stomach does those strange flips again.
"If you think I'm going to give you time to run or change your mind, you're wrong, baby. And I can't wait to see what your skin tastes like after you washed with my body wash."
Why are my cheeks on fire? And why did I admit that to him?
Because I wanted him to know that this obsession he has with me is contagious.
When we reach the bedroom, he closes the door with his foot and sets me down gently on the mattress as if I might break if he let me go too abruptly.
This is when I start fidgeting. Did my mascara smudge after this day? Why the hell didn't I go check if my lipstick is cracked?
"You're perfect," he murmurs and leans toward me.
I'm not. There's something ugly in me that gnaws at my thoughts, something that was born that night. That grew with the crumbs Ivette threw my way every day. With Dad's indifference. With the way I was never anyone's priority.
But it's hard to remember that when his tongue touches mine. When his hands go under the shirt I'm wearing and touch my waist.
For a second he breaks the kiss, and I want to protest, but he pulls his shirt over his head and throws it aside, and his eyes... God. They're like two flames and suddenly the temperature in this room has risen too high.
My hands go to my own shirt, but of course he won't let me take it off myself.
In the next second, my bra and pants fall next to his shirt.
Now it's my turn to undress him, so I move my hands to the fly of his jeans and that's when I reach the same level as his bandage, which, thank God, is clean.
I don't know what impulse pushes me to do this, but I lean down to kiss his bandage and I hear him suck in a breath.
