“I don’t think we get to decide that.”
“Stop thinking then.” His gruff voice belied his fingers, tracing patterns on my hips. “Pretend it never fucking happened if you need to.”
I didn’t, and I was on him before I made the conscious decision to kiss him again. No fear. I kissed him as if we did it all the time. As if our three-year friendship wasn’t tainted by hopeless longing and a million things unsaid.
It was easy. Too easy, perhaps. But the moment consumed me, and everything was liquid heat until Mateo pulled back, breathless.
I grinned at his bemusement. “You think I could forget that?”
His only answer was a low, rumbling sound.
An ominous sound. It was hard not to wonder what he’d do to me if things were different, and he wasn’t afraid of detonating the monster in me. Because there was a monster in him too. In our messed-up world, a man’s magic number had nothing to do with where he put his dick, and Mateo’s was high. Mother of Christ, he’d killed a man six months ago.
The man who’d put a blade in my gut.
He killed for you.
I’d always known he would.
“We need to go,” he said around a deep sigh. “Got shit to do before we head out tonight.”
He was right. We’d been gone too long already. But I didn’t want to let go. Not yet.
“Oi.” Mateo sat up, bringing me upright for good measure. “Promise me something.”
His arms came around me on instinct.
He didn’t reclaim them, distracted by the severity of whatever he was thinking.
His gaze was potent.
His embrace? Man, it was everything. An out of body experience, which made no fucking sense at all when it was my body calling the shots.
Legitimately. I was welded to him. We were gonna have to stay here forever.
I brushed my lips over the scarred flesh on his cheekbone.
He shuddered, eyes fluttering shut. “Em.”
I’m sorry.
Nah. That was a lie.
I wasn’t.
Not even a little bit.
I did owe him a promise, though. “Tell me what you need.”
His eyes flew open again, fixed on me, pinning me in place. “Don’t freak out while I’m gone. If you want a deep and meaningful when I get back, we can do that. But don’t hate on this moment while I’m not there to talk you out of it.”
His unassuming eloquence made my stomach burn, twisting me up inside because I knew he was right. But I had a solution to the vortex of overthinking I’d fallen into when I’d been too fucked up to do anything else. Prevention was better than cure, right? “I won’t have time. Nash asked me to jump on the bricky van and I’m gonna do it.”
Mateo’s dark brows jumped into his hairline. “You’re going back to work?”
“You don’t think it’s time? Saint was back on his hog two months after surgery.”
“Saint’s insane,” Mateo snapped.
