I reached for him.
He flinched.
“You are as scared as me,” I realised, to myself as much as him.
Ranger pursed his lips. Admitting nothing. Conceding everything with his silence, and the reality of what we had shared was a jagged pill to swallow. Barbed with injustice. We wanted things we could not have. And for reasons I could not understand, the next words out of my mouth were this: “You said I let Jake fuck me. I never have.”
Ranger blinked. “What?”
“He does not fuck me. I fuck him.”
“What difference does that make?”
Everything. Nothing. But I’d exhausted my ability to explain it. The messy, traumatised hole in my head widened enough to suck me under, and I could speak no more. I could notmove. I could only drown and pray he would save me before I was lost forever.
It was new to me to care. But Ranger’s gentle touch felt as old as time.
He came back for me. Not to kill a fool who had crept up behind me, but to drop his hands on my shoulders. To fix me with a stare that did not end, and I wondered if this was it for us. And what would happen to me when he left this place and returned to his old life—hisreallife—and I remained here with nothing but bad habits and regret.
“Vik.”
“Hmm?”
“I hate it when you do that.”
“Do what?”
“Leave the planet. My company really that shit?”
His gaze was earnest. His question a serious one. I fought for the clarity I’d lost over the past year. The faculties to string a sentence—a thought—together.
For him, I found it. “Actually, it is the opposite.”
He frowned, waiting.
“I enjoy your company too much,” I elaborated. “I do not know how I am going to give it up.”
“Same way you stop other shit. Find something better to do.”
It was my cue to laugh without humour, but the sound died in my throat.
Better than Ranger?
Than this?
No. Dizziness hit. I was going to lose him because I had been ruined long before I met him, and there was nothing I could do about it.
Ranger nuzzled my cheek again. “Can I ask you one more thing?”
His voice was distant enough to terrify me, but the calmness in his touch eased my skipping pulse. Slow, even breaths that belied the rage I’d seen in him just moments ago.
I found a deep inhale of my own. “You can ask me anything.”
Ranger slid his rough hand along my jaw, bringing our lips together once more, but barely. A whisper of a kiss that stole my breath all over again. “Do you like it? When we do this?”
Do I like it?
Thoughts unhinged, I answered in Russian by mistake. But some things did not need translating. Or maybe Ranger had spent enough time stuck with me that he knew my mind better than I did.
