“I think it makes it real.”
“Stars, you’re infuriating.” I rub at my temple, pacing harder, faster. The floor creaks under me. “You should’ve told me sooner.”
“You already knew.”
I spin on him. “That isnotthe same thing.”
He doesn’t answer. Just watches me. Always watching. But this time, his gaze feels like a wall. Not cruel. Not cold. Just... steady. And I hate how much I want to crumble against it.
I stomp into the bathroom and slam the door harder than necessary.
The water’s scalding. I want it that way. I want it to burn off the tightness in my chest, the buzzing behind my eyes. But it doesn’t. I brace my palms against the tiles and let the steam fog up the mirror and my vision. My breath hitches.
It isn’t fear. Not really.
It’s frustration. It’s being pulled into something bigger than me, again, and feeling like the only way to survive is to become steel. Again.
But I’m tired of being steel.
Tired of pretending that not caring is strength.
I don’t know how long I stay in there, but when I finally shut the water off, the silence on the other side of the door is thunderous. My body’s pink from heat, my fingers pruny. I wrap a towel around myself and reach for another, but it’s not on the hook.
Voltar’s holding it.
He’s leaning against the wall like he’s been there the whole time. Just waiting. Not pushing. Not speaking.
He holds the towel out like an offering. “I didn’t mean to scare you,” he murmurs.
I look at him. At the way his hair clings to his temple from humidity. At the way his jaw is tight, but his eyes are soft. Open.
Then I drop the towel.
And kiss him like I need air and he’s the last breath in the universe.
“Shut up,” I whisper against his mouth.
Clothes vanish. Hands fumble. His mouth finds my neck, my collarbone, my shoulder. We knock over a chair. Neither of us cares. The loft’s full of half-formed moans and muttered curses and the kind of groans that sound like prayers with teeth.
It’s not gentle.
It’s not slow.
It’sreal.
It’s bodies colliding with desperation, a fire lit by fury and banked by days of soft tension snapping all at once. I claw at his back like I want to keep him inside my orbit. He lifts me without thought, presses me to the wall like I weigh nothing, like I’m something to be worshiped and broken open at the same time.
He growls against my skin, low and wrecked. “You drive memad.”
“Good,” I pant. “That makes two of us.”
When he moves, it’s with purpose. With hunger. Like every moment until now was him holding back, and this is what happens when the leash snaps.
And somewhere, in the heat and the chaos, the heady crash of skin and breath and want—I realize something.
I don’t want to go back.
Not to the silence before him. Not to the cold war of survival, the pretending I didn’t need anyone. Not to a world where I go to bed alone and wake up harder than before.
