I pull my hand back. Sit up. The door opens.
He's in the corridor in a dark jacket, hands at his sides, looking like a man who has lost an argument with himself and hasn't decided yet how he feels about losing it.
"Dalton," I say.
"I know it's late," he says.
"I was awake."
We look at each other. The bond is very loud. Neither of us is pretending otherwise.
"Come in," I say.
He comes in. The door closes. His eyes skim over me on the bed — my shirt, my state of having recently been interrupted — and something moves through his expression that is not the professional mask at all.
"The bond," he says. Flat. An explanation and an accusation at the same time.
"Yes," I say.
"You were—"
"Yes."
He exhales through his nose. Looks at the ceiling for one second. Then back at me. His eyes are dark and the control he usually keeps so carefully assembled is not assembled right now.
"Move to the center of the bed," he says.
Not a question. Not a request.
I move.
He takes his jacket off slowly. Sets it on the chair. Rolls his sleeves. All of it deliberate, unhurried, his eyes on me the entire time — and I understand that the deliberateness is the point. He's telling me something about how this is going to go.
He sits on the edge of the bed and his hand finds my jaw, tilts my face up.
"You were going to handle it yourself," he says.
"Yes."
"And you thought that would work."
"I hoped it might."
His thumb traces along my jaw. "It wasn't going to work," he says.
The bond doesn't work like that — whatever I feel runs through the connection between us, amplified and broadcast, and what I was doing alone in my room at midnight was apparently loud enough to reach a man who was very firmly not coming to my door.
Until he was.
"No," I say. "It didn’t."
Something shifts in his face — not softening, the opposite.
His mouth finds mine and it's nothing like the almost-scene by the bookshelf. That was both of us choosing not to close the distance. This is the distance already closed, the choosing already done, and Dalton kissing me like he has a specific idea of what the next hour looks like and I'm going to find out what it is.
He pulls back.
"Shirt off," he says.
