"Please," I try.
My mouth opens. No sound comes out. The lights blur. A flash of someone turning away. A familiar shape. A promise already broken. It's Carter. He left me. He left me there for his coach to rape so he could get playtime on the field. The realization hits harder than the hands ever could. Left. I was left. My chest caves in. I fold inward, my arms wrap around myself as if I can disappear into my own ribs, into bone, into nothing.
"No," I sob. "No—please?—"
The words lodge in my throat and won't come out. My breath stutters. My body trembles, helpless, braced for something I can't name but know is coming. The sound of rotor blades grows, drowning out everything else. With it, my desperation heightens. My mouth opens again. And this time, one name breaks free. The one name I didn't know to call out ten years ago, but who was there nevertheless.
"Massimo."
It rips out of me, raw and desperate, like a lifeline thrown into black water. Like the last thing I have. My body jerks. Air floods my lungs in a sharp, painful gasp. My eyes fly open. Darkness. A ceiling I don't recognize.
My heart hammers wildly, my skin is slick with sweat, the sheets are twisted around my legs like restraints I can't quite escape. It takes a second—two—for the present to crash back in. Then I seehim.
Standing at the foot of the bed.
Emotions crash over me too hard to describe, too many to decipher. Crawling out ofthatparticular nightmare is always hard. But with the added sound of the helicopter takingAmauri away, it feels like I'm not simply suffocating, but being eviscerated at the same time. Sweat drips down from every pore in my body. I can feel my hair plastered to my skin, not that I care. My heart is pounding so fast and hard inside my chest, it feels impossible that it's still going. Breathing hurts, like it did back then… like I had been choked in real time. My eyes meet Massimo's, and the déjà vu moment robs me of my last breath. I can't help it, though, because hope collides with fear as hard as it did back then. Only now my hands are sticky with sweat, not blood.
Time seems to halt completely as we stare at each other. Like the years are moving backward in the blink of an eye. I don't know if he feels what I feel, but for me, it's as if all the emotions that happened in the following months after that day have been balled up and stuffed down my throat. Hope, love, betrayal, secrets, laughter, tears, all of it tumbling through my head like laundry in a dryer.
Most of all, there is need. A primal, deep-rooted, lonely need. Besides Amauri, nobody has hugged or embraced me in ten years. I haven't kissed anybody, haven't made love to anybody in ten years. And my traitorous body chooses this moment to remind me of how Massimo excelled at making it sing.
It's more than desire, though. A sob rips from my throat, lonely, desperate, if he would hold me, just hold me for one moment—a minute, that's all I'm asking—I know I'd find the strength to fight on. I always do. I know my eyes are pleading, the raw hunger in me for anything, any kind of human contact, anything to make me feel anything else besides pain. I don't even have the energy to be ashamed of it. He steps closer, just one step, it's all it takes to make my breath hitch, to make my heart stumble in its own impossible rhythm. His dark eyes turn darker. I know that look. That burning hunger. The desire. I've seen it so many times. One of them created Amauri. He wantsme as much as I want him. If time felt like it stopped before, it's now gone entirely. Time doesn't exist. It's just him and me. No present, no past, no future. Nothing. We're suspended in this room.
Another step.
He's so close, the air between our mouths is nothing but hunger, the invisible thread that has always tied us together jerking taut without warning. I feel it snap me forward—an electric, involuntary spasm—and suddenly his gaze is so intense it's not just a sensation, it's a physical presence on my skin, like the heat of a fever. I'm dizzy and alive, more alive than I've been in years, and I realize I've been half-asleep for a decade, sleepwalking through my days with a part of me cordoned off, preserved like some delicate, unlabeled tissue sample:Do Not Disturb. Now he looks at me, and the echo of my desire takes form again, recalibrating itself in the new, post-Massimo world, unable to distinguish between survival and annihilation.
He leans in, slow and deliberate, as if he's savoring every millisecond of my anticipation, the way a lion might savor the stuttering heartbeat of prey before the kill. His knee lands on the edge of the mattress with the heavy inevitability of fate, the mattress tilts under his weight, and a low moan of protest from the frame punctuates the silence. His hand is on my waist, shockingly warm, the briefest flex of his fingers lighting up every dormant nerve ending from my navel to my spine. His thumb traces the thin band of skin above my waistband, and I shudder with the certainty that I have been waiting, unconsciously, for this precise moment since the last one ended.
He pulls me forward, and my body—traitorous, grateful, starved—melts into the space he makes for me. I crash into his chest, the old familiar solidity of it, that slab of muscle and bone and memory, and the last shreds of my composure evaporate. His lips are on mine, and I know instantly that the interveningyears were a fabrication, that time is not, after all, real. This is the first kiss, and the last, and every desperate, whispered promise in between. His mouth is hot, demanding, his teeth nipping my lower lip as if to say,Don't you dare leave me again. I whimper, actually whimper, and his answering growl is the sound I used to live for, the sound that told me I was seen, claimed, wanted so deeply it could almost be mistaken for hate.
My hands move up his back, the broad, muscular stretch of it now mapped by age and violence and the kind of gym devotion that never fades. His hair is shorter than I remember, softer, and I wind my fingers through it, anchoring myself lest I float away entirely. The kiss deepens, his tongue finds mine with a slow, devastating certainty, a choreography so familiar my body falls into it like muscle memory. My mind, that old traitor, tries to keep pace:This is wrong, this is dangerous, this is Massimo, you are not the girl you were. But his mouth and hands and breath are an argument that drowns out everything but the drumbeat ofnow, now, now.
His other hand slides to my lower back, urging me closer, and I'm aware of the heat of his skin through the thin cotton of my shirt, the blunt pressure of his thigh between mine. My body responds with a reflexive hunger, that white-hot ache I thought I'd cauterized years ago now roaring up through my pelvis, raw and unashamed. He kisses along my jaw, my throat, dragging his teeth over the skin and leaving a trail of goosebumps in his wake. I tip my head back, surrendering, baring my neck like some offering.
"Jenna," he breathes, my name. I gasp, and he smiles against my skin, knowing exactly what it does to me.
The years collapse and expand simultaneously. I remember the first time we kissed, I remember the last time, too, though I didn't know it was the last, didn't know he'd disappear and take half of me with him. But memory is powerless now; the presentis too overwhelming, too urgent. I want him to consume me, to erase the years of loneliness and longing with the brutality of his touch.
He tugs at my shirt, and I lift my arms, letting him peel it away. For a second, he pauses, just looking at me, his chest rising and falling like he's trying to memorize something essential. His hand cups my jaw, his thumb slides along my cheek with a tenderness that undoes me more than the hunger ever could.
"You're still so fucking beautiful," he murmurs, and I want to laugh, or cry, or both, but there's no room for anything except the way he's looking at me, as if I'm the only thing in the world worth the trouble.
His mouth finds mine again, rougher this time, his hands move greedily along my ribs, my hips, my thighs. I am desperate to touch him, to verify that he's real, that this is not some delirious hallucination conjured by a lonely, overworked brain. My palms move up and down his back. Somewhere in the back of my mind, I notice raised skin, but when he takes my breast into his hand, the shudders moving through me nearly kill me, and I forget all about it. I'm so close to coming, just from his kiss and touch.
The pad of his thumb caresses my nipple, sending more sparks through me, ready to ignite the charge already spreading through me. I arch my back, he looks up at me, then down, his eyes catch the tattoo poking out from underneath my breast, and he stiffens.
With a groan that could be the moan of a dying animal, he pushes back. "Fuck!"
The word tears out of him, rough and unguarded, he's breathing hard, his chest is rising and falling like he's just run a mile instead of crossing a room. So am I. We stare at each other, suspended in the wreckage of what almost happened. His hands are still on me, one at my waist, fingers digging in like he'sanchoring himself, the other braced against the mattress. I can feel the tension coiled in him, every muscle locked tight, his body fighting an order his mind is screaming.
His eyes flick over my face like he's cataloging damage. Tears. Sweat. The way my lips are still parted, still chasing the echo of his. Confusion burns through his expression, sharp and ugly and real. Desire is there too—I can see it, feel it—but it's tangled with something darker. Rage. Guilt. Fear. Control slipping. He shakes his head once, hard, like he's trying to clear it.
"This—" he starts, then stops. His jaw tightens, his teeth grind against each other. "This can't happen."
The words land like a slap. I flinch, just barely. "I didn't—" My voice breaks. I swallow and try again. "I didn't mean to?—"
My hands fumble for the shirt he took off me, pulling it around me like a shield.
