"You should eat," he says.
"I'm not hungry."
"You haven't eaten since this morning."
"I'm not hungry, Claudio."
He takes a drink of water. Doesn't push. I'm grateful for that, and I'm angry about being grateful, because gratitude implies I expect him to push, and expecting men to push is a leftover from a life I'm supposed to have left behind. The anger sits in my chest beside the emptiness, and together they make a combustible combination that I can feel building behind my ribs.
I need something. Not food. Not sleep. Not another safe house or another highway or another cigarette, and I'm out of those anyway, the last one stubbed out in the cupholder on the county road while I said Daniel's name for the first time in three years.
I need to feel like my body is mine.
I look at him. He's still on the counter. Still watching. Not with the clinical attention he usually carries. He's looking at me the way he looked at me in the farmhouse kitchen before everything went sideways. Like I'm a variable he can't solve. Like the equation changed while he wasn't looking and now the math doesn't work and he's trying to figure out which number moved.
"Stop looking at me like that," I say.
"Like what?"
"Like I'm breakable."
"I don't think you're breakable."
"Then stop looking at me like you're trying to figure out how destroyed my soul is."
He slides off the counter. Crosses the small room in three steps. He's in front of me now, standing between my knees where I sit on the edge of the bed, and I have to tilt my head back to see his face. The light from the kitchenette is behind him, turning his edges gold and his face into shadow.
"You told me something today that hurt you," he says. "I'm not going to pretend it didn't happen, and I'm not going to treat you like glass because of it. But I'm going to look at you. Because Iwant to, and because you deserve to be looked at by someone who isn't figuring out what he can take."
My throat tightens.
I grab the front of his shirt and pull him down to me.
The kiss is mine. It’s deep and passionate, filled with the longing I’ve been desperately trying to push down and swallow. Intentional. I know exactly what I'm doing and why I'm doing it. I spent hours on the side of a road giving away pieces of myself, and now I need to take something back.
He kisses me back. Careful. Testing. His hands hover at his sides like he's waiting for instructions.
"Sit down," I say against his mouth.
He sits on the bed. I push him back until he's leaning against the headboard, legs stretched out, and I climb into his lap and straddle him. His hands finally land on my hips and the breath he lets out is ragged and broken, and the sound of it goes through me like a match striking.
"Principessa."
"Shut up."
"Are you sure—"
"I said shut up. Stop asking. Just fucking take me. Use me." I pull back enough to look at him. His eyes are dark, pupils eating the green, and his mouth is a line and his hands are flexing on my hips, and I can feel him getting hard beneath me, the thick ridge of him pressing against the seam of my jeans. "I need this. Not because I'm sad. Not because I'm broken. Because I just gave you the worst thing that ever happened to me and I'm still here and I need to feel like my body belongs to me. Do you understand?"
His throat moves. "Yes."
"Good. Then let me fuck you."
I pull my shirt over my head. His shirt. The one I've been wearing for days, the one that smells like both of us. I drop it on the floor, and the cold air hits my bare skin and my nipples tighten and I don't flinch. God, I don’t flinch. His eyes drop to my chest, and I watch him look and I let him, because this is different from being looked at by a man who thinks your body belongs to him. This is being looked at by a man who knows it doesn't. Who knows that every inch of skin he sees is mine, offered, not owed.
His hand comes up. Fingers trace the line of my collarbone. Slow. Down. Between my breasts. The backs of his knuckles brush the swell of one, then the other, not grabbing, not squeezing, tracing. Learning. His calluses catch on my skin and the rough drag of them makes my breath hitch.
"You're beautiful," he says. Not a compliment. An observation. The way he'd say the gun is loaded.
