"It’s okay," I said. “I jumped you.”
"Jumped me? That’s what you call smacking me on the head?"
“It’s how I say hello.”
“Maybe you could try again?”
“Smacking you?”
He smiled a wicked smile. “Jumping me.”
His eyes were on mine. And the thing in his expression—the thing I'd been watching surface for five days through the cracks in his control—was fully visible now. Not anger. Not patience. Not the predatory focus of a man managing a situation.
Want. He wanted me.
It was written across his face the way his scars were written across his body—honestly, without concealment, the record of something that had happened to him that he hadn't chosen and couldn't undo. He wanted me and he knew it and he wasn't hiding it and the raw, exposed truth of it hit my chest like a hand against a drum.
“You could,” I whispered, “jump me, instead? It’s only fair.”
“It’s only fair,” he whispered into my mouth. And then, he kissed me.
His hand moved from my cheekbone to the back of my neck, his fingers sliding into my hair, his palm cradling the base of my skull. Slow. So slow that I felt every increment of the distance closing—the warmth of his breath first, then the brush of his lips, then the press. Firm and soft at the same time, the way a thing can be two contradictory things at once when both of them are true.
I grabbed his shirt.
Both fists. The cotton bunched in my scarred hands and I pulled. Pulled him closer, pulled him down, pulled him intome with a force that surprised us both. The kiss deepened. His mouth opened against mine and I tasted him—coffee, warmth, the faint ghost of the garlic he'd cooked, and under all of it something that was just him, just skin and heat and the particular taste of a man I should not be kissing, should not be touching, should not be pulling toward me with hands that shook.
His other hand found my waist. Not grabbing—settling. The weight of his palm against my hip, his thumb tracing the strip of skin between my shirt and my jeans, and the touch was so careful, so specifically restrained, that it undid me more than force ever could have. He was being gentle. This man—this scarred, violent, broken, terrifying man—was kissing me gently, and my body responded to the gentleness the way dry wood responds to a match.
I made a sound. Small. Involuntary. A sound I hadn't made in years, maybe ever—not a moan, not a gasp, something between the two, something that came from the place in my chest where the wall had shifted and the feeling had moved in and the architecture of my entire interior life was rearranging itself around the pressure of his mouth on mine.
He pulled back.
Not far. An inch. His forehead against mine, his breath on my lips, his hand still in my hair. I could feel his pulse in his fingers—fast, hard, the rhythm of a man whose control was costing him. His eyes were open. Mine were open. We were breathing each other's air and the space between us was charged and warm and impossible.
"Fuck," he said. “I should not have done that.”
He let go.
His hand left my neck. His hand left my waist. He straightened, and the distance between us reopened like a wound, and the cold air rushed in where his warmth had been,and I sat on the bed with my fists still clenched in the empty space where his shirt had been.
I felt a stab of sadness. I wanted to say something—anything—to let him know that heshouldhave done that, that he should do it again.
But I couldn’t say a thing.
He left. The door closed. The lock engaged—that heavy, metallic, definitive sound.
I sat.
That night, I didn’t sleep a wink.
Chapter 7
Santo
Wecalleditasafe house, but in truth the place on Archer Avenue was a dump. It smelled of damp concrete, old copper, and stale, old mold. The basement was below grade, windowless, lit by two fluorescent tubes that hummed at a frequency designed to make everyone in the room slightly worse.
Nico met me at the bottom of the stairs. He looked exhausted. His eyes were flat, his expression grim.
