You don’t have to hurt anymore
With a little time, take what you want, what you’re looking for
“Listen, Gabriella. It’s like it’s written for you,” he said, his feet following my lead.
I hated this song. I hated the way he was looking at me. I hated how his warm breath burned me to the core when it fell on me. I hated how his body, so fit, so strong, so virile, so sexy was crashing against me, not scorching but incinerating me. Destructive and obscene and unmerciful.
I hated myself for letting him. For not ending this night as I should have after knowing he wasn’t a spy. After I was certain every brazen, depraved desire he had for me was real. After I shamelessly kissed him, misleading him into believing there was hope with me.
I hated how, even when I was leading, my body kept going back to his closeness, craving it, succumbing to a hunger I’d stifled for years.
“You want me, too, Gabriella. So why fight?” he whispered.
Because I had to. “Stop being so full of yourself. I don’t want you.”
You’re lying! Lyyyying!
The singer blared, calling me on my shit. Even my hips proved my dishonesty when they swayed against his hardness, defying the orders of my brain.
“You have a weird way to prove it, Lady Brighton. I thought we agreed on honesty. It’s not like you to lie.”
I wasn’t lying. Even if my body wanted him, I didn’t. Couldn’t.
Right?
My breaths shivered on my lips as I tried to even them. This man was temptation on skates, and I was no saint. Sin marked and marred me for life. Pretending to be good would never make me so. So why fight? Why the long redemption road when I knew nothing was going to spare me the hell that awaited me?
Why torture myself when I’d be tortured for all eternity?
He kept whispering like the devil, tickling every forbidden desire a woman who hadn’t been touched for three years had.
With every whisper, every move my body betrayed me into making, I was losing the challenge I didn’t know I’d face. And God, losing was so much more fun than winning when I was fighting temptation. And when the temptation was a gorgeous guy who mastered women’s bodies and their needs with the stamina of his age…
Will you leave or move on?
Is your love from before still strong?
“Seriously now, shut the fuck up.”Ovaries, you too.
He laughed, but then he pierced my gaze, mischief, dark and smoldering, dancing in his eyes. “I’m getting through, aren’t I?”
He knew he was. I didn’t need to say anything. It was showing in every fiber of me.
“C’mon, what do you have to lose?” He tangled his fingers in my hair, bringing me close, our lips an inch apart. “Just say the word, Gabriella.”
My eyes fluttered shut as I let out a long, heated sigh, ready to drown in the searing waves of his kiss.
But if you move on, will you keep the memory
That made the night so long, the cut so deep?
As if yanked out of a nice dream and shoved into a brutal reality, I snapped my eyes open with a pang set in my chest.
“No, Gabi,” he pleaded. “Forget everything and stay with me, just for tonight. Per favore.”
“You think I don’t want to forget? You think I haven’t tried? Haven’t been trying for years? But the things I’ve done can’t be erased or forgotten. They have to stay. They have to remind me I can’t allow myself even one night of relief. They have to stay andhurt.”
“What? Why?”
