“It’s not an easy pill to swallow,” I explained, my voice softening as the elevator shifted underneath us. “Me having a fourteen-year-old at home.”
“Who cares?”
“Who wouldn’t?”
“You expect me to believe that someone is going to look at you,” he said, emphasizing this like it was the be-all and end-all, “and decide the deal-breaker is your sister?”
“Believe it,” I replied. “It happened.”
His expression shifted into the impassive mask I hadn’t seen much of lately. “Tell me,” he said quietly, and that muscle in his jaw ticked.
He’s angry, I thought almost wondrously.
“I was with someone when my dad died. Shawn. We lived together. We weren’t engaged, but we were there. We looked at rings. And then…” I leaned my head back, bonking it against the metal, and shrugged. “He couldn’t handle it.”
“He couldn’t handle it,” Dex repeated, no longer attempting to hide the disgust.
“At first we—Phoebe and me—we couldn’t stomach going back to Dad’s, so she slept on the couch of our apartment,” I said, eyes locked on our distorted reflections in the metal walls. “He started pushing me to take her back to my dad’s within, like, a day and a half. And when I did, the calls and texts got fewer and farther between, and then he came from Boston one nightto break up with me in person. Said it was too much, he didn’t sign on for it.”
“Christ,” Dex muttered. “What a coward.”
I didn’t mention the delayed response I had to the breakup. How autopilot kept me moving until I was brushing my teeth three months later and the ache hit, a blinding pain, a visceral emptiness, a new sort of grief befriending the loss. I thought I would marry Shawn and he bailed on our life so easily, as if he had a bag packed the whole time. It was a lot to handle, Dad dying and my guardianship of Phoebe—a not-insignificant part of me understood why Shawn left. So many people in my life called him a coward, but sometimes I couldn’t help wondering if I should’ve given him an out.
“Vi.” My head snapped up, meeting Dex’s dark eyes under the fluorescent elevator lights. Something about him calling meVitied up my insides like a balloon animal, all twisted and ready to pop. “That guy was an asshole. You didn’t deserve that, and neither did Phoebe. But that’s not how every person will react to your situation.”
We were closer. When had I left my wall? I’d assumed it was the only thing keeping me upright.
“Maybe,” I said softly “Doesn’t really matter.”
“No?”
I could smell him. The sharp scent of his soap mingling with the sweetness of strawberry and tequila. I wished I could curate a cologne of exactly this, his scent right now.
“Since when do you care about my personal life?” I whispered. I could reach out and touch him, could see the pulse thrumming in his throat.
“I care,” he murmured. His eyes dipped to my mouth and stuck there. “It’s easy to care when it’s you.”
My blood went molten and every thought in my head winkedout completely. I reached for him, cupping his face with my hands, letting the coarse stubble scratch my palms. Dex’s eyes fell shut, letting out a jagged breath, and his arm slipped around my waist, dragging me against him. His touch burned through my shirt. I was on fire, surely.
Our noses brushed. I couldn’t breathe.
I lost every ounce of self-control in my body and pulled his face the rest of the way. His lips and mine touched, just barely; it couldn’t be considered a kiss, but electricity pulsed through my live-wire veins, solar flares popping in my lips, and where his beard tickled my chin, and my lower back where his fingers dug in like he still had one last shred of the self-control I’d lost. Showoff. I pushed up on my toes, pressing harder, and his mouth tipped open for me, that first real taste pitching me down a rabbit hole.
The elevator might as well have come crashing down—it was world-bending, the pressure of him against me, the slide of his tongue, the delicious scrape of his stubble, the lingering taste of strawberry. He pinned me against the wall, a low, desperate groan coming from his throat. And I was there, too, grabbing at him, gasping into his mouth as a rough hand slid up my shirt and drew across the underside of my breast, tantalizingly slow.
“Fuck,” he rasped against my mouth, and pulled away slightly, skating his lips across my jaw, down to my neck. His hand shifted, thumb brushing over my nipple, and I arched into him, so wildly satisfied that he’d flown past my expectations already.
He bared his teeth against my neck and I dropped my fingers to his shoulders, nails digging in through his T-shirt. “Fuck,” he said again. Keeping one hand working over my breast, Dex slid the other down over my ass to my thigh, below the hem of my pajama shorts. His fingers curled around and hiked my leg up, and I nearly blacked out at the feeling of our hips gnashing, himhard grinding against the blinding pressure between my legs. He moaned into my neck, shifting away and into me again. My head fell against the metal, fingers so tight against his shoulders, they might bruise. I was close already.
His mouth returned to mine, a short taste before moving in deeper, slower, the sharp scrape of his chin stoking the fire as his hips ground against mine again, harder. I moved my hips in tandem, desperate for more. There was so little fabric between us, I couldalmostfeel everything. I wanted it all. Wanted his skin against mine, him inside me, impossibly close, closer than any upright position would allow.
He shifted, hand flexing against my leg as he angled me closer, and I dragged my hands down to his hips to show him exactly what I needed. We panted into each other’s mouths, unable to keep up the kiss when this felt so fuckinggood.
The elevator chimed, cutting into the breathy silence, and the doors slid open. Dex was off me in a flash. I blinked several times, dazed, unable to return the smile of the drunk man stumbling into the elevator from the lobby. Apparently, we’d missed our stop.
“Heyo,” the man said gruffly, eyes sliding between us. “Good nights all around, yeah?”
Dex cleared his throat and hit the button for our floor again. I brushed my fingers over my beestung lips; the buzz remained. I looked at Dex, but he avoided my eyes.
