Even if it killed me.
“Come here,” I said, voice wrecked.
She crawled back up my body and I pulled her against my chest, tucking her head under my chin, one hand stroking slow down the curve of her back. My cock was still half-hard between us, but I ignored it. This wasn’t about that. Not yet.
Not until she was all the way in it with me.
I pressed a kiss to the top of her head and closed my eyes.
“Still mad at me?” I asked quietly.
She didn’t answer right away. Just pressed her face into my neck and breathed me in.
“Yeah,” she finally said, but her voice was soft. Not sharp. “A little.”
I smiled against her hair. “Good. Means you’re still here.”
She made a small sound that might’ve been a laugh or a sigh. I held her tighter.
I could wait.
For her, I could wait forever if I had to.
But heaven help me, I hoped she didn’t make me wait too long.
The weeks blurred.
Takeout containers stacked on my coffee table. Her leg propped on pillows while I worked the knots out of her hamstring with oil-slick hands. Her pretending she didn’t like being taken care of. Me pretending taking care of her wasn’t becoming the best part of my day.
We kept toeing the line.
Hell, we danced on it.
Hands under shirts. Mouths that forgot how to be careful. Her breath breaking against my throat. My name coming out of her mouth like she was mad at me for making her want it. Almosts that stopped just short of becoming something we couldn’t label fake anymore.
I told myself stopping made me honorable.
Maybe it did.
Or maybe I liked stopping because every time I did, we got to pretend we hadn’t already crossed a dozen lines before we ever made it to the obvious one.
We held hands in the back row of our shared lecture like it was normal. Like we’d been doing it for years. She startedstealing the coffee I brought her before I could put it on her desk. She learned which hoodie I grabbed when my head was loud and which one meant I was just cold. She left a lip gloss on the counter in my bathroom and then acted like I committed a felony when I put it in the same little tray every time she came over.
“You alphabetize women’s lip products now?” she asked one night.
“It was rolling around loose.”
“It’s lip gloss, Drew. Not a live grenade.”
“Clutter spreads.”
She’d rolled her eyes, but she smiled when she said it.
That smile got me through a Wednesday practice that should’ve killed me.
I saw her guard dropping in real time.
The way she stopped checking her phone every five minutes when we were together. The way she leaned into me instead of away when I touched the small of her back. The way she started laughing for real when I stole noodles off her plate and called her a menace with soft tissue damage.
