“Drew…”
His mouth pauses at the corner of mine.
His forehead almost touches mine.
“You don’t have to fix it tonight,” he says softly. “You don’t have to stop loving him tonight.”
The words hit like another wound and another mercy all at once.
“Then what do I do?”
His thumb strokes once slow at the back of my neck.
“You breathe,” he says. “You let me hold you. And you stop acting like this doesn’t matter just because it’s not the story you planned.”
His hand slides from my jaw to the back of my neck.
Big.
Careful.
Possessive in the earned way.
He smells like fresh cotton, mint, rain, and something purely male underneath it all—warm skin, clean sweat, the kind of scent that should not feel this safe and this dangerous at once.
The fire pops behind us.
Rain keeps striking the glass.
His mouth moves over my skin with a tenderness so patient it almost hurts more than the heartbreak does.
Because he is not trying to take advantage of me.
He is not turning my grief into an opening.
Not making my ruin convenient.
He is kissing me like he hates that I’m hurting.
Like he’d rather hold the worst of it for me than watch it keep carving through me.
And that?—
that might be the thing that undoes me.
My breath catches.
Then stutters.
He pauses at the corner of my mouth, forehead almost touching mine now, his hand still warm and steady at the back of my neck.
I wanted lightning bolts from Tristan.
I wanted the polished prince.
The it guy.
The one everybody wanted and I was stupid enough to believe might finally want me most.
