Page 29 of Last Line of Defense

“Can you tell me what the hell you’re trying to do tonight?”

Her mocking smile slowly fades from her lips. That drastic change in her body language alarms me more than any of her previous provocations. Because behind her usual facade of a tough, cocky woman, something infinitely more serious, raw, and honest suddenly emerges.

“The truth is, the only thing I’m interested in knowing is why it bothers you so much to see me with someone else when you yourself have made it clear to me that what happened between us was a mistake,” she confesses in a low, direct whisper, seeking my gaze.

“It’s just that I don’t care what you do with your private life.”

“Clara, please…” She says my name so softly and slowly that it feels like an intimate caress and a death threat all at once.

“Alicia, don’t do this here.”

“Do what? Have the nerve to ask you if I matter to you?”

“It’s just that you have no right to demand explanations from me about anything,” I reply, though my voice trembles slightly, betraying my feigned strength.

“Oh, really? And you, on the other hand, have every right in the world to decide unilaterally for both of us that what happened meant absolutely nothing to either of us?”

A thick, deathly silence suddenly falls between us, drowning out the noise around us. The air on the terrace becomes unbreathable. The physical distance separating us shrinks to mere inches. The truth of the matter is impossible to ignore in the moonlight.

“I never said it meant nothing…”

“You didn’t need to, Clara. Your silence these past few days said it all for you.”

Her tone of voice has dropped three octaves all at once. There’s no trace left of the playful woman who used to liven up the table; she’s not playing games with me anymore.

“You constantly hide behind the board’s rules, behind professional ethics, behind that absurd and unhealthy need you have to control everything around you. But then you look at me, and I feel like the whole world is on fire.”

I take a deep breath, feeling my pulse racing in my temples.

“Alicia…”

“No, Clara. This time you’re not going to get away from me so easily.”

She takes another step forward, cornering me against the railing. Right now, she’s damn close to me. I can smell her perfume perfectly, feel the direct heat of her breath on my lips, and sense the fire burning inside us.

“You brought me your own jacket in the rain, out in the middle of the field,” Alicia continues in a broken whisper, gently touching my chest with her finger. “You looked at me as if you really cared that I might get hurt. So don’t come at me now and tell me that what’s happening between us doesn’t exist just because you’re terrified to admit it out loud.”

I’m barely able to defend myself, and it’s precisely because of that helplessness that I react in the worst possible way. Because some truths, when they’re thrown in your face, hurt just like an open wound against raw flesh.

“Can you just tell me what you want to hear from me?!” I snap at her, raising my voice much higher than I intended, losing my cool. “What are you looking for? Do you want me to openly admit that I care about you? Do you want me to confess once and for all that what we have is crazy, but that I’m incapable of going even a single second of the day without thinking about you? That every time you show up, you turn my life into perfect, avoidable chaos, and that, even so, I can’t get you out of my head no matter how hard I try? Do you want me to tell you that I dream about you at night and then wake up in a lousy mood because I can’t control my own emotional impulses? Is that what you want?”

Her eyes don’t leave mine for even a millisecond, shining with an intensity that burns my eyelashes.

“Yes, Clara. That’s exactly what I want to hear.”

Brutal honesty sometimes has a beautiful, addictive cruelty.

We stand there, frozen, breathing each other’s air, too close. With all the frustration that’s built up these past few days. With all the wild, pent-up desire. With all our mental resistance crumbling like a house of cards. Until, quite simply, there’s no more physical space or air left to keep pretending we’re sane when we’re not.

Either I kiss her in a fit of passion, or she kisses me, crashing her lips against mine; honestly, at this point, I couldn’t say for sure. I only know that it happens. Suddenly. Abruptly. Desperately. Necessarily. As if we’d both been holding our breath for weeks on end, waiting precisely for this blessed moment.

Her back hits the brick wall of the terrace with a dull thud, and my hands find her waist with a desperation that I know will embarrass me terribly tomorrow morning, but right now I couldn’t care less. At this very moment, the only things that exist in the universe are her mouth, its warm, familiar, intoxicating taste, our pent-up rage, and the wild way she returns every one of my kisses, as if she, too, were exhausted from resisting the obvious.

It’s pure pent-up frustration. It’s physical hunger. It’s everything we don’t know how to control within the bounds of logic.

Alicia cups my face in her hands, pulling me deeper into her, and I feel that dizzying free fall of someone who realizes—too late—that she’s lost control of the game. I pull away from her lips first, purely out of raw survival instinct, gasping for air.

“This is still a terribly bad idea for both of us…” I manage to say, though my voice doesn’t sound convincing even to my own ears.