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"I don't know."

"Guess."

"I've had control of it since I joined the coven." He said it to the bathtub. "Since the first time you put your hand on my arm in a hallway and I had about a quarter of a second to decide what kind of a male I was going to be. I have made my intent clear every single time since, and I have never once come close to slipping in your presence. I want you to understand that isn't the same as me being safe for you. Especially now that most of it is gone."

"I get that." It became obvious again how cold his fingers were around my ankle. "That's not an answer, though."

"No," River agreed. "It isn't."

And that, right there, was the whole problem with him. He never tells me it's fine. Everybody else in my life manipulates me. Danika with lies, Sissily with cheerfulness, Alex by putting his body between me and the world. This male crouches on a bathroom floor and tells me the truth and lets me decide what to do with it, which is so much worse and so much better that I have never known what to do about it. That's why I push him away.

"Okay," I said.

"Okay?"

"Yes, okay." I attempted to pull my foot out of his hands, but he tightened his hold. "Finish faster. I've got one more foot and that one is worse."

He chuckled. One breath, as if caught off guard. Then he bent his head and finished cleaning me up with the single-minded focus of a surgeon. I sat on the edge of a motel bathtub in a town whose name I never learned and watched the top of River's head while he picked gravel out of my feet. That was when I fell the rest of the way in love with him with all the grace of a rhinoceros on roller skates.

We ended up on the floor at the foot of the bed nobody had claimed, backs against the mattress, legs stretched out toward the credenza. Neither of us said anything about why we weren't sitting on the bed.

I had socks on. He'd found those too.

The TV was on with the sound off, tuned to a channel showing a program about people renovating a lake house. Neither of us was watching it, but neither of us turned it off either. The light from it moved across the ceiling in slow blue sweeps while I fidgeted with the hem of my shirt just to have something to do with my hands. There was an expectant tension filling up the space so strong it was choking me.

"Say something," I told him.

"About what?"

"Anything. The lake house. Your opinion on their backsplash for all I care."

"It's a poor choice."

"It is a criminal choice." I agreed honestly.

"They'll regret it inside two years." He tipped his head back against the mattress and turned it just enough to the side so he could look at me. "Hazel."

"Mm." My heart was galloping in my chest and I would have bet my life on it that he could hear it.

"You're going to have to kiss me first."

My whole body went hot and then cold, in that order, in a split second.

"I'm sorry?" I sputtered indignantly and pretended ignorance, which was possibly the least convincing thing I have ever said out loud, and I've told Danika I wasn't hungry while shoveling food in my mouth like an animal.

"You heard me." He was now talking to the ceiling. "I've wanted to kiss you since that day in the library when you told me to address you as Miss Byrne. But I'm not going to do it, and I need you to understand that's not me being noble about it. Gallantry has nothing to do with it."

"Then what is it?"

"Touching you… your foot, for example." He turned his hand over, the one that had been holding my heel an hour ago, his fingers twitching as if remembering the feel of my skin. "I could do that all night. I was concentrating the entire time, however. Every second of it, the whole way through, and it cost me nothing because I wasn't thinking about anything except how badly I wanted to help you and not hurt you."

The TV changed to a commercial. The room went briefly very bright, painting sharp angles on his face, before it turned blue again.

"And this would be different, how?"

Which, I noticed, was not me denying that I wanted to kiss him.

"This would be the opposite." His voice had gone rough at the edges. "The thing that keeps you alive when I touch you is me paying attention. And if I lean over there right now, Hazel, I am not going to be paying attention to anything else but how much I want you."