Page 43 of Break For Me
His glasses are fogged from his own breath. His lips are pale, tinged with blue. His body is trembling—a sustained, whole-body shudder. It isn't the fine tremor of a panic attack. It is the gross, rhythmic contraction of muscles trying to generate heat they don't have the fuel for.
"Come here."
He looks at me. He takes off his glasses and folds them carefully into his shirt pocket. Without them, his face is different. Younger. More exposed. The sharp, aristocratic lines of his jaw and cheekbones are the same, but his eyes—pale blue, red-rimmed from exhaustion—are larger. More vulnerable.
"You’re hypothermic," I say. "Your core temperature is dropping. You need heat."
"I’m fine."
"You’re not fine. You’re shivering so hard your teeth are clicking. Get over here."
He doesn't move. The stubbornness is a mirror of my own. A man who would rather freeze to death than accept help from someone who scares him. I understand it. I respect it. And I’m not going to let him die from it.
I reach across the small space between us. I grab the front of the flannel shirt—my flannel, on his body—and I pull him toward me. He resists for a half-second. Then the cold wins. His body overrides his pride, and he lets himself be pulled.
I settle my back against the hard rock wall and draw him against my chest. He’s rigid at first—every muscle locked, his sharp shoulder blades pressed against my pectorals like plates of armor. I wrap my right arm around his torso and hold him. My left arm, the damaged one, I tuck between us, the bandaged hand resting on his hip.
He’s freezing. The cold radiates off his thin frame the way a fever radiates off mine. It’s a thermal transfer, his body bleeding heat into the frigid air faster than it can produce it. I pull him tighter against me. My chin rests on the crown of his head. His unwashed hair is stiff, pressed against my jaw.
"Breathe," I say.
He breathes. A violent shudder runs through him—deep, structural. Then another. Slowly, the rigid lock of his muscles begins to release. His shoulders drop. His back settles against my chest. His head tips sideways, his temple resting in the hollow of my shoulder.
He weighs nothing. A hundred and seventy pounds that feels like a hundred. A body made of sharp angles and thin muscle and the relentless machinery of a mind that never stops calculating.
I could break him without trying. I could close my arm and crush the air out of his lungs. The knowledge sits in my body as pure physics, as raw capacity.
I don't want to break him.
The realization arrives without ceremony. A simple fact settling into place like a bone resetting in its socket. I don't want to break him. I want to hold him against the cold. I want to guard him the way I’ve guarded Alessandro—with the whole of myself, with every bruised and bleeding inch of what I am.
The thought is so foreign it doesn't have a shape. I let it sit there, heavy and unnamed, while the snow falls and his body warms against mine.
His shivering stops. His breathing deepens. The measured, counted rhythm gives way to something longer, slower. He has fallen asleep. His hand uncurls from his medical bag and comes to rest on my forearm. His long fingers are loose, his palm lying flat against the bandage covering my wound.
He’s holding my wounded arm in his sleep.
The overhang is dark. The heavy snow has muted the world outside into a featureless, silent white. Garrett is a still shadow at the entrance. Killian breathes steadily under the blanket. Adrian sleeps against my chest.
I am awake because someone has to be. And because my body is doing things I can't stop.
The arousal is a slow, insistent build. Not the sudden, feverish spike from the auto shop, but something heavier, deeper. It rises from the sustained, unconscious contact of his body against mine. His back against my chest. His hips settled between my thighs.
Every small shift he makes in his sleep presses some part of him against some part of me. The friction accumulates. The heat accumulates. I am hard against the small of his back and there is nothing I can do about it except sit here in the dark and burn.
I could move. I could shift my hips and create distance. I could wake him and make an excuse. But if I move, he wakes. If he wakes, he’s cold. If he’s cold, he shakes. And I can't watch him shake again.
So I stay.
My right hand moves. Slowly. I ease it from around his torso and slide it down between my hip and the cold rock wall. The thin sweatpants have no resistance. The elastic gives easily. My hand closes around myself and the relief is immediate—a bright, sharp pulse that radiates from my grip through my pelvis and into the base of my spine.
I don't think about women. I think about hands. Clean, steady, precise hands that held a needle in my torn palm and didn't shake. Hands that pressed a cold cloth against my burning chest and turned pink at the knuckles. Hands that touched me like I was something worth preserving.
I think about the way he looked at me in the motel. The sudden flush high on his cheekbones. The visible crack in his composure. The moment his clinical wall fractured and what was underneath was pure, undeniable want.
I think about what it would feel like to put those hands on me without the gauze, without the medical protocol. To have him touch me because he chose to. Because the thing between us finally stopped being a pathology and became a decision.
My hand moves. Slow. Controlled. The rhythm is deliberate. Adrian’s breathing is deep and steady against my chest. His fingers twitch on my forearm. I press my lips against the crown of his head. Not a kiss. A compression. The simple weight of my mouth against his hair.
