Page 15 of Honey Cut
“Hi,” I say. My voice is only breath. No sound. I think of his fingers inside me the other night, of him bending me over a small chapel pew. Of his hot tongue between my thighs as the waves slapped against the hull of the yacht. “I thought Jago was picking me up.”
Tristan’s eyes are scanning the dojo again, so he’s not looking at me as he answers. “He is. He’s outside. But Mark has asked for you to join him for dinner tonight, and he tasked me with cajoling you.”
His expression is the expression I’ve come to expect from him since we’ve left the sea: alert and impassive andjustthis side of scowling. A soldier’s face, which he still is, in a way. Mark’s private soldier. But I see the faintest ember of curiosity behind his eyes, the way they linger over the racks of weapons and the mats in a battered stack against the wall. The old red carpet, worn and thin enough to spin on easily, the framed Bible verses on the walls, which had been hung crooked and have only gotten crookeder with time.
“It’s run by nuns,” I say, and then I almost smile at the disbelieving look on his face. “Well, sisters, if you want to get technical.”
“Karate nuns. All right.” He looks at me in my gi, my black belt knotted neatly around my waist, and then at the sword in my hand. “So this is where you go before and after work every day?”
I can’t look at Tristan’s mouth without thinking of it on the curve of my breast. Panting against my neck as he drove between my legs. Tristan is my kingdom in the desert, my bread out of stones.
And why? Why do I want him so much? I haven’t overslept an alarm in ten years; I haven’t gone a single day without praying a rosary; I have killed and nearly been killed in return but never been caught. And yet I can’t hold my own against green eyes and a good heart?
I set the sword carefully on the rack—it’s a bokken, a wooden training sword, but it pays to treat training weapons like the real thing—and turn to find him closer. Only a few feet away.
It’s the closest we’ve been since that night in my room, and it’s the most alone we’ve been since the yacht because there’s no one here, no one at all.
And suddenly, it feels very, very important that he knows it.
“The other students have gone,” I say. I can’t believe the sound of my own voice, the implication of my own words, but neither can I stop myself. “The sisters too. We’re alone.”
His face changes, snow melting into spring, and I can now see the struggle. The obsession. A burn in his stare, a hunger to his mouth.
And I know, I feel it, Iget it, because it’s me too, it’s mirrored in me, twinned in me. With Mark, I’d been told over and over again that my own lust wouldn’t be a sin, only a weapon to use against him. Butthis—this is sin.
Lust, adultery. Deceit. Choosing my own weak and human desires over the will of God.
I want to be good. Like the apostle Paul, I want it so, so badly, and yet I cannot help being bad.
He slowly untucks the earpiece from his ear and lets it hang from his collar. “It’s been so hard to stay away from you,” he says, his voice low and hoarse. “At night, I hear your dreams, and I want to break down the fucking door to help you. When I wake up in the morning, I think of you on the other side of the wall, warm and sweet, and I think of how it would feel to slip inside your room and get in bed beside you. And when I saw the bite on your shoulder at the engagement party…”
I flush.
“You’re killing me,” he finishes. “You are killing me, Isolde.”
We are so close, and I can hear the hard rush of his exhales, and I’m so used to keeping everything inside myself, holding my entire heart and mind and body on the point of a knife, but with those black-pooled eyes, that expression like he wants to carry me out of a burning building and then fuck me while the ashes blow over us, I can’t bear it.
I can’t bear it.
Everything was ordained for me—martial arts, my major, my cover job as an antiquities’ appraiser, and my real job as a saint of the Church…and, of course, my future as Mark Trevena’s bride.
But not him. Not Tristan.
He’s the one thing I’ve chosen for myself.
Our mouths are nearly touching, and I’m trembling. My nipples are hard under my sports bra as I smell him, Irish Spring and something sharp and minty underneath it. Aftershave.
I inhale him and inhale him, that same scent that drugged me on the open ocean. I grew up smelling colognes so expensive that the perfumer came to our penthouse to deliver them personally, and yet it’s the simple smell of soap and aftershave that makes my mouth water.
His breath is warm against my lips, and I can only see suggestions of his face—a single green eye, the furrow between his brows, the helpless part of his lips. His shoulders block out whatever light has sunk through the skyscrapers to make it to the dojo windows.
I press my hands to his chest and feel his heart slamming against his ribs. So I find his hand and press it above my left breast so that he can feel the same slamming in mine. We are twins in this, and all I want is to rip apart any last thing that separates us. Weddings, black belts, medals of valor, anything that makes us different from one another, because we are the same at the core of it all. Children of God made wicked by the clever words of a serpent.
Tristan’s mouth is almost on mine now, brushes, whispers of lips.
“I have to feel your cunt again,” he says. My lower belly clenches at the dark need inside his words.
“Yes,” I say against his mouth. I drop his hand to fumble with the knot of my belt, to untie my gi jacket. The thick fabric is hardly sexy; neither is the utilitarian underwear I’m wearing beneath it, but it doesn’t matter. The minute Tristan shoves his hand—his right hand, the one with Mark’s black and silver ring on his first finger—down my pants and finds my sex, we both groan.
