Page 221 of Iced Up Love: Part Two
I nod against him, letting his steady warmth hold me, even as the ache of Elijah’s controlled distance lingers like a bruise I don’t know how to heal.
forty-seven
Elijah
I shouldn’t have looked.
That thought sits heavy in my chest as I stand in the kitchen, hands braced against the counter, staring at nothing while the image refuses to leave me alone.
Her. Under him.
Soft.
Open.
Alive.
The kind of alive I haven’t let myself touch.
My jaw tightens, something restless and sharp moving under my skin, because it isn’t just what I saw, it’s what it did to me. The instinct that hit before anything else had a chance to follow. The immediate, undeniable pull to cross the room, take her back, and remind her exactly who she belongs to.
The way I always have.
The way she responds to.
The way she needs.
My fingers flex against the counter before I force them still, dragging in a slow breath that doesn’t settle anything, because the second I let that instinct rise, something else hits just as hard.
Her on that floor.
Her going still in my arms.
The memory cuts through everything.
That’s what stops me.
That’s what has been stopping me.
Because I know what I become when I don’t hold that line. I know how far I go with her. And I don’t trust that version of me right now.
Not with her.
Not when she’s still healing. Not While she is carrying my child.
Not when there’s even the smallest chance I push too far and see something in her eyes that I won’t survive.
So I didn’t take what I wanted. I leaned down. I kissed her gently. I called her wife. And that hadn’t been accidental. That had been deliberate. A quiet claim wrapped in control.
A reminder.
To her. To them. To myself.
Sheismine.
Even if I’m not touching her the way I want to. Even if holding myself back feels like it’s tearing something out of me.
Movement down the hallway pulls me out of it.
