Page 98 of Ruin
His hand slides up my thigh.
Knuckles grazing bare skin where the shirt has ridden up, and the contact is so light it barely qualifies as touch, but my body responds like he's pressed a brand against me.
Goosebumps rise and my breath catches, every nerve ending from knee to hip waking up and leaning toward his hand like flowers toward a heat source.
"I can't want you," I whisper. "Not after what you told me."
"You already want me. The question is whether you'll let yourself have what you want."
His hand reaches the junction of my thigh.
His thumb traces the crease where my leg meets my hip, feather-light, barely grazing, and I'm trembling.
Not from cold. From the effort of holding still when every cell in my body is screaming at me to move, to open, to let him in.
"This is sick," I say.
"Yes."
"We're both sick."
"Yes."
"I still dream about my parents' funeral. I still hear the gunshots sometimes when it's quiet. And I still get wet when you touch me, and I don't know what that makes me."
"Human." He leans in. His mouth at my ear, not touching, just close enough that I feel his breath move across my skin like a warm current. "It makes you human, Selene."
My hands find his chest. I mean to push him away.
My palms land flat against the cotton of his shirt and I feel his heartbeat under my right hand, steady and strong, and my fingers curl into the fabric and pull him closer instead.
The betrayal is so complete that I almost laugh, but his mouth is on mine before the sound can form, and the laugh dies in the space between our lips.
The kiss starts soft. Tentative.
Nothing like the collision of the last few nights.
This is a question, and I answer it without meaning to, my lips parting under his, my tongue meeting his, and the small, broken sound I make when he deepens the kiss is the sound of something inside me giving way.
Not breaking. Giving.
A wall I've been holding up with nothing but fury and grief, and his mouth on mine is the thing that finally makes my arms too tired to brace.
Papers crumple beneath me, a pen rolls off the edge and clatters on the floor, and the whiskey glass tips and amber liquid pools across a stack of documents and neither of us cares.
He pushes the shirt up over my hips, slowly, his fingers trailing fire along my outer thighs, giving me every opportunity to stop him.
I don't stop him.
His mouth leaves mine and travels down.
Jaw, throat, the edge of the collar.
He traces the diamonds with his tongue, a gesture I know from our reunion night, from a dozen nights before the truth, but now it carries a different feeling.
He's tasting his ownership of me, and I'm letting him, and the complicated spiral of shame and desire that creates makes me dig my nails into his shoulders hard enough to feel muscle give beneath my fingers.
He drops to his knees.
