Page 178 of Where Your Scars Meet Mine
When she pulls back just enough to speak again, her nose brushes mine.
“I love you,” she says, “because you make me feel wanted without ever making me feel owned.”
Then she kisses me again.
Longer this time.
My hand slips to her waist instinctively, holding her close while she shifts higher against me beneath the sheets. The kiss deepens on its own, not hurried, just fuller, warmer, her mouth parting under mine as if every reason she gives me opens something else between us. The fear is still in the room somewhere, the call still hanging in the walls, but for these fewbreaths she is pulling me out of it with nothing but her mouth and the honesty in her voice.
When she lifts her head again, her lips are pinker, her breath softer against mine.
“I love you because,” she murmurs, thumb brushing once beneath my eye, “you see the ugliest things in me and still look at me like I’m something worth keeping.”
That one nearly undoes me.
Her kiss after it is less gentle.
Not rough. Just needier. Hungrier around the edges. She presses in closer, one thigh sliding over mine, the warmth of her body against me pulling a low sound from my throat before I can stop it. My grip on her waist tightens. Her mouth tilts over mine with growing confidence, as if each confession is stripping away another layer of uncertainty.
She breaks it again only to breathe my name.
“I love you because you never ask me to lie to myself.”
Then her mouth is on mine once more. This time her hand slips lower.
The touch is almost absentminded at first, fingers gliding down my stomach beneath the sheet, tracing the line of muscle there as if she’s still speaking through touch even after she’s run out of breath. But then her fingertips catch the waistband of my boxers, and the gesture turns calculated.
My whole body goes taut.
She feels it immediately.
Her mouth curves faintly against mine, not into a smile exactly, more like a soft, wicked little acknowledgment that she knows exactly what she’s doing now. Her fingers hook the waistband lightly, tugging just enough to make my breath catch harder.
“Beautiful,” I murmur against her mouth, warning and want tangled together.
But she just kisses me again.
Slower. Hotter. Her body settling over mine with more intention now, every place we touch starting to build toward something neither of us is pretending not to feel. Her hand stays at my waist, teasing the band of my boxers with small, dangerous little pulls while my own hand slides up her back beneath her shirt, needing more of her, all over again.
And when she whispers the next reason against my lips, the words come wrapped in heat.
“I love you,” she breathes, “because even when you’re trying to hold yourself together… you still come apart for me.”
God.
This woman is my salvation.
Not in the clean, church-fed way people like to use that word. Not in any neat, holy sense that would make it easier to say aloud without sounding insane. She does not save me from darkness by banishing it. She saves me by stepping into it, by putting her hands on the worst parts of me and refusing to look away. By reminding me, over and over, that there is still something in me worth coming back for.
She is not rescue. She is resurrection.
The only beautiful thing to ever grow from soil this ruined.
CHAPTER 37
Octavia
His mouth finds mine again before I can gather the next thought, the whole room seemingly exhaling around us.
