Page 11 of Give In to Me
She stepped forward instead of back.
His hand came out of his pocket and settled on her waist before she’d closed the distance. His fingers discovered the curve of her hip through the polyester, and the touch went through her body like a current, warm and heavy and everywhere at once. She tipped her face up to his. Two feet between them collapsed to six inches, and his other hand came up and his thumb traced the line of her cheekbone. The gentleness of it after days of nothing nearly undid her.
“I’m going to kiss you.” Her tone was part nervous, part determined. “Unless you tell me not to.”
He didn’t tell her not to.
She rose on her toes and put her mouth to his. Soft, this time. She kissed him soft and certain, and felt him go rigid under her hands, every muscle in his body locking tight, and then the lock broke and he made a sound against her mouth, low, from his chest, and his arms closed around her and pulled her into his body and he kissed her back with a thoroughness that turned her bones to water.
His mouth was warm. He tasted like the club’s iced coffee, bitter and cold, and underneath that was justhim, and her hands settled on his chest and slid up to his shoulders and she could feel his heart hammering under her palm, fast, so fast, and the knowledge that she did this to him, that his body was as undone by hers as hers was by his, made something fierce and bright bloom in her chest.
He walked her backward. A jacaranda trunk, wide and rough-barked, the purple blossoms drifting down around them. Her shoulder blades met the bark through her polo and she gasped at the texture, and he used the gasp, kissed deeper, drinking her in. Her hands slid from his shoulders into his hair and pulled.
His response was immediate. A rough sound against her mouth. His hips pinned hers to the tree, and she could feel him, the physical evidence of what she did to him, and this time she didn’t freeze. This time she arched into the pressure and heard him groan, a sound that vibrated through his chest into hers.
His mouth left hers and trailed down her neck. Her head fell back against the bark and her fingers tightened in his hair.
“Julian.” His name tore out of her, half breath, half plea.
His hand slid from her waist, up her side, over the polyester, and then his fingers reached the hem of her polo and slipped under. His palm on her bare skin. The shock of contact made her gasp, and his hand flattened against her stomach, warm, and then traveled up. Her spine arched and she pulled herself closer, and the sound she made was something she’d never heard from her own mouth, high and broken and needing.
He froze.
His hand stopped. His mouth stilled against her neck. She could feel him breathing, harsh and ragged, his chest heaving against hers, and his forehead dropped to her shoulder. He stood there, rigid, his hand still under her shirt, his body still hard against hers, and she could feel the war in him, every muscle locked in a fight against himself.
“Don’t stop. Please.” The words spilled past her lips in a whimper.
His fingers curled against her ribs. She felt his mouth open against her shoulder, felt him inhale her, and for a stretched, infinite moment he stayed there, his face buried in the curve of her neck, his hand on her skin, his body coiled tight. She wrapped her arms around his shoulders, fingers in his hair, keeping him against her like she could hold him there through force of will.
Then he pulled away.
Worse than the garden. He peeled himself off her one point of contact at a time. His hand from under her shirt, his mouth from her shoulder, his hips from hers. Each separation a separate loss. She read his face as he did it, read the hunger getting swallowed by composure, the exact moment the mask slid back into place.
But his eyes were still dark. And when he stepped back, he didn’t break the connection.
“This can’t happen,” he said hoarsely.
“It already is.”
“Katy.”
“It already is, Julian. You can walk away from me as many times as you want. It’s still happening.”
His gaze bore into hers. She held. She was leaning against a jacaranda tree with bark impressions on her shoulder blades and her polo rucked up where his hand had been and her mouth swollen and her hair half-fallen from its pins, and she shouldhave felt exposed, embarrassed, small. She felt none of those things. She felt like the truest version of herself. The girl who ran toward things, the girl who didn’t let terror win.
“You don’t know me,” he gritted out. Almost a plea.
“Then let me.”
He closed his eyes. When he opened them, the mask was back, but it wasn’t solid anymore. She could see the fractures running through it, and the light pouring through from the other side.
He walked away. She let him.
JULIAN DIDN’T GO HOME. He drove to the coast and parked at a lookout he never visited and sat in his car absorbing the Pacific and tried to remember how to think about anything other than the sound she’d made when his hand touched her bare skin.
He couldn’t.
He dug the heels of his hands against his eyes. His hands still smelled like her. Clean cotton and something floral, the scent that had lodged itself in his brain weeks ago and never left. He could feel the phantom shape of her ribs under his palm, the ridge of bone under warm skin, and the involuntary arch of her back when his thumb had reached the edge of her bra, and the sound, that small broken cry that had come out of her like something torn free, and he’d frozen because if he hadn’t frozen he would not have stopped.
