Page 30 of The Beast
Fuuuuck.
She smiled against my jaw. Reached down between us, her hand finding me through the denim?—
—and I caught her wrist.
Stopped her. Just stopped her, gentle but absolute, the grip of a man who can stop almost anything.
She went rigid. The whole warm forward motion of her locked up at once.
"I don't think this is a good idea," I said.
"Okay." It came out small and scraped. She started to lift off me, pulling back, her face already closing. "Okay, sorry, I?—"
"No." I caught her hips. Held her right where she was. "That's not—listen to me." She went still, hovering, eyes wide and stung. "I want you. Bad. In case you couldn't tell." I let out a breath that shook on the way out. "You have no idea."
Something flared in her face, relief and heat both, and she dropped back down and started moving on me again?—
I stopped her a second time. Both hands. Steady.
Fuck.
"Then what," she said. Sharp now, embarrassed, the hurt cutting through. "What is the problem?"
"You were getting married." It came out rougher than I meant. "Twelve hours ago you were in a white dress. You're shaking right now, Mary Catherine. You're scared and you're hurting and you've had a day that'd put any sane person on the floor. I'm not gonna be the thing you grab for in the dark and hate in the morning. You deserve better than that. You deserve—" I stopped, because I didn't have the rest of the sentence and didn't trust my voice to carry it.
For a second, she just looked at me. And I watched the shaking she'd been hiding finally win, watched her face do something it had probably spent twenty-nine years not doing in front of people.
"Right," she said. Brittle. Bright. The curated voice slamming back down over all of it. "No, of course. God. I can take a hint."
"Mary Catherine?—"
But she was already off me, off the sofa, up and across the room with her arms wrapped around her own middle. She went into the little bathroom and shut the door, not a slam, worse than a slam, a careful quiet click.
And I was left sitting on a busted sofa in a room full of the truest thing she had, hard as a teenager, heart going like I'd just run a mile under fire, staring at a closed bathroom door.
I put my head back against the wall and shut my eyes.
In my whole life, I'd never had trouble knowing the right thing. The trouble was always doing it. I'd just done it—the rightest, hardest, most decent thing I'd managed in years—and I felt like the lowest son of a bitch in South Carolina. Somewhere, on the other side of that door, a woman I'd known for one single day was crying as quiet as she knew how.
The FBI was circling my family. My name was loose in a city I'd been in for a day. My brother had stopped laughing.
And the only thought I had room for, sitting there in the dark with my pulse in my ears, waswhat in the hell have I gotten myself into.
13
MARY CATHERINE
Isat on the edge of the tiny bathroom vanity, looked at myself in the small mirror, and had a very direct conversation with my reflection.
You are not humiliated. You are not the girl who got rejected. You are a woman who made a clear and honest choice and was met with?—
I stopped.
He'd stopped me twice. Caught my wrist like he was disarming something. And then he'd saidyou're shakingandI won't be the thing you grab for in the dark and hate in the morning. I had felt the shape of those words land somewhere deep and true and inconvenient, because they were the words of a man who was paying attention. Real attention. The kind that saw through the bravado to what was underneath it.
He was right. I had been shaking.
I was still shaking, a little, but it was different now. Not fear. Something else—something that had been building since cold Atlantic water and was not going to resolve itself by sitting on a bathroom vanity.
