Page 64 of Everything You Hate
She catches my wrist.
“The light.” Her voice is low. Raw. Something in it I haven’t heard before. “Turn it off.”
I glance up at the lamp swinging above us, and every pass of it lays her out for me. Flushed throat. Wet mouth.
Fuck.
I’ve spent the last week refusing to look at her, and now that I’m finally letting myself, she’s asking me to stop.
“I want to see you.”
“Dean.” Her fingers tighten on my wrist. “Please.”
Whatever she’s asking for, it costs her something to ask.
I reach past her and kill the lamp.
Her breath leaves her in a long and shaky exhale when the light goes out. Then she takes my face in both hands and pulls me down to her, and her mouth meets mine with a hunger that erases every objection I’ve ever had.
Chapter Seventeen
Scarlett
The second the light goes out, the cabin shrinks to nothing. I could touch every surface from this bunk: Dean’s chest, the edge of the table, the wall behind my head, the thin layer of fleece covering my body from collarbone to knee. The darkness is total—no window, no glow from the storm, nothing but breath and pulse and the snap of rain on fiberglass overhead.
Dean’s mouth is on mine before I can change my mind. The first kiss is a misfire—he misses, lips landing on the corner of my mouth, then the second is better, open, fierce, hungry in a way that makes me want to laugh. I kiss him back harder, so hard our teeth knock together. I want him to taste the wanting, the days of holding this in, the weeks of being watched by every person in this town except the one I actually wanted to see me.
“Three weeks,” he says against my mouth. “Three weeks of you walking around my dock like you own it.”
“You hated it.”
“I jerked off thinking about it.” He says it flat, like a man reporting weather. “Every night. Hated myself after. Did it again the next night.”
Heat drops through me so fast I make a sound I don’t recognize.
His hands are huge. One on my cheek, warm and steady, one on my waist, thumb pressing the thin cotton of his own sweatshirt tight against my hip. I’m sitting up, braced by the table, but he pushes into me until I tip back onto the mattress. He follows, sliding a knee between mine, all heat and scratchy stubble and salt on his skin.
I wrap my arms around his neck and pull him down. I want him close. I want him now, not next week or next hour. I want to outrun the thinking part, the years of caution and choreography, the version of myself I’ve been selling to strangers.
He groans, low, and the sound goes straight through me. I find his hair, the back of his neck, the ridge of his spine under the sweatshirt. He’s solid everywhere, built for holding weight. I pull him down, and he comes.
His hips grind against my thigh. I hook a leg around him and drag him tighter, anything to force the last of the hesitation out. I want friction. I want to be pinned, not handled. If I’m going to let myself do this, I want to burn.
He pulls back just enough that his mouth leaves mine. He’s searching my face in the dark. His breath is fast. “Tell me if you want me to stop.”
“Don’t stop.”
“Say it again.”
“Don’t stop.”
“Good girl.” His mouth drops to my throat. “Because I’m about to be very bad at pretending I don’t want this.”
He slides a hand up under the sweatshirt and flattens his palm just under my ribs. My body goes rigid.
He doesn’t notice. He moves the hand up, aiming higher.
Every nerve in my body spikes. I catch his wrist before he gets there. “Dean.”
