Page 81 of Break Me Apart
I look at him properly then, one eyebrow raised. “That sounds suspicious.”
He leans in and murmurs against my lips. “It’s meant to.” Then he kisses me. It instantly shoves everything else a little further away for a second. I kiss him back without hesitation, my hand sliding up behind his neck and holding him there. I’d almost forgotten what this feels like, which is crazy because it’s only been a matter of weeks.
I deepen the kiss, and Caiden makes a soft sound into my mouth, shifting in closer. The truck is cold underneath us, the metal leeching heat through my clothes, but hishand is warm, his mouth is warmer, and the contrast gets under my skin fast.
When I pull back, it’s only enough to rest my forehead against his. “That,” I say quietly, “is exactly the kind of distraction I had in mind.”
He laughs once. “I thought it might be.” We kiss again, slower this time, which honestly helps.
It’s just the two of us in the dark with the edge taken off for a few minutes. Cassie is still dead. Niko is still falling apart. Vladimir is still too small for any of this. None of that goes anywhere, but while Caiden’s hands are on me, while his mouth is warm and his body is here, real and not something I have to imagine, the noise in my head drops to a level I can stand.
We stay there longer than we probably should, kissing in that slow, stupid way that makes time stop behaving properly. It’s almost as if my whole body woke up and went, “Yes, there you are. I remember this. Thank you.”
Eventually, he breaks the kiss and rests his mouth briefly against my temple. “We should go.”
“Yes,” I say, but I still don’t move. Neither does he for another few minutes. Then we do the sensible thing and climb down separately, spacing ourselves out without having to discuss it. It’s automatic by now — that distance in public, that private choreography of not looking like what we are.
He goes his way first, thenI follow later.
I get back to my room and shut the door behind me, then sit on the edge of the bed without bothering with the light for a minute.
Caiden is here, and that matters more than I like admitting most days. It doesn’t make anything better exactly, but it makes it easier to keep going.
I lie back and stare at the ceiling. Tomorrow will bring all the things it was going to bring anyway. Conversations I don’t want, responsibilities I can’t dodge. Niko looking me in the face and pretending he’s more all right than he is, and me pretending to believe him for as long as he needs me to.
For now, though, I let myself think about Caiden in the truck. I close my eyes and hold onto that for as long as I can before eventually drifting off to sleep.
TWENTY-SEVEN
CAIDEN
The thing is, sleep has always been something I negotiate with rather than... trust. It’s kind of like I have an unreliable arrangement between me and my own body where I offer exhaustion, and it offers me terms back. What’s different now is that when I shut my eyes, I know exactly where Ari is, which helps immensely.
He’s not somewhere vague and imagined. He’s not a face I have to reconstruct from memory and old emails until the details start slipping. He’s in a real room, in a real building, that I could reach in a matter of minutes.
You’d think that knowledge would be enough for me to get a decent night’s sleep, but here we are.
I shower, dress, and move through the same routine I always do, because routine is better than thinking and considerably less likely to kick you in the nuts before breakfast.
By the time I’m done, the base is waking properly around me.
The briefing is exactly what a briefing always is, and no one looks at me twice. I listen, I contribute where it’s useful, and keep my face neutral.
If I’m distracted, it doesn’t show.
Years of training see to that. You learn early how to stop your expression from giving you away. You learn how to sit in a room carrying all sorts of things nobody else getsto see and still look like you’re thinking only about maps, timing windows, and whatever idiot forgot to submit the correct report.
Between tasks, though, my thoughts circle where they please.
Mainly to Ari.
By late morning, I’ve found my rhythm, or rather... it’s found me. Work has a way of doing that if you let it. I focus on what’s in front of me. A report that needs checking, a maintenance issue, a conversation with a superior that could’ve been half the length if anyone here respected brevity.
The usual.
When I can, I slip away again.
By now, the route to Niko’s flat comes to me like second nature. I know which corner to cut, which stretch of path is usually empty at this hour, which bit of fencing hides you best from the windows on the wrong building. It’s not as dramatic as it sounds. I’m not sneaking through enemy lines for the love of God. Still, there’s a knack to moving quietly through a place that notices patterns.
