Page 37 of You Can Run

The movement was careful and controlled. He lowered himself onto his back like he was trying not to disturb the air between them. But the bed was old and the mattress sagged toward the center, and the dip pulled her an inch closer to him whether either of them wanted it to or not.

Close enough that she could feel him without touching him. Heat, presence, the weight of a body trying very hard to hold still.

He lay there, and she lay there, and the room was quiet except for the sound of the highway and the drip of the bathroom tap.

“You're not asleep,” Dante murmured.

“No.”

Silence.

“I keep seeing it,” she said quietly. “My place. That man with blood all over him.”

Dante turned his head toward her. She felt it more than saw it.

“You're here,” he said. “That's what matters.”

It should have been comforting. It wasn't.

Jessica rolled onto her back, staring at the ceiling. “I don't feel here. I feel like I left something behind and I don't know what it was.”

“Good,” he said, almost under his breath.

She turned her head. “Good?”

“That life wasn't yours. You were fitting yourself into something that didn't know what to do with you.”

“And you know what fits me?” she asked.

He didn't answer. The silence that followed was warm and close and full of everything they weren't saying, and Jessica was suddenly aware of exactly how thin her t-shirt was, and how little she was wearing beneath it, and how the mattress kept pulling them both toward the center like the bed itself had formed an opinion about the distance between them.

“It used to be me,” he whispered.

She turned onto her side, facing him. In the green wash of neon light, his face was all shadow and edge, his eyes fixed on hers. He wasn't hiding what was there anymore, or maybe he couldn't, not this close and not in the dark.

“Dante,” she said, softer now. She didn't know what she meant to say next.

He moved first. His hand came up slowly, giving her time to stop him, time she didn't take. His fingers brushed her hair back from her face, then her cheek, rough and warm and so familiar it made her chest ache.

Her breath caught. She should have pulled away. She leaned into his hand instead, and that was all it took.

He closed the distance in a single movement, his mouth finding hers with a force that wasn't gentle. It was need, stripped bare—thirteen years of it, compressed into the space between one breath and the next.

Jessica's hands came up to his shoulders, gripping, pulling him closer. His body shifted over hers, not fully, but enoughthat she felt the weight of him, the heat of him through the thin cotton between them.

His hand slid down her side, fingers curling at her waist and stilled. Just for a fraction of a second.

Then lower.

The shirt shifted under his touch, riding up as his palm found the curve of her hip, her skin, nothing else.

She felt the moment it registered for him. His breath broke against her mouth, sharp, involuntary, and his hand tightened, instinctive, possessive, before he caught himself. The discovery of what she wasn't wearing hit him like a physical thing. She felt it move through his whole body, the sudden tension, the effort of not letting it take over.

Her fingers tightened in his shirt. “Dante?—”

He pulled back just enough to look at her. His breathing was ragged, his control visible only because he'd stopped moving.

“Tell me to stop,” he said, his voice low and strained. “Because I'm about to not be able to.”