Page 61 of Tears of Ink

His smile warms my insides and I begin to liquefy at his close presence. My body shouts with a loud voice that it wants to be touched. Any connection, no matter how fleeting.

I stare at his face, his lips. The stubble on his cheeks.

I could drown in him and never surface.

He watches me in silence. Can he read my face again? Would it matter? It’s just sex. Just once. It could be done and dusted and then I could move on.

Then I remember him in the kitchen the other night. That sheer loneliness that radiated from deep within.

My mouth is dry and I lick my lips.

Friends. Trust.

Two things I don’t ever do. For good reason.

“What were your calls about?” How I get my vocal cords to untangle and work I don’t know.

“My case.” His eyes harden.

“Want to talk about it?”

He shakes his head. “No. Thank you, but no.”

We stare at one another again. The silence is tangible. A weight that presses us down, pushing us to places where darkness reigns.

“Want to talk about your uncle?”

I shake my head, a lump lodging in my throat.

“Faith.” My name is deep and rich from his tongue. “My life is so complicated.”

I go to move away. I don’t need him to reject me. I choose when and how, nobody else has that power.

“I don’t care what your life is. It’s your business not mine.”

He catches my fingers. “I want you to care, as wrong as that is.”

“Don’t friends care?”

He raises an eyebrow, his lips curving just a fraction. “Don’t friends trust?”

“That’s what I’ve been told.” I glare at him.

In one fluid movement he is off the bed holding his hand out to me. “Come on.”

“Where are we going? Are we going to stand under the sprinklers again so you can see my bra?”

His face splits with a huge grin. “No, but maybe later. The sprinklers don’t come on... he checks his watch, “for another four hours.”

“Four hours, that’s a long time to wait.”

“Are you throwing yourself at me?”

“You’d know if I was.”

Before I can move, or even try to duck out of his grasp, he has me pushed against the bedroom door. His lean and hard body pins me in place. His hands are on the bare skin of my arms, hard enough that if my ink wasn’t permanent, it would have smudged.

He smells divine. Soap and musky wood notes. My heart stutters in my chest, banging loudly against my ribcage. My head whirls with his presence in my space.