Page 52 of About to Fall

One second. That was how long the silence lasted. One second of looking at each other and everything I had been suppressing for weeks caught fire.

I closed the distance. Or he did.

We collided. My hands fisted the front of his shirt and his hands were on my jaw and his mouth was on mine and it was not gentle. It was not tentative. It was not the kind of kiss that asked permission.

It was angry. It was weeks of provocation and proximity and Québec and the gym floor and him calling me beautiful and the sound of his breathing in the dark and every time he'd said Nicky in that voice and every time I'd pretended it didn't go straight through me.

His lip rings were cold against my mouth. His hands were hot on my face. He tasted like beer and something sweet underneath and I was gripping his shirt hard enough to tear it and I didn't care. My whole body was burning. Every nerve ending lit up, every inch of skin that touched his skin sparking like a live wire. I could feel his heartbeat against my chest, fast and hard, matching mine, and the knowledge that he was just as wrecked as I was made something feral and reckless surge through me.

He grazed my bottom lip and I groaned into his mouth—a sound I didn't recognize, low and desperate—and felt him smile against me. That infuriating, knowing smirk. I wanted to smother him and devour him in equal measure. Wanted to bite that smirk off his face and swallow it whole.

He kissed me like he did everything else—without hesitation, without apology, with the full committed intensity of a person who had never once in his life done anything halfway. His hands slid from my jaw into my hair, pulling, and the sharp sting of it sent heat flooding down my spine and pooling low in my stomach.

I kissed him back like someone who had finally stopped caring about being good.

25. Adrian

My teachers. My coaches. My best friends. Hell, every single person who had ever known me long enough to form an honest opinion—agreed on one thing about Adrian Zhao.

I lacked impulse control.

Which was how I ended up in a hotel room in Osaka kissing my biggest rival. The one person most likely to stand between me and an Olympic medal. My coach's nephew. The reigning national champion. The golden prince whose composure I’d spent weeks picking apart like a curiosity I couldn’t leave alone.

His hands fisted in my shirt, his breath ragged against my lips, his whole body shaking with the force of finally letting something out that he'd been crushing down for way longer than he would ever admit.

Consequences? Consequences could go fuck themselves. Consequences were tomorrow's problem. Tomorrow's Adrian could deal with the fallout—that poor bastard. Tonight's Adrian had just heard Nico Fontaine say kiss my ass in a voice that lit up every nerve ending in my body, and tonight's Adrian was not in the business of saying no to that.

His mouth parted in a gasp—involuntary, startled out of him by something I did with my teeth against his lower lip—and that was all the invitation my tongue needed. I licked into his mouth without hesitation and the sound he made in response—soft, half swallowed, somewhere between surprise and surrender—was going to live in my head rent free for the rest of my natural life.

His tongue responded more tentatively. Cautious at first, testing and then finding the curve of my lip ring and tracing it with delicate, exploratory little licks. Curious even here. Learning the shape of something new with the same careful attention he applied to every element on the ice.

That was the thing about him. Nicky could be feisty—I had the evidence, I had pulled it out of him—but his default setting was sweet. Genuinely, disarmingly sweet in a way he had no idea was rare. He kissed like someone who'd spent his whole life letting other people set the pace and was shocked to discover he had preferences. Every time I shifted the angle or bit down or dragged my teeth across his bottom lip, he made these small, bitten off sounds and each one brought me closer to losing whatever restraint I pretended to have.

Not that I was in the best state of mind. Seeing him with Théo at dinner had made my blood boil.

I could admit that now. With Nicky's mouth on mine and his hands twisted in my shirt. Watching them together—the loaded eye contact, the careful silences, Théo squeezing Nicky's arm in the lobby like he still had some kind of claim—had lit something in me that went way past our general mutual dislike.

Théo Beaubien didn't deserve Nicky.

Uncharitable? Maybe. The guy had been through his own shit and done the best he could with what he had. But I'd just watched Nicky spend two hours acting like everything was fine for a man who'd kept their relationship hidden for three years and then bailed. Who'd taken everything Nicky offered and left anyway.

And Nicky didn't even blame him. He'd said mutually assured destruction like it was a fact of life. Like being someone's collateral damage was just something that happened and you moved on.

Fuck that guy.

I didn't know how to tell Nicky he deserved more without it sounding like a line. But I could kiss him like he mattered. Like whatever he gave me—the anger, the sweetness, the sharp edges he was just figuring out he was allowed to have—I'd take all of it without flinching.

I could do that much.

He didn't stop me when my hand trailed down his spine.

Slow. Deliberate. Giving him every chance to pull back, to say wait, to be cautious and sensible. My fingers traced the line of his vertebrae through his shirt and I felt him shiver against my chest. A full body tremor that started at the base of his skull and rolled all the way down, and his breath caught against my mouth and his fingers tightened in my shirt but he didn't stop me.

My hands found the front of his shirt. Fingers clasping the buttons.

I pulled back just enough to see his face—flushed, lips swollen, the tortoiseshell glasses slightly askew, his blue eyes wide and dark in a way I had never seen them. He looked wrecked. And so, so fucking beautiful.

I could see the war happening behind his eyes. The part of him that wanted this just as desperately as I did fighting the part that had been trained since childhood to calculate risk, to weigh consequences, to ask what will this cost me before allowing himself to want anything.