Page 96 of Unmanageable

The absolute panic of a nightmare that she never explained, that we never talked about, that she just buried under three layers of corporate schedule the next morning.

I pull my head back an inch, my thumb still resting against the soft skin of her jawline. My heart is hammering, my lungs burning, every single instinct in my body screaming at me to just lean back in and lose myself in her.

But I stay right where I am, my chest heaving, my eyes fixed on hers.

Scottie blinks, her breath catching, a sudden, confused hurt flaring behind her wet eyelashes. She shifts her weight on the floor, her mouth twisting into a tiny, defensive line.

“Huh,” she whispers, her voice shaking as she tries to force a laugh that drops flat into the carpet. “This is… this is the part where you kiss me, O’Connell. Did I miss a step or something?”

“Scottie,” I say. “Look at me.”

She tries to pull her chin back, but I hold her steady.

“The first night,” I say, the words coming out slow. “In Philadelphia. When you had that nightmare.”

It’s like the temperature in the room drops thirty degrees in a split second. Scottie goes rigid in my grip, her spine straightening, her breath hitching so hard it makes a tiny, clicking sound in her throat.

“Cash,” she says, shaking her head. “Don’t. That’s… we don’t need to do this.”

“We do,” I say. “Listen to me, Scottie-girl. You don’t have to tell me anything. You don’t have to give me details, or explanations, or any of it. That is your experience. It belongs to you. I just…”

I let out a long breath, my fingers moving to tangle in the hair behind her ear. “I just need to know that this is something you actually want. Right now. With me. I’m not moving another inch until I know you’re completely here.”

She stares at me, her chest heaving, her hands still pressed against the cotton of my t-shirt. She’s looking at me like she’s trying to find the trick, trying to find the contract clause where I pull the rug out from under her.

But there is no trick. There’s just me, sitting on a cheap bed, waiting for her to tell me where the boundary line is.

She licks her lips a couple of times as if trying to force the words out of her. She looks down at my shirt, her fingers tightening into the fabric.

“It was… it was a couple of years ago,” she whispers. “I was in a relationship. We’d been together for two years.”

I keep one hand on her face, the other on her arm, my thumb moving in a slow, steady circle against the tattoo on her wrist to keep her anchored.

“We were… we were staying at his apartment,” she says, her words coming out in a sudden, jerky rush, like she’s trying to unload a heavy weight before she loses the nerve to say it. “I went to sleep early. And I woke up… I woke up in the middle of the night because he was… he had climbed on top of me while I was asleep.”

A sharp, violent jolt of pure ice shoots straight down my spine, my teeth clicking together so hard my jaw aches.

Every muscle in my body goes rock-hard, the urge to find this bastard and kill him instantly overriding everything else in my brain. But I force it down. I force my hands to stay completely soft, completely still against her skin.

I can’t be the scary thing in the room right now.

“And the thing is,” she says, her voice cracking, a tiny, horrible sound of shame leaking into the quiet. “I didn’t push him off. I didn’t scream. I didn’t do anything that a tough, smart woman is supposed to do.”

She lets out a small self-deprecating laugh. “I just… my brain just shut down, Finny. I was so confused, and so tired, and I…”

She swallows hard.

“I mean, it wasn’t like I said no.” She shakes her head. “I didn’t actually say the word. My throat just locked up, and I couldn’t get it out. So I just pretended to still be asleep. I just lay there, perfectly still, with my eyes closed, pretending I couldn’t feel it until he was finished.”

A shuddering breath escapes her, her shoulders hunching inward as if she could shrink away from the memory.

“I kept telling myself it didn’t count. He was my boyfriend. We lived together. It wasn’t like a stranger in an alley. It was just a terrible, messy night, right? I spent months convincing myself it was just bad communication. That it was somehow my fault for not waking up all the way and telling him to stop.”

“Scottie—”

“If he’d been awful from day one, I would’ve left after the first date,” she says, ignoring me. “Or even the second. But fuck, I thought he was a good guy.”

She swallows hard.