Page 44 of Captive Promise

Tonight I slept with a man who has the very loosest definition of the word “morals.”

The worst part—the part I am going to pay for the rest of these twenty-six days and probably the rest of my life—is that I wanted to.

I still want to.

And I do not know how to cope with that.

8

NICO

I don’t move for a long time after she leaves.

I stand in the middle of my kitchen at four-something in the morning, half-dressed, one hand braced on the counter she was on ten minutes ago, and I do not move.

I can’t.

My body is not cooperating with the idea of moving.

I can still feel her.

My skin remembers exactly where her hands were. My mouth is still warm from hers.

The whole right side of my ribs still feels the mark of her nails.

I can taste her on my tongue and I can smell her everywhere. In the air. On my hands. On my mouth.

And the sounds she made. God. I am going to hear the sounds she made for the rest of my life.

The little breath she took right before I put my mouth on her throat. The way she said my name into the space between us.

The whimper against the shell of my ear.

The way she said yes, twice, the sound so breathy with want that it makes my dick start to stir again.

I slept with Katerina Sokolov.

I say it in my head like it’s a fact I need to prove to myself.

I slept with Katerina Sokolov.

The woman I have been half in love with for two years and fully obsessed with for all of them.

The woman I have watched buy coffee, cross streets, run in the rain, get on and off trains, sleep through her subway stop once, and never once believed I would be allowed to actually have.

I had her. On my counter. In my kitchen. In this house.

Then she looked at me like she was going to be sick, and she got off that counter, and she ran.

The remembering of that part is what finally makes me move.

I go upstairs. I do not go to her door even though I want to badly enough that I have to force my feet past it and down the hall to my own room. But being in my room is worse because there’s no her in it, and I can smell her on my own skin instead.

I sit on the edge of the bed, but I don’t turn a light on. I sit there in the dark and try to slow my heart down. It doesn’t slow.

It has been pounding since she walked into the kitchen and it hasn’t let up once—not through the kissing, the aftermath, the walk upstairs, not now, three floors and a hallway later, with her nowhere near me.

My chest is tight.