Chapter 10
Skylar
He kisses me.
Not slowly or sweetly.
There is no careful slide back into what we used to be, no tentative testing of the temperature of now. His mouth crashes into mine, and everything I have been carrying—the anger, the grief, the want and every stupid lie I have told myself about being over him—bursts open between us all at once.
I should push him away.
That is the first thought I have. The smart one. The sane one. The one wearing sensible shoes and carrying a clipboard with a very long list of reasons why kissing Zane Rivera is a fucking catastrophic idea.
I have the list memorized. I wrote most of it in the dark at three in the morning, in an apartment that never felt like mine, lying beside a man who never once made me feel the way I do in the first second of this kiss.
His hand comes up to my jaw. Warm. Rough. Certain in a way so familiar it moves through me like a key finding a lock it was cut for. Every sensible thought I had dissolves before it even forms.
My body remembers him before my pride has a chance to.
That has always been the problem with Zane. My mind can build walls, stack them high, and reinforce them with every ugly word he ever said to me and every night I spent putting myself back together after each one. But none of it matters when he is close.
My body has never once listened to reason when he is concerned. It recognizes him beneath the harder jaw, the broader shoulders, and the man carved from the boy. It knows him the way it has always known him, completely and without asking permission.
His mouth is hot and desperate against mine. He kisses me like he has been starving for it. Like all those years of distance have reduced him to this single point of contact and he is trying to make it last forever.
I grip the front of his shirt with both hands because I need something solid under my fingers. Something to keep the ground from dissolving beneath me.
He is solid. More than he was before. Broader across the chest and shoulders, but under my hands, under all that muscle and heat and tension, he is still Zane. The one I have never stopped loving, no matter how many reasons he gave me to try.
His tongue slides against mine and a sound escapes me. It’s small and humiliating. Needy in a way that makes a stubborn, self-preserving part of me want to die right here in the parking lot of Rainer’s Custom Restorations.
His hand tightens at my waist.
Enough to tell me he registered it, remembers exactly what that sound means, and is not going to pretend otherwise.
Fuck.
I kiss him back harder because if I’m already making this mistake, I might as well make it completely, with both hands in his shirt and his mouth taking the last sensible breath I had.
Everything about him overwhelms me all at once.
The heat radiating off his body. The scrape of his stubble against my skin.
The faint taste of coffee on his tongue, so ordinary and so him, does something to my chest I can’t name.
My fingers curl tighter in his shirt, and his chest rumbles with a low sound that goes straight through me and settles somewhere deep and inconvenient.
God. That sound.
I have dreamt about that sound.
Hated myself for dreaming about it. Woken up beside Damien in that cold, expensive apartment, with the echo of it still burning somewhere I couldn’t reach, couldn’t explain, and couldn’t make stop.
I should have forgotten this by now. I should have forgotten him. Instead, I remember everything.
The way he kisses with his whole body, nothing held back.
The way he crowds me without ever making me feel trapped. That specific quality he has always had of making me feel surrounded and free at the same time.
His thumb strokes along my jaw. That small tenderness in the middle of all this heat nearly undoes me more than any of the rest of it, because that is the thing about Zane I could never reconcile and never get over.
He always did that. Anyone can want someone.
Not everyone can make them feel, in the same breath, like they are both burning and held.
He always made me feel safe. He still does even after everything we’ve been through.
He backs me up a half step before he abruptly halts himself, and I sense the war inside him.
His body is tight against mine, his breath ragged and uneven against my mouth.
His cock is hard against me, thick and unmistakable, and that knowledge sends heat spilling low through my stomach in a way that is not helpful and I’m not going to be able to pretend I didn’t notice.
A sharp, reckless part of me wants to press closer. To feel exactly what I have done to him. To punish us both with the proof of it.
His mouth leaves mine. Not far, only enough for air.
We stand here, breathing. Hard and uneven, entirely exposed.
The city continues on around us as if nothing has happened. As if the entire world hasn’t tilted on its axis and settled somewhere different from where it was before.
His forehead lowers to mine and stays there. I let him, because I don’t have the strength right now to take that from him.
A second passes. Then another.
“Fuck,” he whispers, low and honest.
A slight tremor moves through him.
Not weakness. Zane has never been weak, not even at eighteen, with blood on his knuckles and nowhere to put them. This is restraint. The kind that costs a person something real. I know it because I can see how much he wants to keep going and how much it is costing him not to.
I want it too.
That is what frightens me. How easily I could lean back into him. How willing my body already is to forgive what my heart has not yet survived. Heat pulses through every place he touched.
I want his hands under my shirt.
I want his mouth on my throat.
I want to be the girl in his bed again, the one who wrote that note in the dark because saying it out loud was too terrifying.
I’m not scared of you. I’m afraid of what I feel.
God. I was right to be afraid after feeling him ruin me once. Feeling him again might finish the job.
I pull back. It takes everything I’ve got.
His hand falls from my face the moment I decide, as if he had sensed the decision before I made it.
His eyes open. Storm gray. Darker now, full of heat, hunger, guilt, and something so raw and unguarded that I have to look away.
I take another step back and build the wall myself, brick by brick, because nobody else is going to do it for me.
“That can’t happen,” I say, my voice steady.
He nods once. “Yeah.”
That almost makes me angry.
The old Zane would have smirked, said something filthy and perfectly aimed. Something meant to make my knees weak and my hand itch, turning the whole moment into a dare just to watch me rise to it.
This Zane just stands there, takes it, nods, and doesn’t fight me over a single syllable.
I don’t know what to do with a man who no longer throws every truth back at me with interest. It’s somehow harder. Harder than the smirk would have been.
“I understand why you felt you had to do it,” I say.
His eyes flicker. I hate that I can see how badly he needed to hear it. I hate that part of me wanted to give it to him anyway.
“But I am still mad at you, Zane.”
“I know.”
“No.” The word comes out sharp and final, and there she is. That girl. The one with teeth. The one I thought I had lost along the way. “You hurt me.”
“I know.”
“And I get it now. I get that in your fucked-up martyr brain, you thought you were giving me a life. But you didn’t give me anything, Zane. You took the choice from me. You took what happened between us and made it ugly because you decided I would survive hate better than hope.”
I step closer, enough to make the words land. “Just so you know, I survived both.”
His eyes close for half a second.
When they open, the pain in them nearly cracks the wall I almost finished building. I register it in my chest like a fault line. That specific tenderness for someone who has hurt you, a tenderness that never fully goes away no matter how much you need it to.
I turn away before it can do anything more.
Because both truths are warring inside me right now, their knives drawn, and I don’t know which one will bleed first. I am still mad at him.
I am still so completely, stupidly in love with him.
Those two things occupy the same space, tearing at each other, and I can’t afford to stand in front of him when one of them wins.
“I have to go,” I manage to say.
I reach the car door. My lips still burn from his mouth, and my hands are not entirely steady as I get in and pull the door shut.
Do not look at him. Do not fucking look at him.
I start the engine, my hands shaking as I shift into drive and pull out of the parking lot.
In the side mirror, Zane stands near the doorway of the workshop with the amber light spilling out behind him. He doesn’t move. He simply watches me leave, and the sight of him standing there alone in that light does something vicious to my chest.
He grows smaller in the mirror as I drive, and still he doesn’t move.
The first tear falls before I reach the corner.
I wipe it away hard and fast, furious at myself and it, but another follows before I finish wiping the first. Then another, until my vision blurs and I blink fast to clear them. I am not crashing my car over a man, especially this man.
My fingers lift to my mouth.
I run them slowly over my lips.
Big mistake. The kiss is still there. His mouth on mine. His hand at my jaw, warm and certain. The low sound he made when I leaned into him. The way he pulled back before he took too much.
I have loved him through everything. That is the ugliest truth of all. The one I have been stepping around for years, and it lands in the front seat of my car on a Friday night, with shaking hands, blurred eyes, and nowhere left to put it.
I buried him beneath Damien’s clean sheets, polished surfaces, and a life that never fit properly, no matter how many ways I tried to arrange myself within it.