Chapter 10 #2
I loved Zane when he was a cocky seventeen-year-old with dirty hands and a grin that made trouble feel not just inevitable but worth it.
I loved him when he stepped in front of those boys who would have taken more than I was willing to give and made it clear they were going to. I loved him when he broke me.
Even when I was certain the hate would finally win, I never stopped loving him. Not once, not for a single fucking second.
The realization does not come softly. It slams into me so hard that my foot eases off the gas without my permission.
The car slows and a horn blares from somewhere behind me.
“Fuck off,” I whisper, giving him the finger as he races around me.
I pull to the side of the road and wrap both hands tight around the wheel and force myself to breathe.
I will never love anyone the way I love him. Not some future man with clean hands and good shoes.
The thought should terrify me.
It does.
It absolutely does. But beneath the fear, rising through it like something that has been waiting a long time to reach the surface, something else arrives.
Anger.
Not at Zane this time. But at myself. At every version of me that decided that wanting less would hurt less. That choosing the safe and reasonable would make my life easier.
For fuck’s sake, I’ve been too small for too long and have never taken what I really wanted.
I stare through the windshield at the road ahead. Then I flick on the turn signal.
“You are being stupid,” I mutter to the version of me who spent all these years being sensible and ended up with nothing to show for it but a four-dollar cactus. “Reckless. But I don’t fucking care.”
I turn the car around.
My heart pounds harder with every street I retrace, every block bringing me back to where I have just come from.
By the time Rainer’s workshop comes back into view, I am half furious, half terrified, and entirely, completely out of my fucking mind.
Zane is exactly where I left him, standing in the open doorway of the workshop with the amber light at his back.
When I pull up, his body goes still.
I park crooked, at an angle that would give Cassie enough material to roast me for three solid weeks if she ever saw it, and I don’t care.
I get out and slam the door.
Zane doesn’t move. His eyes lock onto me the moment I appear, and they stay there, tracking me across the concrete.
The closer I get, the angrier I become.
He stands there, and all I want is to climb him, hit him, cry into his chest, and tell him he is still the biggest asshole I have ever met.
I stop in front of him.
“You,” I say, pointing directly at his chest, “are still the most emotionally constipated, self-sacrificing, cocky, martyr-complex-having asshole I have ever met in my life.”
For one full second, he only stares at me.
Then his mouth curves slowly. Dangerous in that specific way it has always been. That crooked smirk that I have spent the better part of a decade wanting to slap off his face and then kiss back onto it in the same breath.
My whole body lights up as if he flicked a switch.
God. I hate him.
My thighs tighten without my permission. Traitorous, treacherous body.
The smirk deepens because he sees it. Never once in my life have I managed to hide anything from this man, no matter how hard I try.
I reach out and take his hand before I can talk myself out of it. Before the sensible part of me, still somewhere back down the road, can catch up and intervene.
“I can be mad at you tomorrow,” I say.
“Sky.” His voice is low and careful.
“No.” I start walking, pulling him with me through the roller door and into the workshop. “Do not ruin this with your prison-guilt bullshit, or I swear to God I will change my mind purely out of spite, and we will both be miserable.”
A rough laugh bursts out of him. Low and entirely unguarded. It hits me somewhere low, warm, and deeply inconvenient.
I lead him back through the workshop, and he reaches back without breaking stride, hitting the button on the wall.
The roller door grinds shut behind us. My heart is beating so forcefully that I can sense it in my throat. Because I know where we are going. So does he.
The first step creaks under my foot. The sound drags up a memory so suddenly I nearly miss the next step entirely.
Me at eighteen, following him up these same stairs, my whole body full of nerves I was covering with sarcasm, my heart going twice as fast as I was willing to let on.
Him glancing back at me over his shoulder, eyes dark and mouth crooked, making some stupid joke because he couldn’t let me sleep in front of the library.
Now he follows me with his hand in mine—the air between us thickening with every step we take.
By the time we reach the top, my skin feels too tight for my body.
I stop in the doorway.
The room sits quiet and the ghosts of who we were are everywhere in it.
Every surface holds a memory I didn’t ask to carry and can’t seem to put down.
I can sense her in here, that eighteen-year-old girl, standing at the foot of that mattress with her heart going too fast and her mouth ready with something sharp in case she needed it.
Zane stands behind me. Close enough that the heat of him is solid against my back. That steady warmth my body has been reaching toward since the moment I first came here.
He doesn’t touch me. He just waits.
I release his hand and walk into the room.
He follows.
I make a decision somewhere between the doorway and the center of that small, memory-soaked space. I am not here for the ghost of us. I am not here to stand in the past and grieve it. I know exactly why I’m here and I am done pretending otherwise.
I turn around and notice his eyes are on me. Dark and entirely, helplessly honest.
“You are unfairly hot for someone I am still furious with,” I say.
His mouth curves at the corners. “I can work with furious.”
“And tomorrow,” I say, holding his gaze, “I am still going to be mad at you. That is not going to go away overnight.”
His smirk deepens into something more dangerous. “Then I’d better make tonight count.”
“You’d better.” I hold his gaze. “Kiss me, Rivera.”
I reach for his wrist and bring his hand up to my breast, holding it there.
The sound that tears out of him is immediate. Rough and starved in a way that sends heat flooding through me from the crown of my head to the soles of my feet. His hand cups me and his thumb drags slowly over my nipple through the fabric.
Pleasure sparks through me so sharp and sudden that my mouth falls open around a breath I cannot steady, slow, or make quiet.
He walks me back toward the mattress, his mouth finding mine again.
This kiss is different from the one outside.
That one was a collision. This one is intention.
His hands move to the buttons of my blouse, each one undone with a patience that is at complete odds with the tension in his jaw and the darkness in his eyes.
The blouse falls. His hands find my waist, then the clasp of my skirt, and when that pools to the floor too, he steps back.
He just looks at me.
I watch it happen to him, watch it move through his body.
His chest rises on an unsteady breath. His eyes move over me the way they always did, not fast, just taking their time with the unhurried reverence of a man who has thought about this moment and is in absolutely no rush now that it is here.
I see his throat move. I notice his hands clench at his sides, the knuckles whitening slightly with the effort of keeping them there when every line of his body tells me he wants them on me.
The sight of what I do to him sends heat flooding through me so fast that my knees weaken.
I have been looked at before.
I know the difference between a man seeing your body and a man seeing you.
Zane has always looked at me like I am the whole thing, not just the convenient parts, as if every inch of me is worth his full, unhurried attention.
I have never once found an adequate defense against it. To be honest, I have stopped looking for one.
“Lie down, Sky,” he says.
When I do, he reaches back and pulls his shirt over his head in one smooth motion.
He was beautiful before. That has always been the inconvenient truth about Zane Rivera.
But he was a boy before, restless and still becoming.
What stands in front of me now is something else entirely.
Muscle cut harder and carved deeper, the kind of body built from years of having nothing but time and the need to survive.
The tattoos I remember are still there—the ink I used to trace with my fingers in the dark—but there is more now, spreading across his ribs and climbing his left shoulder.
And beneath the ink, scars I was not there to see heal, pale lines crossing skin I knew before.
The sight of them does something complicated and painful to my chest even as the rest of me is on fire.
I reach for him before I can think about it.
My palms glide over his stomach, then his chest.
He goes still under my hands. His eyes close and the expression on his face is the most unguarded thing I have ever seen on this man, as if my touch hurts and heals at once and he cannot separate them.
His eyes open and the grin that follows is slow and filthy.
“Been thinking about your hands on me,” he says, his voice dropping low. “Dreamed about them enough that waking up was the cruelest part of every fucking morning.”
He leans forward, pushing me back down onto the bed. His mouth finds my collarbone, my sternum, moving down with unhurried intent. His hands slide my underwear down my legs, and then he settles between my thighs, looking up at me from there with those dark gray eyes.
“Seven fucking years,” he says, his breath warm against the inside of my thigh. His thumb parts me with a slow stroke that makes my hips jerk off the mattress.
“Seven fucking years I have been thinking about this pussy.” His eyes stay on mine. “Just so you know I’m going to take my fucking time.”