Chapter 14 #2
“Was it that bad that you had to leave and not speak to me for twelve years?” she asked, desperately needing to clear the air.
“Yes.”
Wow. That was so much worse than she’d expected. Tears began to fill her eyes, and she tried to escape, but he dropped his arms and blocked her path.
“Get out of my way,” she demanded. Her emotions were at a tipping point, and she needed desperately to get away from him before she lost all control and her eyes started leaking.
“No,” he refused.
“Yes.” She twisted her body and ducked in a sudden motion.
It nearly worked. She managed to slip past him, but she only made it two steps down the hall before his fingers wrapped around her upper arm, and she was spun around so fast it was a blur.
When she refocused her vision, she found her back flat against the wall, with one of Liam’s hands beside her shoulder and the other gripping her hip, keeping her securely in place.
“You’re not leaving like this.”
“Yes, I am.” She ducked her head, but his hand shifted lower on the wall. A single tear slid down her face as her hands fisted by her sides and she stared up at him. “I have been humiliated enough. Can I please go home?”
She hated begging, but at this point, she would do anything to get away from him and preferably never see him again.
He stared down at her, confusion clouding his eyes. “What? Why would you be… I fucked up. I should never have touched you. I’ve never forgiven myself for what I did that night.”
“You?” She couldn’t believe what she was hearing.
If she wasn’t staring at him, she would think he was joking or trying to make her feel better by saying it was him who messed up.
But she was looking at him, looking into his eyes, and she could see that he actually believed the bullshit coming out of his mouth.
“Have you…all these years? I kissed you. I crawled on your lap. I pulled down my dress. I dry-humped you until I came. You never even got off. How did you fuck up?”
“You were a kid. I shouldn’t have let that happen. I took advantage of you.”
“I was eighteen!” she reminded him. Loudly. “If anyone took advantage of anyone, it was me taking advantage of you. I was in love with you my entire life, and your mom just died.”
“You what?” His arms dropped to his sides, and he took a step back. His expression went blank. “You were in love with me? Is that…your whole life?”
Fuck. She hadn’t meant to blurt that out. In fact, she really wished she had a time machine to go back just, oh, thirty seconds and take it back. Should she lie? No. What was the point?
“I guess, yeah, sort of.” She shook her head. “I mean, I thought it was pretty obvious, but if you were really enough of a dumbass to carry around guilt for ‘taking advantage’ of me for all these years, then maybe you’re not as smart as I thought you were.”
His expression remained completely unreadable. She couldn’t tell what he was thinking. It was like a wall was up. A curtain had been drawn. His stare felt cold. Detached. She didn’t like it.
“Why did you hide when you saw me in the hospital?”
Fuck it. She figured in for a penny, in for a pound.
“I don’t know, maybe because, the last time I saw you, I fell asleep in your arms thinking that we were…
I mean …I didn’t think…but maybe…” She took a deep breath, trying to hold her emotional breakdown at bay.
No matter how difficult this was to get out, she had to say it.
“That I was special to you. But I woke up, and you were gone. And then I didn’t see you or talk to you for eleven, almost twelve years.
” A tear slid down her face, she quickly wiped it away and sniffed.
“It fucked me up for a long time. I thought that you regretted what happened with us so much that you left and never wanted to see m—”
“That’s not why—”
“I know. Now, I know that.” She sniffed and wiped another tear.
“But when I saw you walking down that hall in the hospital, I wasn’t the confident, kickass, take-no-prisoners, almost thirty-year-old Frankie standing before you now,” she said sarcastically.
“I was eighteen-year-old Frankie, who woke up in your bed alone and in one day lost the boy she’d loved her whole life, the one person in the world she felt safe with, and her best friend.
” More tears fell, but she didn’t wipe them away.
“Frankie—”
She lifted her hand, stopping him from speaking or moving. She wanted to get this all out. “I was embarrassed.”
“Embarrassed?” he repeated it as if it was a foreign word he’d never heard before.
“Yes, Liam, embarrassed. I got cheated on, that’s embarrassing.
Think about how that would go for me.” She lifted her hand and waved at him awkwardly.
“Hi, the last time I saw you, you were running as far away from me as you could after we spent the night together, and then you didn’t talk to me for over a decade.
Oh, how have I been? Well, let’s see, I was engaged to your brother, but he cheated on me.
With who? Just the hottest supermodel in the world.
” She sniffed and wiped her nose with the back of her hand.
Liam’s head dropped as he exhaled, and his shoulders deflated. “I’m sorry.”
“No!” Frankie pushed against his chest with both hands as hard as she could, he didn’t move. “You promised!”
“What?” He lifted his head. “What did I promise?”
“I told you that you couldn’t treat me any differently after I told you what I had to say.
” She hit his chest again, for no reason other than it just felt good to her.
He didn’t seem to notice her hands on his chest at all.
It didn’t even register as much as a fly annoying him.
“I don’t want your pity. I don’t want you to feel sorry for me. ”
“That’s why you made me promise not to treat you differently?”
“Yeah.” She was confused. “Why else would I say that?”
“I thought…” He lifted his hands, then shook his head and ran his hand through his hair as his head fell back.
When he looked at her again, the confusion in his eyes shifted slowly, almost imperceptibly at first, to something darker.
Frankie watched it creep in, watched the line of his jaw tense and his pupils dilate as if a wild animal had just caught the scent of its prey.
The air between them charged with a different energy, all the hurt and embarrassment from moments before combusting into a spark that traveled up her spine and radiated out to the tips of her fingers.
She’d seen that look on him before, it was the last night she climbed into his bedroom window.
She barely had time to think the thought before he said, "Fuck it," in a tone so raw and low it made her knees weak.
One second, she was standing alone, the next, his hands were in her hair, cradling her face with a shocking tenderness, his mouth descending on hers with an urgency that stopped time.
His lips were soft, yes, but that was the only gentle thing about the kiss.
Everything else about it was wild, desperate, and impossibly deep.
He didn’t kiss her, he devoured her. He made her feel small and powerful at the same time, the center of his universe and completely at his mercy.
Frankie gasped, and he took that as invitation enough to slide his tongue past her lips, the motion so confident and searching it felt like he’d already mapped her out in his mind and was just confirming reality against memory.
She expected heat and pressure, but nothing could have prepared her for how complete the sensation was, how every nerve in her body seemed to light up at once, how her pulse exploded in her ears, and how her legs turned to jelly.
She reached up without thinking, wrapping her arms around his neck, tangling her fingers in the hair at the nape of his neck.
Her hands fisted, and he growled, a guttural sound that vibrated from his chest into her own.
He pressed forward, pinning her firmly to the wall, and she arched up into him, needing the contact like she needed air.
The kiss changed gears then, turning softer and more exploratory, as if he wanted to memorize the shape and taste of her before he went back to conquering.
Frankie responded, matching his explorations with her own, tracing the seam of his lips, then the slick inner edge, memorizing him as he learned her.
For a minute, or maybe an hour, the world was nothing but the two of them floating in a cloud of sensation, the way his hands slid down her jaw to her neck, her collarbone, then clamped at her waist. The way she could feel, really feel, the evidence of his arousal pressed hot against her stomach.
She heard herself making sounds she’d never made before, small desperate noises that would have mortified her if she’d had access to higher brain function, but Liam didn’t seem bothered.
If anything, it only seemed to encourage him, his mouth moving to her jaw and then her throat, nipping and licking and kissing a rough path to the sensitive spot behind her ear.
She shuddered as the scruff on his jaw scraped against her skin, clinging to him tighter, her hands roaming now, greedy for more of him, more contact, more everything.
Frankie had been kissed by a lot of men, especially during her college years on her get-Liam-out-of-her-system mission, most of whom treated the act like a closing argument, with no jury selection, opening statements, presentation of evidence, or witness testimonies.
Liam kissed her as if he’d invented the concept for their mouths and was mastering it on the job.
He eased into the kiss, slower this time but no less intense, and she realized he was waiting for her to take the lead, to see what she wanted next.
She tasted regret and longing and something like relief in the way he moved—like he’d been holding himself back and had finally, finally gotten permission to let go.
Frankie’s mind went blank. No, not blank, it just condensed all the static and chaos into a single white-hot stream of need.
Years of wanting him, of dreaming about this, of thinking she’d never get to taste him again—all of it funneled into that dizzy, all-consuming kiss.
She was half-aware that she was trembling, her hands shaking as they slid across the broad planes of his shoulders, but she didn’t care. She couldn’t have stopped if she tried.
She dimly registered that she was still crying, but the tears had changed, they were warm and sweet and cathartic now, leaking down her cheeks and mixing with his lips.
The second he tasted them on her tongue, he pulled back a fraction to look at her, his thumb brushing away a stray drop with a tenderness that nearly undid her.
He pressed his forehead to hers, their breaths mingling, both of them panting as though they’d run a marathon.
“Sorry,” Liam gritted out, voice hoarse, as if he had just been woken from a particularly deep dream. He set her down and stepped back, rocking on his heels as he ran a hand through his hair, which promptly stuck up in four directions. “I didn’t mean to—”
Frankie’s laugh cut him off, but she sobered quickly. She licked her lips and breathed out words that, although they were true, she knew would drive him crazy: “Don’t you ever apologize for taking what’s yours.”
Liam closed his eyes for a brief second as his jaw twitched, when he opened them again, the look was back. She could see that he was working so hard not to touch her again, not to ravish her. The tortured pain in his gaze made her almost feel bad for teasing him. Almost.