11. Chapter 11 #2
That does something worse to me than if he’d said he wanted me, because want is one kind of risk but being necessary is another.
He looks down at the chair back under his hand, thumb dragging once over the worn edge of the wood. When he looks back up, there’s nothing easy in his face at all.
“I should’ve kept my distance,” he says. “I didn’t. And I can’t seem to start now.”
Something in me gives at that, like a knot pulling loose all at once in a place I had been holding too tight.
None of this gets easier because he said it.
Morning is still coming, and with it the ranch, the staff, and every reason this should scare me more than it does.
But he’s still standing there with all the polish stripped off him, telling me the truth in a voice that sounds like it cost him something to get there, and I am suddenly too tired to keep pretending I am the only one in this kitchen losing ground.
I set the water bottle on the counter. The sound is small, but it seems to travel through the room anyway.
Rebel’s eyes drop to it, then come back to me, and the look of it goes through me hot and unsteady. The kitchen feels barer than it did a second ago, like everything useful has been pushed to the edges and what is left is only him, only me, and the fact that neither of us is backing away.
“You make it sound like I’m the only problem here,” I say.
His eyes stay on mine. “You aren’t.”
“Good.” My voice comes out quieter than I intended. “I’d hate to be carrying this whole disaster by myself.”
I see the exact second he stops trying to talk himself into restraint and starts failing at it openly.
He comes toward me slowly enough that I could stop him if I wanted to. That part matters. He leaves me every inch of space to say no, to step back, to make this into something recoverable.
I don’t do any of those things.
When he reaches me, his hand settles at my waist first, warm and careful and somehow worse than if he’d just grabbed me. Like he’s still asking even now. Like he’s trying to hold on to the last decent version of himself while he does it.
I slide my hand into the front of his henley and feel the heat of him through the fabric. His breath catches. Mine does too.
“Tell me to stop,” he says.
I look at him ... at the tired eyes, the mouth that has spent days saying practical things in that controlled voice, the man who keeps trying to step back and keeps ending up right here anyway ... and what comes out is, “You won’t like what I say next.”
One corner of his mouth shifts, wrecked already. “That bad?”
“Worse.”
Then I kiss him.
It lands with the full weight of the last week behind it, carrying the late-night barn checks, the truck, the motel hallway, and every small moment where he kept choosing me in ways that should have made this easier to deny and only made it harder to resist. He makes a rough sound low in his chest and kisses me back like control has finally lost its grip by degrees instead of all at once.
His mouth finds my neck, teeth grazing the tendon, and my head falls back. His hands slide under my flannel, pushing it up, and I raise my arms, let him strip it from me ... my breasts heavy in my worn cotton bra, my stomach soft, my body real and wanting.
"Beautiful," he gasps. His thumbs trace the lace edges of my bra, and my nipples tighten and ache for his mouth. He doesn't rush. He maps me like territory he’s considering claiming.
"Rebel." His name escapes as a whisper. "Please."
His eyes lift to mine as he hooks his fingers in my bra straps and pulls them down, baring my breasts before his mouth closes over my nipple. I arch into him with a sound I don't recognize.
He sucks hard, and sensation rockets through me, landing heavy between my legs. My hands find his hair, silver-threaded and thick. He switched to the other breast, gentler now, teasing with his tongue, and I feel the wetness pooling in my underwear.
"Bed," he manages against my skin. "Need you on the bed."
We move in fragments, reluctant separation, hands finding each other again. The mattress dipps under my weight, and Rebel follows me down, kneeling between my legs. He looks at me ... really looks ... and I force my hands to stay at my sides.
"These need to go," he says, fingers finding the button of my jeans. I lift my hips, let him peel them down. I’m bare now, exposed, his gaze lingering where I’m wet and waiting.
"Fuck, Tana." The words come out strangled. "You're soaked for me."
I don't answer, couldn't answer. He leans forward and runs one finger through my folds, spreading upward until he finds that sensitive spot. His touch is light, teasing, and I press against his hand with a desperate cry.
"Easy," he murmurs, but there’s no mercy in his voice, only control. "Let me. I want to feel you come like this."
He settles into a rhythm, circling, pressing, until I’m panting, writhing, my hands fisting in the sheets. The sensation builds in waves, my orgasm approaching like a storm I can't outrun.
"Rebel ..." I gasp.
"Let go," he commands, his voice cracking slightly. "I've got you."
I shatter. The orgasm crashes through me in violent spasms, my back arches off the mattress. He keeps his fingers moving through it, drawing out every pulse, until I am limp and gasping.
He withdraws slowly, brings his fingers to his mouth, and watches my face as he tastes me. The gesture is obscene, intimate, and claiming.
"You're going to kill me," he says, and there is no humor in it.
I reach for him, my hands finding his belt, the button of his jeans. He lets me work, and then he is bare … his length heavy and hard against his stomach.
"Now," I whisper, and he moves over me, settling into the space I'd made for him.
He enters me slowly, inch by inch, and the stretch burns in that perfect way. He doesn't rush, watching my face, adjusting his angle until he finds the spot that makes my eyes flutter closed.
"There," he murmurs, and begins to move in earnest.
The rhythm he sets is deep, deliberate, each thrust sending sparks up my spine. I meet him, rising to each stroke. His hands find mine, fingers threading, pressing my palms into the mattress, and the shift drives him deeper.
"Look at me," he demands, and I force my eyes open, finding his face stripped of everything but need. "Stay with me. Don't hide from me."
I come with his name breaking across my lips, my body contracting around him in rhythmic pulses that draws out his own release. He groans, deep and guttural, and I feel him spill inside me, his hips stuttering until he collapses against me, his breath coming hard against my sweat ...dampened skin.
Afterward, the kitchen goes unnaturally still.
He stays close enough that the heat of him is still there, but the shape of the moment has changed.
The urgency has burned off, leaving something slower and harder to sit inside.
His hand remains low at my back. The refrigerator hum comes back first, then the wind at the window over the sink, then a soft creak somewhere down the hall as the house settles around us.
The hard part is the way he stays gentle after the heat burns off, his hand still resting low at my back like pulling away too fast would cheapen what just happened. I don’t want him to let go that fast, and that is its own kind of problem.
Rebel shifts first … just enough to put space where there wasn’t any. When I lift my head from his shoulder and look at him, I understand almost immediately why he moved.
Regret would be easier to deal with. I would know what to do with it. What’s on his face now is harder to sort. His mouth has gone still, and his eyes look crowded, like too much hit him at once.
When I straighten, his gaze drops to my mouth before he pulls it back. There’s no satisfaction in him, nothing smug or protected. He looks stripped down in a way that should make this easier.
It doesn’t.
“Rebel,” I say.
My voice sounds softer than I meant it to.
He says my name back like it drags on the way out. “Tana.”
Nothing more follows, but the silence around it thickens. He has the look of a man standing at the lip of a sentence he knows better than to finish.
The house shifts around us in small, ordinary sounds …
a pipe knocking in the wall, branches tapping on the window down the hall …
and none of it is enough to break what has settled in the kitchen.
Rebel drags a hand over the back of his neck, looks down for a beat, then meets my eyes again.
The strain is there, plain as ever, but so is the fact that he hasn’t tried to pull this back into something tidy or safer than it is.
That gets through me more than I want it to.
I take a step back just to make room for a full breath.
He doesn’t move in to close it. He doesn’t tell me to stay.
He only watches me, open in a way I haven’t seen from him before, and the look of it leaves me with the cold, certain feeling that this will not stay inside this kitchen no matter how hard we both pretend otherwise.
I pick up my bottle from the counter because my hands need something simple to do. “I should go,” I say.
He nods once, and even that seems to cost him. “Yeah.”
Neither of us moves right away.
When I finally turn and leave the kitchen, my pulse is still running too high. At the doorway I look back, maybe because I need proof that I didn’t imagine what was on his face a second ago.
Rebel’s still there with one hand braced on the counter. He lifts his head, and when his eyes meet mine across the dim kitchen, whatever he has been holding in check is visible now.
That is enough.
Whatever’s growing between us has moved past the point where either one of us can survive it by calling it physical and leaving it there.