Chapter 4 #2
"I'm not your student. I'm not your employee. I'm not under your authority in any capacity." He steps around the desk. Closer. The air between us compresses. "And those boundaries you're reciting sound like they came from a policy handbook, not from you."
He's right. They do.
"What do you want me to say?" I whisper.
"I want you to say what you actually feel.
The way you do in your poems." He's close enough now that I have to tilt my head back to look at him.
Six foot three of coiled tension and steady hands and dark brown eyes that see everything I've ever tried to hide.
"Write it for seventeen thousand strangers but say it to me. Right now."
My hands are shaking. My whole body is vibrating at a frequency that feels like it might shatter something if I don't release it.
I look up at this man who reads my poetry at midnight and carries a hundred and fourteen deaths in his body and carved a chess queen in my image without either of us naming it.
"I'm terrified of you," I say. "Not because of what you've done.
Because of what you make me feel. Because the last time I let someone see me, really see me, he decided I was too much and left me standing in a white dress in front of everyone I've ever known.
And you see more of me than he ever did.
You read my poems and you understand them and you're standing in my classroom looking at me like I'm worth crossing an uncrossable distance for, and I don't know how to survive being wrong about that again. "
The words pour out of me the way poems do. Uncensored. Unpolished. True.
Marcel doesn't move for a long moment. His jaw works. The scar flexes. His hands, his impossibly steady hands, open and close at his sides.
Then he reaches up and takes my glasses off.
Carefully. The way he handles everything. One hand folding the earpieces, the other setting them on the desk beside the chess set. My vision goes slightly soft without them, which means his face is closer and warmer and less defined, and somehow that makes everything more intense, not less.
"You are not too much," he says. "You are exactly enough. And I would rather take a bullet than make you feel the way that man made you feel."
He cups my face with both hands.
His palms are warm. Calloused. They span from my jaw to my temples, and his thumbs trace the line of my cheekbones with a precision that makes me understand, viscerally, in my bones, what it means to be held by a man who knows exactly how much pressure to apply.
"Tell me to stop and I'll stop," he says. "But don't tell me you're too much. Not to me. Not ever."
I grab the front of his henley with both fists and pull him down.
The kiss is not gentle. It is not exploratory. It is not the cautious first brush of two people testing the waters. It is the detonation of three weeks of poems and proximity and the specific, devastating chemistry of two people who see each other too clearly and want each other anyway.
His mouth is firm and hot and he kisses with the same focused intensity he brings to everything else.
One hand slides from my face into my hair, gripping at the nape, tilting my head back so he can deepen the angle.
His other hand drops to my waist and pulls me against him and I feel the full length of his body pressed against mine, hard and warm and vibrating with the same frequency that's been building in me since the first time he walked into my classroom.
I open my mouth and he takes the invitation with a groan that vibrates against my lips. His tongue slides against mine and my knees buckle and his arm tightens around my waist, holding me up, holding me steady, the way he holds everything. Precisely. Completely. Without a single tremor.
I'm gripping his shirt so hard my knuckles ache. I can feel him against my stomach, thick and hard, and the knowledge that this man, this controlled, disciplined, impossibly restrained man, is hard for me makes a sound come out of my throat that I will never be able to take back.
He breaks the kiss. Presses his forehead against mine. His breathing is ragged, which might be the most intimate thing about this entire encounter, because Marcel Hale does not lose control of his breathing. He regulates it for a living. He regulates it to kill.
And I just took it from him.
"Thursday," he says against my mouth. "Your porch. Seven o'clock. Dinner."
"Thursday is today."
"Then tonight."
I nod. My lips brush his with the motion and we both inhale sharply.
He pulls back. Picks up my glasses. Opens them and slides them back onto my face with both hands, settling them onto my nose, tucking the earpieces behind my ears. The gesture is so tender, so careful, that my eyes burn.
"Tonight," I say.
He picks up the chess set. Walks to the door. Stops.
"Wear the green dress," he says without looking back.
Then he's gone.
I sink into my desk chair and press my shaking hands flat against the surface and try to remember how to breathe. My lips are swollen. My hair is tangled where his fingers gripped. My heart is slamming against my ribs like it's trying to break free and follow him out the door.
I open my laptop. The cursor blinks.
I don't write a poem.
For the first time in six years, I don't need to.
The words are still on my mouth.