17. Drowning Again #2
The way he said it made me feel seen, understood in a way that Elias never allowed himself to. Victor reached out, his fingers briefly touching my wrist.
“She would have wanted you to be happy,” he said quietly. “Not trapped in some half-life, waiting for a man too guilty to claim what he wants.”
Anna appeared beside us, refilling drinks that didn't need refilling. “Everything okay over here?”
“Fine,” I said quickly, though my voice came out rough.
Victor stood, placing money on the bar. “You don't have to keep punishing yourself for wanting to be loved properly,” he said, his voice low enough that only I could hear. “She wouldn't have wanted that for you.”
“I should go,” I said, but I didn't move.
“Should you?” Victor's smile was knowing, but there was something else in it now—something hungry that had nothing to do with me and everything to do with the ghost he saw when he looked at my face. “Or should you stop letting his guilt rob you of what you deserve?”
The way he was looking at me—like I was precious, like I was her—made something dangerous flutter in my chest. It was everything Elias had denied me, everything I'd been craving in the careful spaces between us.
“Come with me,” I said suddenly, the words tumbling out before I could think them through.
Victor's smile widened, and for a moment his eyes went distant, almost reverent. “I thought you'd never ask.”
But as we stood to leave, as Victor placed another oversized bill on the bar and guided me toward the door with a hand that lingered too long at the small of my back, I caught Anna's eye in the mirror behind the bottles.
Her expression was pure alarm, her mouth opening like she wanted to call out, to stop me from making what she clearly saw as a terrible mistake.
I looked away before she could speak, before her concern could penetrate the haze of alcohol and the desperate need to connect with someone who understood what losing her had meant.
Victor held the door open for me, ever the gentleman, but there was something in his smile that made me think of collectors examining rare specimens.
Door shut. Latch clicked. The apartment inhaled.
Victor reached for me like he’d been holding himself back and had finally decided restraint was boring.
His mouth hit mine—expensive whiskey, wintergreen, something clean—and I kissed him back like breath was optional.
It wasn’t gentle. It wasn’t careful. It was a decision, the kind you make at the edge of a cliff with the ocean thundering below and your bones already braced for impact.
My back met the door. His hand came up to my jaw, thumb dragging along the hinge like he was measuring it for purchase.
I opened for him on instinct, on hunger, on that awful animal urge to be taken apart by something that would finally drown out the noise in my head.
He kissed like a man who’d studied power until he could reproduce it with his mouth.
When he broke away, he was smiling—ruined and pleased, a little startled by his own satisfaction. “I never thought kissing a guy would be that good,” he said lightly, as if confessing a harmless indulgence.
“Sure,” I said, breathless and wrecked, the word clawing out of me as a laugh.
That earned me another kiss—brief, taunting, a promise and a dare. Then he stepped back, smoothing a palm down my chest like wiping prints from a surface. “Make us a drink,” he murmured. “I want to see where you live.”
I pushed off the door and moved toward the kitchenette, fingers clumsy around bottles I knew by weight. Ice cracked. The first pour was generous. So was the second. Behind me, the apartment shifted around Victor like a room straightening to impress a guest.
He didn’t wander. He surveyed.
He glanced at the framed photograph on the bookshelf—the one my mother had taken at the pier when I was fifteen, hair too long, sun too bright. He didn’t touch it. He looked, cataloging. The way his eyes moved felt like a ledger being updated.
Roxie ghosted across the hall, tail up like a question mark. She stopped, took Victor’s measure, then disappeared beneath the sofa with a quiet huff. Smart cat.
“Small,” he said, not unkindly. “Efficient.” His tone implied he’d memorized where I kept the spare key, the way the front window stuck half an inch from the top, the cheap lock on the back door that needed to be jiggled left before it turned.
He looked at my walls like a locksmith, a realtor, and a thief, all in one.
I handed him a glass. He didn’t take it immediately; he let our fingers touch, hold, overlap.
His thumb pressed into my wrist, exactly over the beat.
“Faster,” he observed, as if we were discussing an engine.
Then he accepted the drink, clinked it once against mine without looking away, and took a slow, appreciative sip.
“Stronger than I expected,” he said.
“Like me,” I shot back, sarcasm snapping up to hide the way my mouth had gone dry. It landed and he smiled, delighted like I’d performed a trick for him.
“Like you,” he agreed, voice lowered. “Full of fire. No wonder he hovers. He’s afraid to be burned.”
I didn’t ask who he meant. The name pressed against the back of my teeth anyway, a habit I couldn’t break. Elias. The room tilted almost imperceptibly, and I took another swallow to level it.
Victor set his glass on the table without a coaster. A tiny, deliberate disrespect. My chest tightened. He noticed—of course he noticed—and smiled around the rim of his next sip.
“I wasn’t lying,” he said conversationally. “I didn’t think I’d ever want this. Not… like that.” His knuckles skimmed my throat, just there, where the skin is thin and full of old stories. “Maybe it’s you.”
Maybe it was the line. Maybe it was the cologne. Maybe it was the way he kept his voice pitched like the world had narrowed to the exact square foot I occupied. I leaned back against the counter because my knees made an executive decision without me.
He came closer until the counter pressed cold into my spine and there was nowhere to go that wasn’t him.
He caged me with his arms, not touching yet, just containing , and it said more than hands.
“Tell me something true,” he murmured, as if he hadn’t already filleted me in a dozen polite sentences at the bar.
“Like what?”
“Like why your hands are shaking.” His gaze flicked to the subtle tremor I couldn’t quite will still. “Like why you keep a packed bag by the door.”
I glanced toward the canvas duffel half-hidden by the coat rack. I hadn’t meant for him to see that. I hadn’t meant for anyone to.
“Insurance,” I said.
“Against what?”
“Me.”
He laughed, low and pleased. “God, you are intoxicating.” Then he kissed me again and I forgot what we were lying about.
He didn’t rush. He managed the kiss like a campaign—pressure where it mattered, retreat where it would make me chase, a little mercy to make the next cruelty land.
I hated how good he was at it. I loved how good he was at it.
My fingers slid up under his jacket, found the deliberate cut of his suit, the ridiculous wealth stitched into every seam.
He made an appreciative noise into my mouth like I was something he’d earned.
“Straight,” I said against his lips, taunting, because I needed to put a crack somewhere in that composure.
He smiled against me, teeth grazing the softest skin at the corner of my mouth. “Labels are for lawn signs.”
I laughed, then swallowed the sound when his hand flattened on my sternum, not pushing me away. The possessiveness of it was a wire pulled tight through my lungs. He could feel the shiver I tried to kill. He rewarded it with a soft “Good,” like praise, like a leash slipping on.
“Drink,” he said, and reached past me for my glass, tipping it to my mouth with ritual slowness.
Whiskey slid over my tongue, down my throat, warmth chasing warmth.
His free hand mapped the line of my hip, thumb notching into the dip like he was installing himself in the architecture of my body.
He watched me drink the way some men watch a tide: for when it will turn.
He stepped back again, not far, picking up the sheet of music on the table—my mess of scratched notes, the melody I’d been ruining and resurrecting for weeks. “This one’s yours,” he said. Not a question. “What’s it called?”
“Working title?” I said, trying for flippant. “Mistakes I Make on Purpose.”
He laughed, genuine and bright, then folded the page back down with surgical care. “Play it for me sometime.”
“Now?” I asked, reckless.
He considered, then shook his head, reaching to take the glass from my hand and set it aside. “No. Not today. I want something simpler.”
“What’s simpler than music?”
“Obedience.”
The word landed in my stomach and detonated. I should have stopped. I should have thrown him out for the arrogance alone. Instead, my pulse climbed a rung higher like it wanted to meet his hand where it had returned to the base of my throat, thumb a suggestion over the place my heartbeat lived.
“You really think you can manage me?” I asked, voice rough.
“I don’t have to,” he said. “You asked me to come.”
Somewhere behind him the radiator ticked, an old building’s heartbeat. Outside, a car alarm coughed and gave up. In here, the world had narrowed to the stretch of air between his mouth and mine.
He kissed me again and the counter bit into my lower back as if to hold me open for it. His hands were everywhere and nowhere, greedy and restrained in the same breath. He catalogued my reactions with the same quiet focus he’d given my apartment, and I hated how easy I made his work.