CHAPTER 13 — DONT TOUCH ME IF YOU DONT BELIEVE IN ME #2
The words sucked the air from the room. Rain streaked down the windows, the city below stayed lit, the penthouse remained intact, but something between us stopped pretending at stability.
Noah had spoken the truth I'd been avoiding because it put me in an ugly place.
I wanted him. Wanted him with an insistence that no longer fit into jealousy, relapse, revenge, or anything purely physical.
And yet, when the conversation touched the past, I saw the boy who'd disappeared, the name tied to my family's fall, the pain Julian had taught me to aim at him.
It was like trying to touch fire and ice with the same hand.
“I can't stop wanting you,” I said, and the confession slipped out before I could armor it with arrogance.
“Even when I try to hate you. Even when I remember everything I think you did.
Even when you stand there looking at me like you've been carrying a sentence alone and waiting for me to figure it out.
I can't stop, and it makes me angry enough to say things I know will hurt.”
Noah closed his eyes for a second. When he opened them, there was desire there, yes, but also an exhaustion that made me want to break something outside of us, not inside.
I stepped closer. He didn't retreat. This time, I didn't touch—just asked with my body, slowly, leaving space.
Noah understood. He always understood too quickly.
“If this is to shut me up, I'm leaving,” he said.
“It's not.”
“If it's to prove I still have an effect on you, I'm leaving.”
“I don't need to prove it. You know.”
“If tomorrow you write this off as physical again, Damon, I'm not coming back to this room alone with you.”
The threat didn't sound empty. It wasn't a game. It was a boundary. And for the first time that night, I didn't want to push against one of his limits just to see how far it would bend. I wanted to deserve to stay within it.
“Then I won't call it that,” I replied. “I don't know what to call it, but I won't shrink it down to fit my fear.”
Noah's hand rose and touched my chest, bare.
Skin against skin. The contact was simple, almost still, yet more intimate than the many kisses I'd used to feel nothing at all.
He slid his fingers over the white tape, over the edge of the adhesive, over the place where my body needed support.
The touch was careful, but it wasn't clinical.
It was a choice. My breathing changed, and he didn't make fun of me. He just moved closer.
The kiss didn't begin with anger. It began with exhaustion and recognition, his mouth finding mine like we were both coming back from a war too brief to earn us any rest. I held the back of his neck with my good hand, not pulling.
Noah came on his own, his body pressing against mine—careful of my shoulder, but without that clinical caution that had kept me at a distance.
His tongue touched mine slowly, and my chest tightened because the absence of urgency said more than urgency ever could.
I led Noah to the couch—not as conquest, but as invitation.
He sat first and pulled me down with him, adjusting my arm so he wouldn't strain the injury, and this time I didn't turn his care into provocation.
I let it happen. Let it happen because it was Noah.
Let it happen because his body beneath my hands didn't feel like a prize or a punishment.
It felt like a truth I'd spent too long trying to interrogate instead of hear.
His shirt came off after I asked in a low voice, and my hand found the warm skin of his back with a reverence I'd never have admitted to anyone.
Noah breathed against my mouth, his fingers in my hair, on my chest, on the tape—always attentive, always present.
I touched him without hurry and without trying to win.
I discovered, in a way that shook me more than raw desire ever had, that there was another way of wanting: one that didn't need to take to be intense, one that didn't need to hurt to prove it existed.
“Damon,” Noah said, when my mouth traveled down his neck and my hand found his waist.
I stopped. Not because I wanted to, but because I'd promised without words that I would listen.
“Pain?” he asked, concern cutting through his own desire.
“No.”
“Truth?”
“Truth.”
He nodded, and that small show of trust made me kiss him again, harder.
We moved slowly at first, bodies finding positions that respected the injury while disrespecting all the distance we'd tried to impose.
Noah guided me when I wanted to speed up, and I let him.
In return, I touched him like someone apologizing in a language that didn't have enough words yet.
His mouth opened under mine, his knees pressed against my sides, his hands held my face when I tried to hide in his neck.
“Look at me,” he said, low. “Don't do this if you're thinking about something else.”
“I'm thinking about you.”
“About me or about what I did?”
The question hurt. I pressed my forehead to his, struggling to breathe—not because of the injury.
Because of the honesty he demanded at the worst possible moment.
His skin was warm under my hands, his body responded to mine, and still he wanted the part I'd denied him so many times: to be seen as whole, not as guilt I happened to desire.
“About you,” I replied. “About what I don't know. About what I want to know. But right now—you.”
Noah closed his eyes, and his body yielded a little more against mine.
From there, surrender stopped feeling like a fight.
We continued with our familiar intensity, but there was another layer underneath—slower, almost painful, made of care and skin and short words that didn't try to wound.
He said my name when the pleasure built, and I answered with his, without turning sound into possession.
The world shrank down to the couch, the warmth of the room, the rain on the glass, the way Noah trembled when I found the right rhythm, and the way I lost my breath when he touched me back.
When pleasure reached us, it didn't come as victory.
It came as a fall caught by four hands. Noah clung to me, careful not to hit my shoulder, yet with enough force to say he was there.
I felt my whole body tense, then release—my head against his, my hand gripping his waist, his name escaping before I could stop it.
He answered with a low, broken sound, and for a few seconds the past didn't disappear, but it lost the right to take up all the space.
Afterward, we stayed on the couch, half-covered by a blanket Noah pulled from the back with a tired laugh when he realized the whole room could see us in the window's reflection.
The comment I would have made died before it was born.
Instead, I stayed quiet, my fingers tracing slow paths down his back, feeling Noah's breathing settle into rhythm against my chest. He was still tense.
Not like before. Like someone who'd let his guard down just enough to remember the danger.
“You're going to ask again,” he said, his voice low against my skin.
“About what you found?”
“About Julian. About my father. About me.”
“Yes.”
He stayed quiet so long I thought he wouldn't answer. Then he lifted his face, and the city light caught his eyes in a way that made them look more tired than green. There was a decision there, almost formed, almost spoken. I felt my whole body go tense.
“If I tell it wrong, he destroys my father,” Noah said.
The sentence hit me without warning. It didn't ask.
It didn't explain. It just opened a door and showed me a corridor I didn't know existed.
He. Not my father. Not the university. He.
Julian. The certainty came from the way Noah avoided the name, as if saying it might summon another threat.
I felt something cold and heavy settle in my stomach—different from the old anger, more precise, newer.
“Noah,” I said, and this time my tone carried no accusation. “Who?”
He blinked, as if realizing too late what had slipped out. His body stiffened against mine. The hand resting near my waist curled slightly, and the open expression vanished beneath the mask I hated—because now I recognized it as defense, not indifference.
“I’m tired,” he said, sitting up slowly and pulling his shirt from the floor. “And you need ice before you sleep.”
“Don’t do this.”
“I shouldn’t have said anything.”
“But you did.”
Noah looked at me, and there was fear there.
Not fear of me. Maybe that’s what hit me hardest. Noah Bennett, who faced my cruelty, my body, my anger, and my home without flinching, was afraid of a slip of the tongue.
Of an unspoken name. Of a brother I’d spent years letting arrange the truth for me.
“Tomorrow,” he said, but the word sounded like retreat, not promise. “Tomorrow I’ll figure out how to explain without making everything worse.”
He went to the guest room before I could take his hand.
Not because I didn’t want to. Because, for the first time since Noah came back, I realized that holding on at the wrong moment might shatter something already cracked.
I stayed on the couch, the white tape half-loose on my shoulder, my skin still marked by him, my head replaying the phrase Noah had let slip like someone bleeding without realizing it.
If I tell it wrong, he destroys my father.
Julian knew. Julian threatened. Julian had been at the center of something I still didn’t understand, and Noah—the man I’d spent four years calling a traitor—had maybe only been the one left holding a bomb my family placed in his hands for too long.