20. Tessa
20
TESSA
I didn’t know how else to ask it. Coming right out with a direct question seemed both stupidly silly but also most appropriate. I felt juvenile, like I was back in junior high and asking if a cute boy in class like liked me. As adults, these sorts of things were simplified and implied.
Romeo seemed to want me. I caught him watching me when he must have thought I wasn’t paying attention. I noticed how strained he was when I passed by too closely, daring to brush against him.
But everything was just so confusing. He made no moves. He didn’t ask me anything intimate or personal.
We’d fallen into a strictly platonic roommate situation that felt so damn wrong. Like we were both dismissing this undeniable magnetism that kept us loosely together.
“Am I interested in you?” Romeo asked, returning my question to me over the steam rising from the tub. “How can you even ask that?” The hint of amusement in his tone almost made me smile. He wasn’t mocking me but was incredulous that I posed that question to him.
I nodded, uncertain of speaking until I had his actual reply. All the pent-up tension and waiting had come—literally—to a boiling-over point as we sat in the hot tub together.
“I am. You’ve held my interest since the moment I saw you.”
I furrowed my brow, thrown off by that comment. The first time he saw me was when I was helpless and raped. It didn’t soothe me. If that first impression of my needing saving was the lasting one that he hinged his connection on, I had no hope.
“Oh.”
“What’s wrong, Tess?” he asked, quick to realize that I wasn’t pleased with his response.
“Um.” I cringed, hating that I’d said a single damn thing at all. I was an idiot to ever assume something more could happen between us. He was sweet and generous, but never intimate anymore.
Because I am bad in bed? I wasn’t sure why that worry stuck at the front of my mind, like that had to be the reason he didn’t want to sleep with me again. If it was good, or as pleasing as it had been for me, why wouldn’t he want me again? I was here, always available. He never left my side, not since the shooting at the cabin.
If I had any experience before him, I bet I would at least have some confidence and knowledge to know how I measured. He’d gotten off. That had to count for something. But his lack of interest counted for a lot more, too.
“I…” I shook my head, intimidated to speak up now. I’d only stick myself further into a hold of regret.
“What?”
“Are you interested in keeping me here because I’m a responsibility?”
He stared at me, his hard face blank and shadowed under the night sky.
“That since I have no one else and nowhere else to go, you’re obligated to take care of me and keep me here?” I licked my lips, finding more courage to get these thoughts off my chest. “That I’m a thing to take care of and make sure I stay unharmed?
“No.” He shook his head.
“You…” I sighed, pushed to reveal it all. “You had sex with me. But ever since, I’ve realized that you might not have wanted me at all. That you only went along with it because I was being needy and scared from my nightmares.”
“No. I want you, Tess.” He shifted in his seat in the hot tub. “I want you with every fucking breath I take.”
“Because you have to?”
“Fuck. No, Tess. No one determines what I have to want or not want.”
“But you’ve been so distant, and I don’t know what to think.”
“Think that I will be here to help you and take care of you.”
Just not like that?
He didn’t miss my instant wince. “I want you, Tessa, but I do not want to push you or pressure you.”
Oh, my God. They were right. Nina and Eva said this might be the case, that Romeo didn’t want to put pressure on me.
“You’re still getting over the shock of what happened. Trauma isn’t something that can just be swept away or dismissed. Yes, I want you, so fucking much it hurts, but I refuse to put you in a position that will make anything worse, in a position that will hinder how you can get through the trauma you suffered.”
I nodded, both hating that he had to have that consideration and that I was ever raped, but also that he’d taken it to such an extreme of giving me too much space. Nothing about how we met was conventional, and I was starting to realize that whatever—if anything—we built going forward wouldn’t be conventional, either.
“Does that make sense?”
“It does. But I don’t want you to hold me at arm’s length.” I stared at him through the haze of the rising steam and contemplated how to tell him that I wanted him to hold me close. “When I asked you to hold me, that… that helped a lot.”
He sighed, dipping his chin to his chest for a moment. When he looked back up at me, I hated the guilt swarming in his eyes.
“That’s my fault, Tess. I’m sorry that I’ve kept my distance, but it’s something I am still trying to work on. This guilt.”
“Guilt?” I shook my head, confused. “Guilt about what?”
“About many things. That I was the one who survived a fight when other Constella brothers died. That I failed to protect those men. It’s fucking me up to realize how close I’d come to almost losing you and how I nearly failed at protecting you at that cabin.”
This poor, tortured man. He was so serious, and like I’d suspected for a while now, he kept so much—too much—on his shoulders.
“But you didn’t fail me. Not at all.” I let loose an incredulous laugh. “I don’t see how you ever can. You’ve been nothing but good and generous, so protective of me.”
More than I probably deserve. In a fleeting moment of annoyance, I felt so greedy and self-centered. That every moment that I whined about him not wanting me, I was ungrateful for the security he so freely offered me without any expectations in return.
“If those men had come a moment sooner?—”
“No.” I shook my head. “We’re not playing with what-if s. Anything can happen, Romeo. Anywhere and anyhow. You can’t predict the future. You can’t hold yourself accountable for everything that could go wrong.”
Is that how he lives?
“Or is that part of the job description of being a Mafia prince? Expected to be in control, all the time?”
He looked at me so deeply, I wondered what was going through his mind. “I do like being in control.”
“And when you’re not, it’s not easy to compromise?”
He shrugged his uninjured shoulder. “In psychobabble, that’s probably a big part of it.”
It seemed that he was summarizing a hell of a lot into one statement. How long will you beat yourself up over this guilt for these things that you can’t control?
We both had issues. Him and his overprotectiveness and wanting to be in control. This guilt about failing. Then me with my tendency to shrink inside and manage the trauma of what those men did to me, rendering me a burden to be responsible for. I wanted him to see me as a desirable woman just for the sake of wanting me , who I was as a person, not a thing to handle or secure.
“Is there any chance you can set aside your guilt for me?”
My heart raced at the idea of showing him what I wanted. Excited and giddy, I debated acting on my desire, to show him who I was as a woman, not a responsibility to provide for, an aroused individual who refused to surrender to the fear of rejection.
He dragged his hot stare over me slowly, taking in the flesh that was bare above the water. His attention felt like a molten caress, and I needed to feel it everywhere.
“Any way you can focus on me and what we can have together?”
These words were foreign and risky on my tongue, but I didn’t stop there. Standing in the middle of the hot tub, I rose out of the water. Rivulets of heated liquid streamed over me and left my skin chilled. When I untied my bikini top that I’d borrowed from Nina, my skin reacted with a spread of goosebumps.
“I can.” His voice was husky and deep, full of need as he traced his gaze from my nipples pointing at him, up to my face. Holding his good arm out, he beckoned me to come closer. “Is that what you want?”
“I want you, Romeo. I’ve spent too many days and nights wondering why I was alone in this attraction?—”
“You’re not,” he vowed as he tugged me the rest of the way until I fell in his lap. His erection thrust up at me, but I didn’t have time to say anything. He slammed his lips to mine, kissing me hard and fast. “Not alone, Tessa. You never were.”
He didn’t make another move to kiss me, staring at me with such longing and impatience. But not budging.
“Then show me.” I turned to straddle him, biting my lip at the pressure of his dick between my legs. “Show me that I’m not alone. That you want me too.”
He opened his mouth to say something, but instead, he kissed me hard. For several long, torrid moments of his lips pressing against mine, I wondered if it was finally happening, that since I tried to speak with him directly, it opened the floodgates of truth. That he’d show me now how he desired me.
Or not.
His hands remained on the edge of the hot tub. His tongue dueled with mine, but only after I gestured that I wanted more. While he kissed me back and didn’t stop me from grinding against his erection trapped in his shorts, he didn’t seem like an eager or active participant.
“Romeo.” I huffed, peeved and frustrated. “I don’t understand. You say you want me, but you don’t act like it.”
He thrust his hips up. “I don’t?”
I refused to be mocked. “You won’t touch me. Or act… interested.”
“I am, Tess. I am. But…” He looked away.
I framed his face until his eyes were locked on mine again. “But what? Tell me. You know I don’t have experience. Explain to me why I should believe you when you say you’re interested but act so… passive.”
“I’m not a good man, Tess.”
I rolled my eyes. “You are. To me. And that’s all that matters.” Yes, he killed people, but I was starting to understand that those murders were a matter of the ends justifying the means.
“I am a bad man.”
I never hated my mother more. She called him that, and while I refused to think that was the first time he’d faced that criticism or judgment, it hit deep, somehow.
“And I am a hard man.”
I furrowed my brow at him, trying to understand what that meant.
“I already explained that I prefer to have control. To be in control.”
I dropped my arm. “Then take it.”
“I don’t do things like this. Light and soft and sweet.”
I shivered under the intensity of his stare. “What do you mean?”
“I like it hard, Tess. Harder than what we did before.”
Wicked fantasies filled my mind, but I couldn’t lose the grip of confusion. Of feeling ignorant.
“Show me.” I tipped my chin up, knowing I would meet him in the middle however he wanted me to. “Show me what you want, then.”