Gabriella #2
But the anguish in his face extinguished her words, and she simply stared at him. “I never truly knew you, did I?” The admission of the question felt heavier than the tension in both their bodies. “What are we? What am I to you?”
“My everything.” The confession felt strained and Gabriella was not sure she believed him.
Mateo pressed his forehead to hers, eyes closing briefly, the warmth of his breath fanning across her lips as he forced his breathing under control.
The intimacy of it—forehead to forehead, breath to breath—was almost undoing in its simplicity.
“And I will never let that happen again. Do you understand me?”
She swallowed. “You can't promise me that.”
“I can promise this,” he said, pulling back enough to meet her eyes, his gaze absolute. “No one touches you again unless you say so. Ever.”
Something in his tone—the bedrock certainty of it, the complete absence of theater—made her believe him in a way that frightened her almost as much as it steadied her.
She nodded. “Alright, I will believe you in that … but Mateo, there’s more between us that needs to be figured out,” she said then sighed.
“Just not tonight. I am too tired for this.”
He helped her change into dry clothes after changing into fresh ones himself, turning his back when she asked, but staying close enough that she still felt his presence.
The heat of his nearness burned against her back as she slipped fabric over pebbled skin.
When she was done, he handed her a mug of water, guiding it to her lips when her hands trembled too badly to manage it alone.
“Drink,” he said.
She obeyed. The water was cool and clean, and she drank as if it were the first time in days. Once she’d drained the cup, she sat on the bed, the mattress shifting beneath her.
Only when her shaking slowed did he move beside her, his thigh brushing against hers, his hands settled behind him, his body angled towards her in that protective way he possessed—not crowding or demanding, just present.
She felt so small now, curled inward, bravado stripped away like paint from a peeling wall.
Is this who I am without my work? The thought arrived with a distinct cruelty. Just this? Just small and scared and reaching for the nearest warm thing?
“I thought I could handle it,” she whispered. Her paper-thin voice trembled, so quiet that she barely heard herself. “The attitude. The pretending. I didn't think—”
“You did handle it,” he said firmly. There was no softness in his tone, nothing that sounded like pity. “You survived. That matters.”
Tears welled again, hot and humiliating, and the frustration felt like sandpaper against her skin. “I was scared for my life. I should’ve fought harder. I should’ve been more alert. I’m a coward and an idiot.”
She felt him tense next to her. “That fear,” he said, his voice dropping to a low tone that resonated in her chest. “That fear is your body’s way of telling you it wants to live. And that's not a weakness.”
I know that. She did know it. She had sat across from her therapist enough times to have heard it in a dozen different forms, had nodded along, and filed it somewhere she could find it when she needed it.
But knowing a thing and feeling a thing occupied different countries entirely, and right now she was stranded somewhere between the two with no map.
After a long moment, she whispered, “You said I was yours.”
The words hung in the lantern-lit air between them, delicate and loaded. It was the kind of thing that couldn't be unsaid. The jungle outside pressed its humid breath against the walls. Somewhere in the camp, a bottle broke, and someone laughed.
Mateo stiffened, but he didn't pull away. Their bodies pressed against each other, the solid warmth of him seeping through the thin cotton of her borrowed clothes, and Gabriella felt her heart quicken.
“I meant that,” he said after a pause. He delivered his next words with slow and deliberate care, as if he were measuring each of them before speaking. “In that moment when I said you were mine … I meant it with everything I am, Gabriella.”
She tilted her head back to look at him. The lantern light caught the planes of his face—the shadow beneath his jaw, his split lip still swollen and bloody, his dark eyes that had been filled with murder a short time ago and were now filled with something else entirely. She asked, “And now?”
His thumb brushed beneath her eye, catching a tear she hadn't felt fall, the touch so reverent it nearly undid her completely. “Now I mean it even more.” He gave her a rueful smile before he murmured, “Get some sleep. I'll be right here.”
Gabriella shifted closer to him, the old mattress groaning beneath her, the rough blanket scratching against her newly warmed skin.
Her heart raced as if she were standing on a cliff, teetering on the edge.
She looked at him—really looked, the way a scientist looks when she finally stops being afraid of what the data might tell her—and made a decision.
I am so exhausted of fearing desire.
“And if I don't want to go to sleep?” she asked, her voice steady despite the pounding within her chest.
Mateo's body stilled. His lips parted, dark brown eyes searching her face with an intensity that made her breath catch, that made her want to look away and hold his gaze in equal measure. “Then why don’t you tell me what you want, Gabriella.”
You. The word was already there before she reached for it. Simple and terrifying and completely, irreversibly true.
“You,” she breathed. She was tired of denying herself. Tired of being too scared and too angry to reach for the things she wanted. If she was going to die in this jungle—and the possibility had stopped feeling abstract around the time a man had grabbed her ankle—she wanted this. She wanted him.
That one word ignited a fire between them.
Mateo leaned down, searing his lips to hers in a bruising kiss that left her unable to breathe, the warmth of his mouth a shock against her still-cool skin.
His hand came up to cradle her jaw, tilting her face towards his.
Her heart was a staccato of desire, sending waves of heat throughout her body until she felt like an inferno—all that cold fear transmuting into something molten and urgent, her blood running hot where moments ago it had been ice.
Oh God. The thought arrived distantly, somewhere behind the roar of sensation. So this is what it's supposed to feel like.
When he pulled away, dark eyes hungrily devouring hers, she heard a tremble in his voice. “Are you sure? Gabriella, if we start, I don't know if I can stop … and I don't want to hurt you.”
The question landed with a weight she felt in her chest. He was trembling—barely, the finest vibration running through the hands that framed her face—and somehow that small, human tell cracked her open more than anything else that had happened in the last twenty-four hours.
He's scared, too. But she knew he didn’t fear the men in the jungle or José or whatever may lie ahead of them in Panama. No, he was scared of this. Of her and of his feelings for her.
She reached up, placing her hands on each side of his face. His dark stubble left pricks of warmth against her palms, a pleasant abrasion she found herself pressing into. Her eyes met his and held.
“I am sure. I want this. I want you. If I am going to die—”
“I won’t let that happe—”
“Fine. Whatever happens in the near future …” She paused and took a deep breath. “I want to stop regretting missed opportunities, Mateo. I want to be with you. I want to open up to someone again. I want to trust someone again. And that someone is you.”
Tears pricked her eyes as she fought to keep the tremor from her hands. I love you, she wished desperately to say, the words so present they had a texture, a weight, a particular ache in the back of her throat. But they stayed lodged there, too enormous for the fragile architecture of this moment.
Instead, she asked, “Do you want to?”
Mateo shut his eyes. The pained expression that crossed his face was complex, filled with longing and fear. The lantern light moved across his features—shadow and gold, darkness and warmth—and she watched him breathe through it. One breath. Two.
“I've wanted you since that first night we lay out on the beach counting stars,” he said, his voice low and rough, stripped bare of pretense.
“I've wanted you since the moment you smiled after I saved that turtle from fishing wire.
I've wanted you ever since I saw you step into the conservatory, sunlight dancing through your hair.” He opened his eyes.
The darkness in them was complete. “So yes, Gabriella. I want you. I want everything you stand for and who you are. I am not worthy of you.”
Gabriella chuckled at that, the sound surprising her—rising up through all the fear and grief and want like a turtle breaching dark water. Her fingers slid to the crease of his neck, and she felt him shudder beneath her touch, running through him like a current finding ground.
I do this to him. The realization was devastating in the best possible way.
“So show me, Mateo. Worthy or not, I am choosing you.”
And like a storm crashing into the rocky cliffs, Mateo met her lips with the force of a raging tempest. His mouth claimed hers, devouring and consuming, his tongue finding hers with a skill that made her fingers curl into his shoulders.
He pulled her tongue into his mouth and sucked on it, and the sound she made was not one she recognized as her own.