23. Jasmine
JASMINE
Elias disappears back up the staircase. Sebastian and I go to the study.
He's not guessing. Elias had said. Dain has the real version. Your history. The gaps Sebastian filled. The reputation Owen left you with. He'll use it because it's true.
Now it's only us, and the network shining bright next to us.
Instead of sitting, I choose to go closer to Sebastian. Being near him used to steady me, but tonight, I feel as though I'm holding my breath.
"He turned my life into a weapon," I say. "Cyrus just picked up what was already lying around."
"That's who he is." Sebastian doesn't touch me.
"Do you? Because what scares me isn't Cyrus."
His throat works. "Yes."
The single word lands harder than a defense would.
"You usually have more than that."
"I've run out of excuses or where I explain and you forgive me." He finally looks at me. "I keep waiting to feel like I made the right choice. I didn't. I made the safe one."
I came armored for him to wrap the harm in love until it looked like a gift. He doesn't, and that's worse.
"Then tell me what you're actually afraid of," I say.
His long silence makes me think he won't tell me.
"Dain could take the network tomorrow and I'd rebuild it.
The council could vote me out. The secret could burn down on live television.
None of it empties me. Losing you does. You walked into my life like an angel and made everything else pointless, and I'm terrified of that.
I'd give anything to swear I won't take control again.
I don't think I get to promise that yet.
I haven't earned the right to be believed. "
The honesty is relieving, but it repairs nothing inside, and even though I haven't told him I love him. I know loving him as much as I do is being hollowed out by my mind warning me. I know the smart me would do the opposite of what I feel, but she isn't present tonight.
I close the distance and kiss him. I do it before he can find another sentence, because I am tired of loving someone across a table covered in everything we can't undo.
The kiss isn't soft. It's all the things I've been rationing: grief, fury, wanting.
He freezes for half a heartbeat — then his hands come up to my face, holding me like I might change my mind and he'd rather memorize me first.
"Jasmine." My name, against my mouth. More question than anything.
"Don't," I say. "Don't think of anything, just please. Tonight. We forget the outside world. One night."
"Okay."
He lowers himself into the deep leather chair, but this time he does not drag me into place. He waits, and that waiting does more to me than his strength ever has.
I step between his knees and climb onto him, one leg on either side of his hips.
My dress rides high, the cold of him pressing through the thin barrier between us.
His hands close around my waist and stop there, too careful, too aware of everything he has already taken without asking.
I take his wrists and set his palms where I want them.
"Here," I say.
The word changes him. His fingers press into my hips, not enough to hurt, but enough that it admits he wants to.
There is a whole animal inside him obeying by force alone.
I feel it in the faint tremor of his hands, in the way his mouth opens against my collarbone, he holds himself beneath me as if one wrong movement could ruin us beyond repair.
I unbutton his shirt slowly. He watches my face while I do it, not my hands, and that small discipline nearly breaks my heart. When my fingers touch his chest, his eyes close for a second. One second. A crack in the marble. A glimpse of the man underneath all that control.
I lower my mouth to his throat. His body answers before he does.
His grip tightens. His breath leaves him rough.
The hunger is there, but it is not only hunger for my skin, my mouth, my body.
It is worse than that. It is hunger for the future he may have already damaged past saving. I kiss him harder so I can forget.
His mouth takes mine, deep and unsteady, and the chair creaks beneath us as I move against him.
He lets me set the pace. That is the difference.
Not softness. Not restraint dressed up prettily.
Choice. Mine. The rhythm belongs to me until his control starts to fray and his hands become less careful, sliding up my back, pulling me closer, burying his face against my breasts like he is trying to breathe through me.
The network glows on the wall beside us.
That should ruin it. Instead, it makes everything sharper.
The machine that watched me, sorted me, hid pieces of my life, shines right there while I take what I want from him.
I move over him with the proof beside us.
I make him feel every second of me choosing him and every second of why it still is not enough.
His mouth closes over my nipple, and the pleasure cuts through me so suddenly my hand flies to the back of his head. He groans against me, and the sound travels straight down my spine. His hands grip my thighs now, guiding but not forcing, holding but not owning. The distinction is thin.
I reach between us and free him. The last of his restraint goes silent.
Waiting under his skin while I direct his cock inside me, slow enough that we both feel the cruelty of it.
His forehead drops against my chest. My body stretches around him, takes him, remembers him, and for one ruined second I ache to believe this can be simple. It is not simple.
I move. He lets me. The chair rocks under us, leather warm against my knees, light catching on his bare chest, his hands locked on my hips as if they are the only thing he has left.
Every time I sink down, his face changes.
Want. Grief. Devotion. Fear. Stripped naked before the rest of him ever was.
He does not use speed. He does not move us to the rug, the sofa, the wall. He stays and takes what I give him, and somehow that feels more dangerous than being lifted, pinned, consumed. This is not him overpowering the room. This is him surviving.
The pleasure builds slowly, then viciously.
My body tightens around him and his control splinters at the edges.
His hands pull me down harder. My nails bite into his shoulders.
His mouth finds my throat but never lets his teeth touch, and that, that ache, that refusal to become another thing to survive, tips me over.
I come with my face pressed into his hair, shaking enough that he has to hold me steady.
He follows a moment later, silent at first, then with a sound dragged out of somewhere old and locked.
His arms tighten around me once, almost too much, then loosen before I have to ask.
Even now, he is learning how not to keep me.
For a little while, neither of us moves.
I stay wrapped around him, his body still inside mine, his hand open against my back instead of closed around it.
The network keeps glowing. Nothing has been solved.
Nothing has been forgiven. My body feels claimed, but my life still does not.
And that is the difference I cannot ignore.
He looks where his cock is, still inside, admiring and swipes his thumb over my clit once more. The pulse pushing into him. He smiles from the wetness and the excitement and lifts his head.
His eyes are stripped bare. "I want forever of this with you. I don't know if I'm still allowed to want that."
"Then stop deciding what you're allowed," I say. "That's the whole thing, Sebastian. That's been the whole thing."
His breath shudders out. "How do I stop being afraid of losing you?"
"Being afraid is okay," I say, "you can still want me and be afraid. That's part of the excitement."
We lie there as our hearts slow. His hand tickling my spine. The question is already settling back over us, the one the sex didn't answer. He's holding me like he's won something. And I'm still the woman who had to learn the truth of her own life secondhand.
"Stay," he whispers. Not a command. Barely a request.
I long to. So badly that for a moment I imagine it — folding back into him, letting him talk me out of what I know. That's exactly why I can't.
"If I stay," I say slowly, "you'll learn the wrong thing."
He stops breathing. "What does that mean?"
I lift my head to see him. "That you can do what you have done.
Decide my life. Hide it. Manage it. And then hold me like this, and I'll come back.
It isn't good. I love you — I'm so far past pretending otherwise.
But I can feel myself disappearing inside loving you, one decision at a time, and if I stay I'll keep disappearing until there's nothing left in here that's mine. "
His arms tighten once, an instinct. Then, he goes loose without saying anything. That breaks me. He doesn't argue, doesn't try to promise. He just lets his hands fall open.
I climb off him on unsteady legs and take a shirt from his drawer. He watches me — memorizing — and doesn't move from the chair, doesn't say my name, doesn't make it harder.
At the door I stop. I don't turn around. "You didn't do this because you're a bad man," I say. "That's what makes it unbearable. You did it because you love me."
"Jasmine."
"Don't follow me," I say. "Please."
He doesn't.
I let myself out into the cold hall and walk away from the only person I've ever wanted this much, and I understand — with a clarity that feels like grief and freedom braided into one — that loving him was never the question. Keeping myself was. And the two have stopped fitting in the same room.
He loves me. I love him. It just isn't enough.