24. Sage #2
“You’ve been watching me a lot, huh?”
He chews, wipes his mouth with a napkin. “That’s the job.”
“For now.” I lean against the counter. “Once you guys are sure I’m not going to run off and tell the world, you leave, right?”
Knox sets his fork down, pie half-eaten. He folds his hands and looks at me for a long time, weighing something. “Is that something you want?”
I flush. Shake my head. “I don’t know.”
He nods, and, for the first time, I see something like uncertainty in him. Like he’s not sure how to answer either, or if he even understands the question.
“Would that bother you?” I ask, pushing the moment forward. “If I wanted you to stay? All of you.”
He thinks about it. The pause stretches until I start to wish I could take the words back, make myself small and invisible.
Finally, he picks up his fork, slices a bite off the pie and holds it out. “No.”
I lean in and let him feed it to me, my eyes locked on his. It’s cold and tart against my tongue and I savor it, deliberately slow, closing my lips around the fork before letting it slide out. His gaze flicks to my mouth, holds for a fraction longer than casual.
“Good?” he asks, and his voice has dropped even lower.
“So good.” I let the syllables linger, unashamed.
Who even am I?
We stare at each other. A bright spike of adrenaline hits, but it’s not the oh-shit-run kind. It’s the thrill of knowing we’re both thinking about the line between threat and desire, and neither one of us cares if we cross it.
“Shift ends soon?” he asks, not even pretending it’s about a ride or safety.
“No, I’m on till close.”
“Break?”
I glance at the clock. “In about ten minutes.”
He stands, drops his money on the counter.
“I’ll be in the alley.” He lets his eyes drag down the length of me and back up to my eyes. “Maybe I’ll see you.” Then he’s out the door and I’m trying not to hyperventilate.
I make it through the next ten minutes the way you make it through the last mile of a long drive—eyes forward, hands moving, brain refusing to think about the destination. I cash out customers. I refill coffees. I drop a check at table four and smile at the lady when she compliments the pie.
Then Rosa jerks her thumb toward the back and says, “Go. Before you start vibrating through the floor.”
I blink at her. “Am I that obvious?”
She gives me a deadpan look. “Honey, if I held a tuning fork to you right now, I could set off a tsunami.”
I snort, wipe my hands on my apron one more time, and thank her. My pulse is already in my throat by the time I push through the back door.
The alley smells like fryer oil, wet cardboard, and cold ocean wind.
Knox is there exactly where he said he’d be—leaning against the brick wall, one boot braced behind him, arms folded over that massive chest like he’s got all the time in the world. The afternoon light catches the hard lines of him and makes him look even bigger somehow. Meaner. More unreal.
His eyes find mine immediately.
Everything in me tightens.
“Now what?” I blurt.
He smirks. “That would be up to you.”
“I . . .” I take a step closer. Stop. My heart hammers in my ears. “I don’t know what you mean.”
“Sure you do.”
“You asked me here,” I say, because if I don’t say something I’m going to combust right here between the grease bin and the back step.
Knox’s gaze drops to my mouth. “You could’ve said no.”
“I know.”
“And?”
“And I didn’t.”
His jaw flexes once. A tiny movement.
The alley goes still around us. A gull screams somewhere overhead.
Cars hiss past on the street out front. Behind me, the kitchen door thumps as Danny moves around inside, but it feels far away—another world entirely.
In this one, it’s just me and Knox and the foot of space neither of us is closing.
I take another step closer.
He doesn’t move. Doesn’t uncross his arms, doesn’t push off the wall, doesn’t close the last of the distance. He just watches me come, that mountain stillness wrapped around something I can feel humming underneath it, like standing too close to a struck bell.
I stop a foot away. Close enough to feel the heat coming off him. Close enough that he has to tip his chin down to keep my eyes.
“Do you want me?” I ask.
I expect a grunt. A deflection. That’s the job.
His eyes move over my face, slow, and when he answers it’s lower than I’ve ever heard him. “Yes.”
The word lands somewhere south of my navel and pulls tight.
“Then touch me.”
“No.”
My stomach drops—a clean, cold plunge—right up until he leans down, mouth at the shell of my ear, and the no turns out to have a second half.
“You want my hands on you, you put them there.” He straightens just enough to hold my eyes again, and there’s nothing soft in his now. “I don’t take what isn’t handed to me. So you decide. You move. I’ll meet you the second you do.” A beat. “But you come to me. Every time.”
It should make me feel powerful. It does. It also makes me want to scream, because he’s just handed me the whole thing and dared me to want it out loud.
So I test him.
I reach up and curl my fingers into the front of his shirt and pull, trying to drag him down to me—and he doesn’t move. Doesn’t bend an inch. I might as well be tugging on the brick. He just lets me haul at him, one eyebrow rising, the corner of his mouth tilting, immovable as a dropped anchor.
But under my knuckles his heart is going like something trying to get out.
He wants this. He wants it bad enough that holding still is costing him—I can feel the effort of it, the leash pulled tight—and he’s holding still anyway. Because making me close the distance is the entire point, and he will stand here all night sooner than rob me of it.
Fine.
If he wants me to take it, I’ll take it.
I let go of his shirt. Slide my hand up instead—over the wall of his chest, the corded muscle of his throat, the rough line of his jaw—until my palm is cupping the side of his face and his stubble bites into my skin.
He lets me. Lets me tilt his head exactly where I want it.
The most dangerous man I’ve ever stood next to, holding still under my hand like he’s been waiting his whole life to be moved by someone smaller than him.
“Knox,” I breathe.
“Yeah.”
“Kiss me.”