Chapter 18 #2
The floor is cool under my legs, the steam wrapping around me, the shower still hissing somewhere just behind him.
Up here, standing over me in his sweats with his chest bare and bruised and his face still damp from me, he looks devastating.
Bigger somehow. More dangerous. More vulnerable.
My hands go to the waistband of his sweats, fingers trembling with what I’m about to see.
He doesn’t stop me.
He doesn’t move at all as I pull the waistband down slowly.
First the sharp V of his hips appears, then more skin, then the dark ink I’ve only ever glimpsed before. The hidden tattoo at his waist.
My breathing stalls.
It’s a moth.
Not abstract. Not decorative. A moth rendered in dark, delicate detail, wings spread over his lower hip, beautiful, private, and instantly, devastatingly familiar. My fingers go still on the fabric as my pulse turns to static in my ears.
No.
No.
Dragging the sweats lower by instinct, my eyes stay locked on the tattoo, the world narrowing until there is nothing in it but ink and memory. The shape. The wings. The unmistakable echo of another one.
Rose.
My moth.
Parting my mouth, my hands stop just at the base of him, frozen there, not because I don’t want more but because the realization hits me so hard it steals the ground out from under me. Looking up at him, he is already watching me, face unreadable except for the rawness underneath it.
“Y-you,” I whisper.
The word barely makes it out.
His throat moves, but, he doesn’t look away.
“The St. Augustine boy-”
Something in his expression shifts then, not denial, not surprise.
Surrender.
He exhales through his nose, slow and shaking. “I got my own Rose,” he says quietly, “to remember the only person who ever made me feel like I might be worth a damn.”
The bathroom goes silent inside me.
Not literally, the shower is still running, steam still filling the room, our breathing still ragged, but all of it drops behind the force of those words.
Staring at him from the floor, one hand stays curled in the waistband of his sweats, the other hovering uselessly at his hip near the moth. My heart pounds so hard it hurts.
The St. Augustine boy.
The one I thought I lost to time and all the wreckage in between.
The one who somehow became this man standing over me, bruised, bare, and shaking from what we just did.
“Silas,” I say, but his name comes out stunned, almost broken.
He reaches down then, not to stop me, not to pull away. His fingers brush my cheek with an almost unbearable gentleness as he gives me the smallest, saddest smile I’ve ever seen on his face.
Steam wraps around us in thick, white sheets, turning the bathroom into something unreal. The shower beats hard against tile, loud enough to swallow the sound of my breathing, though not loud enough to drown out the way my heart is trying to break through my ribs.
I’m still on my knees when I pull his sweats down farther.
This time I don’t rush past it. I can’t.
I stop.
My fingers stay curled in the damp waistband while I stare, heat blooming low in my stomach.
He’s bigger than I let myself imagine. Thick, heavy, flushed with want, the length of him standing hard under the steam.
For a long moment all I can do is look. My pulse stammers.
My mouth goes dry. The shower hisses behind him, water streaking over the tile.
He stands there bare and bruised, chest rising and falling as he watches my face change.
Feeling his gaze on me, I can’t stop staring.
The moth tattoo at his hip only makes it worse somehow.
That soft, private ink. That confession.
That history. All of it right there beside the hard, raw proof of what I do to him.
It hits all at once, the memory, the desire…
the shock, until my breath leaves me in a shallow little exhale I don’t mean to make.
His thumb rubs my cheek.
“Octavia,” he says quietly, strain in it now, a thread pulled too tight.
Blinking up at him, still kneeling, I hold his sweats, the expression on his face enough to make my stomach tighten even more. He looks wrecked by the way I’m looking at him, like my silence is touching him just as much as my hands have.
So I lean in, gently kissing the moth.
My lips press to the ink like I’m honoring something sacred, the reaction in him immediate. Catching his breath sharply, his fingers flex against my face, his stomach tightening under my mouth.
Then I kiss lower.
Not all at once. Not greedily. I let the moment drag, pressing my mouth to the hard line of his lower stomach, before moving just beside it, then finally to the thick length of him, tasting nothing but the heat of his skin and the steam collecting there.
The kiss is slow enough to feel private in a way that almost embarrasses me.
Hearing the sound that leaves him, low and rough, it goes straight through me.
His hand slides into my hair.
Not pushing. Just there. Holding, while shaking a little.
Kissing him again, more firmly this time, his other hand slams against the wet tile behind him, his head tipping back for a second. The sight of that, Silas trying and failing to hold himself together while I kneel in front of him, sends a fresh rush of heat through me.
Then he moves.
Fast.
He kicks the sweats the rest of the way off, shoving them aside, catching me under the arms before I can even brace.
In one swift motion he drags me up to standing, backing us both under the spray.
Warm water crashes over us instantly, soaking me, turning his dark hair nearly black as it slicks back from his face.
He doesn’t give me time to adjust. He’s already kissing me again, mouth hot and desperate under the water, hands roaming bare skin like he can’t decide where to touch first.
Feeling him against me now with nothing in the way, the full, hot weight of him presses to my stomach as he pins me lightly against the tile.
My breath catches hard enough that he feels it.
One of his hands slides down my spine, fingers spreading at my hip as his mouth tears from mine, dragging along my jaw.
He is about to say something.
Or do something.
I don’t know which, because a knock cracks through the bathroom door.
It hits the room like a gunshot.
We both freeze.
The water keeps pouring over us. My hands are still on his shoulders. His body is still pressed hard against mine, slick with steam and heat. For one suspended second neither of us breathes.
Then the knock comes again, heavier this time.
“Octavia?”
Relief and panic hit at once.
Silas’s mouth twitches. Not a smile exactly. More the ghost of one, as if he can’t quite process the absurdity of this, his body pressed naked against mine in the shower, my legs still shaky, and my mother standing three feet away on the other side of the door.
“Just me, Mom,” I call.
I’m proud of how steady I sound because I am anything but steady.
I can feel him react to the lie. The barely contained laugh in his chest. The hot drag of him shifting once against my stomach as though even now, even interrupted, he cannot stop touching me completely.
“Is Silas asleep?”
My heart nearly stops.
“Yes, Mom,” I say quickly. “Leave him be.”
That does it.
Silas smirks, slow and wicked, forehead resting briefly against mine under the spray.
His eyes are dark with amusement, with want, with the kind of dangerous tenderness I don’t know what to do with.
The expression says he’s fully aware of the lie I just handed him.
Fully aware of what it means that I said it so fast.
Outside the bathroom, my mother sighs. “We just wanted to let you know we’re home. Your father and I are going to bed.”
“Okay,” I answer, softer now.
A pause. Then footsteps retreat down the hall.
We don’t move until the floorboards stop creaking.
The second the house settles back into quiet, Silas and I look at each other and laugh, silently at first, shoulders shaking, mouths pressed shut to keep the sound in.
Mine breaks first into a breathless, disbelieving huff.
His follows, more exhale than laughter, but it loosens something in the room all the same.
The tension doesn’t vanish.
It changes.
It becomes somehow more intimate in the aftermath of almost being discovered, of having to lie while he stood there hard and dripping against me.
“I should sneak back to my room,” I whisper.
The words sound thin compared to everything my body actually wants.
Silas’s expression shifts again at that.
The humor fades, leaving something quieter.
He leans in, pressing a kiss to my forehead, the softness of it nearly ruining me.
Water runs down over his lashes, over his bruised cheekbone, over the line of his throat.
His lips linger at my skin just long enough to make my chest ache.
“And Kadin?” I ask, voice barely above the spray. “What do we even do with that now?”
I’m fully aware, as I say it, that his cock is still rubbing slowly, helplessly against me every time either of us breathes. The intimacy of the question and the blunt, undeniable heat of his body feel almost cruel side by side.
His jaw tightens.
“If anyone finds out I touched you,” he says quietly, “they’ll send me back to St. Augustine.”
The words settle heavy between us.
“Or worse,” I whisper.
His eyes lift to mine. There’s no dramatics in his face. No exaggeration. Just hard truth.
Swallowing, the shower pounds on around us. My hands are still resting against his shoulders, sliding now and then from the water. I don’t move them.
“I don’t want this to stop,” I say.
That confession is smaller than the others, but somehow more frightening.
He closes his eyes for half a second, like it physically pains him to hear it.
“Neither do I,” he whispers.
The answer goes straight through me.
Then he opens his eyes again, and whatever softness had started to bloom there gets held carefully in check. Not extinguished.
Controlled.
“But tonight it has to.”
The words feel like a hand closing around my throat.
My fingers curl against his skin. “Silas-”
“The next time I touch you,” he says, voice low, “I’ll be sober.” His thumb brushes once over my hip, a movement so slight I almost miss it. “And you won’t spend a single second wondering what it means to me.”
I can’t breathe for a beat.
Because I believe him.
Because he means it.
He steps back then.
The loss of his body is immediate. Cold air hits wherever he was touching me.
Water keeps falling between us, but now it feels like a barrier instead of an excuse to stay close.
He pushes wet hair back from his face, reaching for a towel hanging near the sink, wrapping it low around his waist with a sharp, efficient movement that somehow only makes him look more appealing.
Bruised chest. Bare shoulders. Damp skin.
The moth at his hip vanishing beneath the white cotton.
He looks at me one last time.
Really looks.
My ruined tank top clings to the floor of the shower. My hair is soaked. My lips are swollen from his mouth. My whole body is still flushed from his hands, his tongue, the hard promise of what almost happened.
His gaze drags over me slowly.
“You look fucking beautiful,” he says.
That’s all he says before opening the bathroom door, leaving me standing under the spray with steam in my lungs and his restraint burning hotter than anything he could have done if he’d stayed.