14. Xander #3
“Iz lets me in. Iz talks to me like I’m a person, not a problem to solve. Iz kisses me in the daylight, Xander. In front of my parents. He doesn’t wait until two a.m. to show up because the dark is the only place he can be honest.”
“Penny, stop.”
“You want to know what Iz does that you don’t?
” She steps closer. Into my space. Her face tilted up, mascara-wrecked, eyes blazing.
“He takes his time. He goes slow. He asks if something feels good before he does it. He puts his hands on my face and looks at me—actually looks at me—before he kisses me. He doesn’t grab.
He doesn’t claim. He doesn’t use his hands like he’s trying to own something.
He touches me like I’m something worth being careful with. ”
Each sentence is a blade. Each one finding a different organ.
“And tonight.” Her voice drops. Cruel. Deliberate.
The particular cruelty that only comes from someone who loves you enough to know exactly where the knives go.
“Tonight, in this room. In that bed.” She points at the mattress.
“The same bed you keep laying me down on in the dark. Iz showed me what it means to be wanted by someone who isn’t afraid of wanting me.
He was slow, Xander. Patient. He asked before every single thing he did.
And when he touched me, I could feel the difference—between a man who wants me and a boy who wants to own me. ”
She steps closer. Her chest nearly touching mine. Her chin up. Defiant.
“You use protection as an excuse to keep me out. Because letting me in means being vulnerable. And vulnerability is the thing your father beat out of you. And instead of fighting that programming, you just… became him.”
The word “him.” Lucian. Spoken like a verdict.
Something in me breaks.
Not the careful, measured, program-trained restraint I’ve been building for weeks.
Not the voice in my head that says “one day at a time” and “the things you don’t do.
” All of it—gone. Overwritten. The animal takes over.
The green beast, unchained, roaring through my nervous system with a fury that is not anger but something more primal, more desperate, the particular detonation of a boy who has just been told he’s become his father by the one person whose opinion is the only one that matters.
I grab her. Both hands on her hips. Pull her into me so hard the air leaves both of us.
My mouth finds hers—not soft, not asking, not the version Gideon described four hours ago.
This is the closet. This is the alcove. This is the only language I know, the one my body speaks when the civilized part of my brain goes dark and what’s left is the thing underneath.
She doesn’t pull away. Her hands grip my shirt—fistfuls of cotton—and she’s pulling me closer, not pushing.
Her mouth opens under mine and the kiss is war.
Teeth and tongues and the taste of tears and fury and the chemistry of two people who have been trying to destroy each other and are now trying to consume each other and the line between the two has always been nonexistent.
I walk her backward. Her legs hit the bed. I don’t lower her—I push, and she falls back, and I follow, over her, between her, my hands on either side of her head, my mouth on her neck, her jaw, the spot below her ear that makes her arch.
Her hands are at my shirt. Not unbuttoning—ripping. The fabric tears and she doesn’t care, pulling it over my head, throwing it. Her nails dig into my back—not caressing, scoring. Lines of fire down my spine. The pain makes my vision spark.
“Iz takes his time?” My voice against her throat. The dark voice. The one from the closet. The one that lives in the room I’m not supposed to enter. “Iz goes slow?” My hand finds the hem of her t-shirt. Pushes it up. Not slow. Not patient. “Iz asks?”
“Xander—”
“I’m not Iz.” I pull the shirt over her head.
She lifts her arms to help—active, participating, her body making decisions her brain hasn’t caught up to.
“I will never be Iz. I will never be slow and patient and gentle and all the things you just listed. I will be rough and desperate and possessive and I will put my hands on you like you’re the only thing keeping me alive because you are.
You are the only thing keeping me alive, Penelope, and if that’s not enough—if you need the slow, kind version—then walk away right now because what I’m about to do is not kind. ”
She looks up at me. Chest heaving. Mascara destroyed. Hair spread across the pillow like ink. The friendship bracelet on her wrist catching the moonlight from the window.
She reaches for my waistband. Pulls. Not away. Toward.
The answer isn’t a word. It’s her hands on my body, pulling, demanding, matching my urgency with her own.
She is not the girl in the closet—passive, overwhelmed, taken.
She is an active participant in this destruction.
She is choosing the fire. She is reaching into the blaze with both hands and she is not flinching.
My mouth on her collarbone. Her nails in my hair. Clothes being shed—not removed, discarded. The violence of two people who are done with barriers and are eliminating them with the efficiency of demolition.
Her body underneath mine. The heat. The particular electricity that has been building between us since a closet in Bridgeport and has been denied and redirected and denied again and is now being released with the force of something that was never meant to be contained.
She wraps her legs around me. Pulls me closer. Her mouth at my ear. “Prove it.”
Two words. A dare. A permission. A challenge aimed at the core of everything I am—the boy who takes, the boy who claims, the boy who has something to prove because the girl he loves just told him another man does it better and the animal in his chest will not, cannot, will never let that stand.
I press my forehead to hers. Our breathing the same speed. The same desperation. Two people on the edge of something that will either save them or destroy them and choosing, together, to jump.
“Penny.” Her name. The prayer.
“Xander.” My name. The answer.
And in the dark, in her room, in the bed where everything began and almost ended—