Chapter 14 #3
“I keep seeing it,” she said quietly. “My place. That man with blood all over him.”
Dante turned his head toward her. She felt it more than saw it.
“You're here,” he said. “That's what matters.”
It should have been comforting. It wasn't.
Jessica rolled onto her back, staring at the ceiling. “I don't feel here. I feel like I left something behind and I don't know what it was.”
“Good,” he said, almost under his breath.
She turned her head. “Good?”
“That life wasn't yours. You were fitting yourself into something that didn't know what to do with you.”
“And you know what fits me?” she asked.
He didn't answer. The silence that followed was warm and close and full of everything they weren't saying, and Jessica was suddenly aware of exactly how thin her t-shirt was, and how little she was wearing beneath it, and how the mattress kept pulling them both toward the center like the bed itself had formed an opinion about the distance between them.
“It used to be me,” he whispered.
She turned onto her side, facing him. In the green wash of neon light, his face was all shadow and edge, his eyes fixed on hers. He wasn't hiding what was there anymore, or maybe he couldn't, not this close and not in the dark.
“Dante,” she said, softer now. She didn't know what she meant to say next.
He moved first. His hand came up slowly, giving her time to stop him, time she didn't take. His fingers brushed her hair back from her face, then her cheek, rough and warm and so familiar it made her chest ache.
Her breath caught. She should have pulled away. She leaned into his hand instead, and that was all it took.
He closed the distance in a single movement, his mouth finding hers with a force that wasn't gentle. It was need, stripped bare—thirteen years of it, compressed into the space between one breath and the next.
Jessica's hands came up to his shoulders, gripping, pulling him closer. His body shifted over hers, not fully, but enough that she felt the weight of him, the heat of him through the thin cotton between them.
His hand slid down her side, fingers curling at her waist and stilled. Just for a fraction of a second.
Then lower.
The shirt shifted under his touch, riding up as his palm found the curve of her hip, her skin, nothing else.
She felt the moment it registered for him.
His breath broke against her mouth, sharp, involuntary, and his hand tightened, instinctive, possessive, before he caught himself.
The discovery of what she wasn't wearing hit him like a physical thing.
She felt it move through his whole body, the sudden tension, the effort of not letting it take over.
Her fingers tightened in his shirt. “Dante—”
He pulled back just enough to look at her. His breathing was ragged, his control visible only because he'd stopped moving.
“Tell me to stop,” he said, his voice low and strained. “Because I'm about to not be able to.”
Jessica's pulse was hammering so hard she could feel it in her throat. Every part of her was pulling toward him. It was like gravity, like a feeling they'd been falling toward this moment since he'd walked into her bedroom and said her name.
She didn't tell him to stop.
Her hand slid from his shoulder to the back of his neck and pulled him down. For a moment he gave in completely, his mouth on hers, deeper, slower, his hand tightening on her bare hip like he was holding on to something he'd been reaching for in the dark for years.
Then he stopped.
Really stopped.
His forehead dropped to hers, his breath hot against her skin, and she felt the war in him, felt it in the tremor of his hand, in the rigid stillness of his body, in the way he was holding himself above her like the distance was the last thing keeping him intact.
“Not like this,” he said, barely audible.
Jessica's eyes opened, searching his face. “Why?”
“Because if it's tonight, it's because we're running.
Because we're scared. Because we're in a motel room with nowhere else to go and it's the only thing that makes the rest of it bearable.” His thumb moved once against her hip, a small, involuntary stroke that contradicted everything he was saying.
“And I'm not going to be something you regret when this is over.”
The words landed somewhere deep, in a place she hadn't expected him to reach.
“Dante—”
He pulled back. The space between them rushed in, cold and immediate and wrong.
He rolled onto his back, dragging a hand over his face. She watched his chest rise and fall, watched him fight to get his breathing under control.
“Get some sleep, Jess,” he said, quieter now. “We leave in a few hours.”
She didn't turn away. She stayed on her side, facing him, watching the outline of his profile in the dark.
After a while, his hand found hers between them. He didn't lace their fingers together or pull her closer. He just held on, loosely, like it was the one thing he'd allow himself.
Jessica closed her eyes.
She didn't sleep. And from the way his thumb moved absently against her knuckle in the dark, slow and steady and unconscious, neither did he.