13. Emma #3
“I can’t stay away from you.” His forehead drops against mine, his breathing uneven, nothing like the control I spent ten years remembering him for.
“I leave before you’re even awake so I don’t have to look at you and want this.
I sit in that office until I can barely read the numbers on the page.
I schedule meetings I don’t need and take calls Christopher could handle in his sleep, and then I come home after your door’s already closed because I tell myself if I don’t see you, I’ll get this under control. ”
His eyes close for one second, like the next part costs him more than the rest combined.
“Then I spend the entire goddamn day thinking about coming home to you anyway.”
My throat tightens enough to hurt.
“Alex.”
“I hate it.”
He opens his eyes, and whatever softness had been living there a moment ago is already retreating behind something harder.
“I hate that I want you.”
The words land exactly where he means them to. I feel my face betray me, and he sees it happen, his jaw tightening, the movement close enough to regret that I could almost let myself believe it.
“I hate myself for wanting you,” he corrects, quieter this time. “That isn’t the same thing.”
Somehow it’s worse. Or better. I honestly can’t tell anymore, not with his hands still on me and his mouth an inch from mine and ten years of wanting this exact thing crowding out every rational thought I have left.
“I lie in bed and remember what you feel like,” he says. “I sit in meetings and think about the sound you make right before you come. I walk past a goddamn cinnamon roll in the break room and all I can think about is your hands.”
A broken laugh escapes me before I can stop it. His mouth twitches like he might let himself smile, then decides against it.
“I’ve spent ten years learning how to live without you,” he says. “And you walk back into my life, and clearly I learned nothing at all.”
My eyes are burning now, and I reach up to touch the scar through his eyebrow, the one I used to press my lips to before either of us knew what the word betrayal would come to mean between us.
“You think this is easy for me?” he asks.
“No.”
“Good.”
His gaze searches my face as if he’s looking for the seam where the lie starts.
“I hate when you look at me like I’m someone you don’t know.” I say.
“That’s rich.”
“I know.”
“You are someone I don’t know.” He tells me. “Even though my body tells me otherwise."
The truth of it hurts enough that I almost pull back. His hands stop me before I can, not with force, just with the simple fact of holding on.
“I know,” I whisper.
His stare hardens. “And every time I think I’m getting close to understanding you, I find another lie.”
I could tell him right now. The words rise so fast I can taste them before I’ve decided to speak.
There was a reason. I was protecting you. Your father died because the people I was running from wanted to hurt all of you. I loved you the entire time.
My mouth opens.
Mel’s voice comes back to me instead, steady and immovable. A few more days.
Alex watches whatever’s happening on my face with an intensity that makes me feel transparent.
“What?”
I shake my head. Coward, some voice inside me says, and I don’t argue with it. “I can’t.”
His hands drop away from me, and the loss of his heat hits my skin like a physical blow.
“Of course you can’t.”
“Alex—”
He steps back. I catch the front of his shirt in one fist before he can put more distance between us, and he looks down at my hand like he’s cataloging the fact that I reached for him at all.
“Don’t,” I say, and my voice comes out smaller than I want it to. “Don’t leave.”
His eyes close. There’s enough pain in his face in that one unguarded second that I nearly break the promise I made to Mel less than an hour ago. Instead, I pull him back between my knees, both hands sliding up to frame his jaw.
“For here,” I whisper.
His eyes open. “What?”
“Just here.” I slide my thumbs along his jaw. “For as long as this lasts, when we’re in this kitchen, or your bed, or mine, can we stop punishing each other?”
His face tightens. “I don’t know if I can do that.”
“Neither do I.” My thumb drags over the rough patch of stubble near his mouth. “No ten years standing in the middle like a wall neither of us can climb. Just you and me, for as long as it lasts.”
“That sounds dangerously like pretending.”
“Maybe it is.”
His thumb traces slow over my hip, right over the place his hand left a mark last night. “I don’t care.”
He stares at me for a beat too long, and then he kisses me again, and this kiss is different from the one at the door, slower, heavier with something that feels dangerously close to grief.
His hands cradle my face instead of gripping it, and my fingers slide beneath his collar to find the back of his neck while his mouth moves over mine like he intends for me to feel every single second of it.
He pulls back only far enough to breathe.
“This is insane.”
“Yes.”
“You’re still lying to me.”
My chest tightens hard enough to hurt. “Yes.”
His forehead drops against mine, and for a moment we just breathe the same air.
“I still don’t trust you.”
The words land somewhere under my ribs and stay there.
“I’m sorry.”
His mouth brushes mine, barely a kiss at all. “I still want you.”
My fingers twist into his shirt like I could hold the two of us together through fabric alone. “Please.”
“I hate that.”
He makes a rough sound that’s half laugh, half surrender, and then he kisses me again, and this time nothing else exists. Not because it disappears, but because for a little while we’ve both agreed not to look directly at it.
He carries me out of the kitchen with flour still drying on my hands and his shirt. Bee yowls behind us, offended at being abandoned mid-supervision.
“Bee,” I say into his shoulder.
“She’ll survive.”
Bee yowls louder, a sound of pure betrayal.
“Traitor,” I call back over his shoulder, and her offended cry follows us all the way down the hall.
Alex laughs. Actually laughs, low and real, a sound I feel in my chest before I fully register hearing it. I lift my head from his shoulder to look at him, and the laugh catches me so completely that I forget to breathe for a second.
He feels me go still. His smile fades. “What?”
“Nothing.”
“Belle.”
The name comes out soft. Private. Mine, the way it used to be before it became a weapon he used to remind me of everything I’d lost.
I touch his face. “I missed that sound.”
Something shifts behind his eyes, there and gone before I can study it. I don’t explain what I mean. I don’t have to. He already knows exactly what I’m talking about, and for once, he doesn’t punish me for saying it out loud.
This time neither of us rushes.
Maybe because the desperation had already broken something open in the kitchen. Maybe because we’ve given ourselves the smallest truce imaginable, and some part of both of us understands exactly how temporary it is.
Alex undresses me slowly, as though he’s trying to savor rather than conquer.
His fingers pausing over every mark he left on my skin the night before, as though he’s counting them, cataloging proof that I let him have this much of me.
His mouth follows the same path his hands take.
When he reaches the fading bruise near my hip, he lifts his head and looks at me from beneath dark lashes.
I already know what he’s thinking.
“That one was healing,” I tell him.
“I noticed.”
“You’re proud of yourself.”
“No.” His mouth touches it, soft and light, and my breath catches somewhere behind my ribs. “Maybe a little.”
I pull his hair in retaliation. He smiles against my skin, and there is the man buried underneath ten years of armor, close enough to touch and gone again before I can hold on to him. It makes my chest ache worse than his cruelty ever managed to.
I want his old devotion back so badly that I would crawl toward it on my knees.
That’s the humiliating truth sitting underneath every choice I’ve made since I walked into this penthouse.
I want Alex looking at me the way he used to, like loving me was the simplest thing he’d ever done, like there was no question of whether I’d still be there when he woke.
I can’t ask for that while I’m still keeping the largest truth of both our lives.
So I take what he offers instead. His mouth.
His hands, careful over my ribs where the bruises still ache, and then not careful at all everywhere else, like he’s relearning every inch of me by feel.
The way he says my name, my real name, when he loses whatever control he walked in here holding onto.
The way he stops the moment I tense, waits without a single word until I’m the one who pulls him back.
There’s nothing punishing in him tonight. When his hand slides up my thigh, it’s because he wants to touch me, not because he wants to remind me who’s allowed to. When I open for him, arching up into his palm with a sound I don’t try to hide, it’s because I want him just as badly.
His fingers find the ache between my thighs, and I forget every argument I had prepared for tomorrow. My hips lift into his hand on their own, my body answering him before my mind has finished deciding it should.
“Alex.” His name comes out wrecked, barely a word at all.
“I know,” he says against my throat, like he can hear everything I’m not saying underneath it. “I know, baby.”
The word undoes a knot in my chest I’ve spent years keeping stitched shut.
I drag his mouth back to mine because I need to feel him say it again without actually asking him to, and when he finally moves inside me, slow enough that I feel every single inch of the ten years between who we were and who we’ve become, I stop trying to hold anything back.