Chapter 21 I Wanna Kiss the Stars #2
Following his train of thoughts right now was as maddening as trying to follow the train of thought of a toddler.
“Sometimes… sometimes I think about you and wonder if you’re only nice to me because your sister isn’t.”
“So this is about Monica?”
Maybe we were finally getting somewhere.
Ethan shook his head, pinching his fingers together over the straight bridge of his nose. “No, no! This is about you . You and Peter and how happy I am for the both of you.”
“Okay?”
“Exactly!” Ethan exploded. “It is okay. It’s more than okay! It’s fucking magnificent that you guys are together now. I couldn’t be happier for the two of you!”
“Okay, so what’s your problem then?” I asked, my voice rising with my frustrations.
I assumed Ethan had reached his peak. I assumed he’d gotten as angry and as belligerent as he was going to get. I had assumed wrong.
“My problem is that I’m not happy!” Ethan shouted, an ever-blazing fire breathing in his stare. “My problem is that I’m lying to myself constantly, telling myself that I’m happy when I’m fucking not.”
“Ethan—”
“My problem is that I haven’t been able to stop thinking about you since you got here.” My heart stilled. Ethan’s eyes sharpened on mine, and he stepped closer.
“My problem is that you’re so goddamn perfect that you’re ruining everything.”
Ethan continued towards me, determination in his calculated steps and sins running through his eyes. Sins that spoke directly to my wildly beating heart as Ethan got closer and shook my entire foundation.
He didn’t know what he was saying. He couldn’t have.
I tried feebly to put back that space between us that Ethan had taken away, stepping backwards until my heels hit a wall.
I had nowhere else to go. My back was against the wall both literally and figuratively, and Ethan took full advantage of that.
He towered closer, my head tipping back to keep an eye on him and those dark vices clouding his judgement.
Thoughts raced back and forth and around and around until they collapsed against my brain, overwhelmed to the point of mindlessness as Ethan closed in.
He came so close, the crisp aroma of rum on his breath made me lightheaded with just a simple whiff. Or maybe it was just Ethan and everything he was saying and how he was looking at me right now that made me feel drunk past the point of help.
Ethan embodied imposing as he loomed over me, his dark energy suffocating any surviving oxygen living between us until I was only breathing what came from him. We breathed each other’s air, living off of each other as Ethan raised his arms up over me and placed them against the wall.
He had trapped me using his own body and the provocative look charring his eyes over black, leveling them on mine.
“My problem,” Ethan said, his breath kissing my lips. “Is you.”
My ears heard him say it, but my brain refused to believe it. There was a misunderstanding snag somewhere along this conversation on my part. There just had to be.
“You don’t know what you’re saying,” I breathed.
“But I do.” Like he was trying to prove his point, he let the heat of his words wash across my lips, watching me grow heady on the aroma of him.
“I didn’t mean that I had to drink tonight because of you.” Ethan’s words fell from his lips slowly, like the most skillful seduction I’d ever been a part of. “I meant that I had to drink so I could stop thinking about you with him .”
“I hate thinking about you with him.” And I saw that hatred sew through his thick eyebrows, pulling them together as his gaze danced across my face. “I can’t stand the thought of him touching you or being the one to make you blush so easily like you do.”
The dance his gaze was doing across my face came to a standstill on my mouth.
My heart felt like it was trying to kill me by how hard and how violently it was thudding at that moment.
The pain centered in my chest only deepened as the hands that were once above my head on the wall, cupped the sides of my face.
It was then that Ethan brushed his thumb across the expanse of my bottom lip like he was touching gold… and any disbelief I held onto up until this point shattered .
“And I’ve never hated anything more than knowing he kissed these lips tonight.”
Oh my god.
Both my breathing and willpower stumbled as he thumbed my bottom lip again, caressing it with a tenderness I’d never felt from another person.
“I… hate myself for the thoughts that I have,” he whispered gently, not once stopping his attention to my lips. “I hate myself for what I’m thinking right now.”
“What are you thinking?” I asked, my voice a wisp of a breath, but I didn’t care. I wanted to know. I needed to know what he was thinking right now.
“I love that you want to know.” A cold front swept across my lips as Ethan removed his touch, and I felt like crying to have it back. Instead, the backs of his knuckles laid against my neck, dragging down my skin so slowly, so sweetly, my eyes nearly fell shut with the feeling.
“But you’d never look at me the same if I told you what I was thinking.”
“You don’t know that.” There’s a lot you don’t know.
Ethan surveyed every inch of my face, his perfect lips thinning as he shook his head.
“There’s no way you wouldn’t and… that’s not a risk I’m willing to take.”
The turmoil in his stare was devastating to witness, and I wished more than anything that I could absorb any hurt he was feeling into myself and take it on as my own.
Seeing and knowing he was in any degree of pain hurt my heart anyway, so why should both of us be in pain when I could take it all on for the both of us?
I’d gotten good at living with the pain over the last few months.
And now at the root of it, I knew I was owed his pain anyway because it was my fault.
His pain was my doing.
Somewhere—somehow—along the path we followed for our friendship, Ethan had caught the same virus that I had. Somehow, it happened to us both. The virus infected us, turning our minds and hearts sick while it ate away at us from the inside.
“What if I’m willing to take the risk for us?” I asked.
A cut of hot breath pushed between his lips, tasting of anguish as his head dropped low.
“Those are dangerous words.” Eyes so brilliant I could have dreamt them up latched onto mine as he looked back up and shook his head. “You have no idea what you’re asking for, Slim.”
Slim.
“Why do you call me that?”
The first time he called me Slim was the day at the lake. I hadn’t thought it meant anything more than a dumb nickname until now. Until he used it on the two occasions he’d gotten himself close enough to kiss me.
A sad humor tinted the edges of his stare as he leaned his head in close.
I sucked back a breath and held it in as Ethan rested his warm forehead against mine.
This couldn’t be real. This had to be some beautiful chaotic dream and not reality staring down at me through eyes that melted my heart with their aching honesty as he spoke.
“I’m relying heavily on the hope that you’ll never figure that out.”
“But why?”
Ethan hummed through a slight smile, shaking his head against mine. “No more questions. I’m having enough trouble answering them as it is without saying too much.”
“But—” I stuttered, hesitant to say the words waiting on my tongue. But what if I want you to say too much? What if his ‘too much’ was exactly what I wanted to hear?
Then again…
What if his ‘too much’ was exactly what I wanted to hear? Where did that leave us? Where did that leave Monica?
Ethan used my hesitation to push the moment along.
“ But what? Nothing I say tonight will matter in the morning, so why say it at all? They’re fucking useless words.
Anything I want to say tonight…” A breath hitched in my throat as his stare lowered to touch my lips. “Anything I want to do tonight…”
A dangerous part of myself stepped forward into the spotlight, holding my conscience by the neck as Ethan’s hands moved lower.
We both watched in total silence as his fingers traced down the top half of my body, traveling over my collarbone and quickening my breaths into labored pants.
His hands were detached from all logic and consequence, and so was my mind.
Lust took it hostage and whispered that nothing else mattered past the slow pace of his fingertips as they skimmed down the sides of my breasts.
He touched me as he never should have, and all I could do to help myself was gasp his name.
“ Ethan .” My voice was nearly a moan, and I couldn’t find a reason to care at that point.
The tenderness in his touch vanished as soon as his name from my lips corrupted the air between us.
The desire polluting his name was it for us and this gentle tease we’d been playing out.
His grip around my body tightened, squeezing so firmly that I gasped, and fought not to squirm against him as he ignited a fire through my veins that had a direct path to right between my legs.
It felt like he was touching all of me when, in reality, I knew he was only holding my waist. It didn’t matter.
Ethan’s one touch felt like it consumed my entire body, heart and soul included.
I was a hopeless fool to search out Ethan’s stare, because as I did, as I saw him and the dominance carving his features, I knew I was done for.
This was it. He was looking right through me, down to the shameful, deplorable person that I was inside as he saw how much I wanted him.
No matter the situation, no matter the sordid morality badge it slapped across my chest, I wanted Ethan and now he knew it.
Fingers buried the feeling of their touch through my blood, saturating the need felt in them to my bones.
“I’ve already touched you in so many ways that I shouldn’t have.” Between my legs ached as his voice became something primal, something punishing. Those eyes of his dropped to my lips for the umpteenth time tonight. “So what’s one more?”
Cheers of happiness met riots of protest inside my head, but I shushed it all to the back of my mind as he inched closer.
Ethan was going to kiss me.
And I was going to let him.
We’d deal with the consequences later, but tonight—right now—he was mine and I was his and there was no one left in between.
I’d hate myself tomorrow. Tonight, I’d love the man who hated himself for reasons I now understood.
His lips were so close and I wanted them so badly I could cry.
I had this feeling building inside of me, creating these wild expectations that kissing Ethan would be equivalent to touching the stars.
One brush of his lips against mine would be like plucking a radiant ball of fire from the sky and holding it all to myself for just one moment in time that would stick with me forever.
And tonight—tonight I wanted to kiss the stars.
The scar from his kiss would be permanent, but magnificent to behold.
As Ethan lingered in closer, I thought of nothing but him.
My mind was consumed with Ethan’s smile, his laugh, his thieving gaze that stole away a piece of my heart every time it met mine.
His eyes had a direct link to my heart, and as he came so close I could see my own weakened gaze reflecting in his, I instinctively knew I’d never get my heart back whole after tonight.
Just as I’d accepted my selfish fate and willed a connection I never imagined truly possible to life, those lips that I craved so much it hurt brushed right past mine.
A sharp breath sliced through my throat as Ethan hid his face against my own, his cheek hugging mine. His stubble scratched my cheek as his breath kissed my ear instead of my lips.
“Why did you have to come here?” he whispered in torment, and my heart cracked in two.
Then, he pulled away from me and from our second almost-kiss like it was an easy thing to do, like pulling away was as simple as cutting a cord connecting us to one another. With our moment snipped and dead, I watched him go, unable to move.
Ethan left me and my openly bleeding heart to weep until we’d both run dry as he turned the corner into the bedroom he shared with my sister, and closed the door.