Chapter 26 The Break #3
How could anyone be expected to form a coherent phrasing of words when all the beauty in the universe was staring down at them?
Ethan captured my mouth in his once again, sealing our damned fate. A new-found passion curled into our kisses as our lips worked together to create the ultimate catastrophe that two people had ever willingly, knowingly created.
He stained me with his kisses, pulling breath right out of me and filling me up with his own. Ethan sucked my bottom lip into his mouth, nibbling down on the flesh and tearing a moan straight from my mouth.
“ Fuck ,” Ethan cursed, flicking his tongue over my swollen lip. I freely moaned against him again, feeling my limbs begin to vibrate with how much erotic energy was bustling around inside of me and centering right between my legs.
“I could listen to that sound all day,” he mumbled, barely leaving enough space between our lips to get the words out.
Without any forethought, I mirrored his action, the taste of our lips touching my tongue, and the clenching in my core deepened to something almost painful. Ethan’s grip on the back of my neck tightened as I tested those waters, and less than a second later, I tasted Heaven.
The nudge of his tongue parted my lips, and together we groaned in sync as Ethan deepened our kiss and our connection to one another at the same time.
The taste of Ethan was as addicting as I feared it might be and poisoned my blood like a drug.
It infused my body with the forbidden taste of him and the more he gave me, the farther I sank into the mystifying high that his addiction created.
The exhilarating rush of energy filtering through my veins proved that I was right about kissing Ethan.
It was like kissing the stars.
Kissing him was to hold the most magnificent beauty all to yourself for as long as you could stand before the intensity of its power burned through to your soul. If I held onto Ethan for too much longer, my soul would char over black and incinerated to ash.
Bringing my hands up to cup the sides of his face, I tried to memorize everything about this moment.
How the growing stubble of his beard felt against my palms and fingers, how terribly soft his damp hair was as I ran my hands through it over and over again.
I memorized the scent of him and how it smelled combined with mine—like burnt cherry soap.
And lastly, as stupid as it was to do, I never wanted to forget the excruciating, unimaginable pain that ripped through my heart as I parted my lips from Ethans without the intention of ever kissing them again.
“Stop.”
And he did. He stopped moving, and from the sudden lack of labored breaths across my face, he stopped breathing, too.
Warmth pressed against my forehead as he placed his to mine and his eyes fell shut.
My heart beating a wild race inside my chest, I watched him closely as his jaw set in place, his nostrils flared, and he swallowed hard.
An ache spread over my heart as worry wrinkles formed between his eyebrows before he let out his first breath in many seconds. It hit my face and cracked my heart in two with the force of it.
I could practically taste the torment on his breath.
Guilt for so many things wrapped itself around my stomach like a rope, cinching tighter as Ethan slid his forehead down mine, slowly working his way down my body.
I watched his dark head of hair dip past my breasts, and the lower he got, the harder I trembled.
My breathing was a wreck, same as my heart, and I knew that Ethan could feel it.
Especially as he trailed a hand along the same pathway, pausing dead center over my chest.
I knew he was feeling my erratic heartbeat slamming against the palm of his hand, crying for him to stay and go all the same.
And then, the crying from my heart reached up my throat, pouring out into a real cry as the lips I loved so immediately it terrified me, pressed against my stomach in a kiss.
With heartbreak caught in my throat, I watched him seek out a newly unkissed area of skin, and brush his lips across it before planting a stolen kiss there too. Ethan trailed his mouth down my stomach, dropping slow, tender kisses the entire way down.
His lips were the embodiment of devotion against my bare flesh, worshiping every inch of my body his mouth could reach.
Each kiss was a goodbye in another language. The languages of love, misery, and heartbreak were written across my stomach with his lips as the pen, ink sinking through and diluting my blood with his addiction.
Each kiss told a story. Each kiss broke my heart. Each kiss made it harder and harder to say what I needed to say next.
“You need to leave.”
Ethan’s hold around my waist tightened and in that motion, I felt how badly he did not want to leave. He needed to, though. For the sake of all the people we both tried not to think about during the last five minutes of our lives, he needed to go.
I’d pushed Monica, Peter, my parents, Ethan’s mom—everyone our connection would hurt most—from my mind for as long as I could to let myself enjoy the sins I had been dancing around for weeks.
Those sins had been played out now, and reality was back in session no matter how much both Ethan and I would prefer to deny it.
Eventually, Ethan stood from the bed and dressed himself in his still sopping wet shirt.
I did the same, tugging on a dry shirt I pulled from my closet as Ethan waited for me in the corner of the room.
Both of us dressed, I walked to and opened my bedroom door.
Our silence was harrowing as it continued as we walked through my apartment until we reached the front door.
I opened the door fast so that the chance to talk myself out of it wasn’t even an option.
Inside, I was crumbling, falling apart piece by broken piece and just begging myself to hold it together for thirty more seconds.
My mission was to get him out of this apartment within those next thirty seconds or else he’d be witness to what I already knew would be my second biggest breakdown in my 24 years.
I could feel it coming on strong, barreling forward inside of me like a monster closing in. Unfortunately for me, Ethan had no idea what was coming for me and even if he did, it didn’t stop him from giving us one last shot.
“I can’t go back to pretending, Alice.” Standing with both hands against the doorframe and one foot in and the other out in the hallway, he said, “I can’t go back to that.”
“Well, you don’t really have a choice.”
Certainty ablaze in his eyes, he spoke firmly and directly at my imploding heart.
“I choose you .”
And that was it. That was the knife to the heart, the press of the detonator, the nail in my coffin.
Those three words obliterated what was left standing of me.
Those three little words sliced through it all and invited hellfire to rain down.
The monster was here. The breakdown was now.
I used the last of my stable breaths to speak, my words cold and detached.
“You can’t have me.”
And then I closed the door in Ethan’s face and welcomed the breakdown with open arms.