Chapter 14 #2
“The only person in my head—the only person who has ever been in my head—was you.”
I was in front of him. I watched his pupils dilate. I could feel the heat radiating off his skin.
“It has always been you,” I said. “Even when I was running. Even when I was refusing to acknowledge the chemistry between us. Even when I convinced myself I hated you—it was still you.”
He looked up at me, and I watched him fight it—the hope. He was terrified of it. I could see the terror right there on his face, plain as daylight.
“Don’t.” His voice was rough. Uneven. “Don’t say that unless you mean it, because I cannot—” He exhaled, hard. “I can’t survive losing you again.”
I stared at him, my heart beating too rapidly. “All this time you refused to let me go, and now I’m standing right in front of you telling you I’m done running—and you’re the one who’s scared?”
I took his face in my hands. His stubble scraped my palms. His skin was warm, alive, real.
“You didn’t answer me in that building. In the dark, you said those words. Did you mean them?”
His hands came up and covered mine.
“I meant them,” he said, and his voice was nothing I’d ever heard from him before—quiet and fierce and completely defenceless. “I have always meant them.”
“Then have me,” I whispered.
He pulled me down and kissed me.
His mouth met mine like a wave hitting a wall—forceful, hungry, overwhelming. His hands gripped my waist and dragged me into his lap and I went, knees on either side of him, fingers sliding into his hair and holding on.
He groaned into my mouth, deep in his chest, the vibration traveling through me and settling in my blood like a lit fuse. The sound he made—God, that sound—went straight through me, igniting something that had been smoldering for weeks.
I kissed him back with everything I’d been hoarding.
Every restless night. Every time I’d watched that elevator and prayed.
Every lie I’d told about not caring. His tongue swept against mine and my hips rolled forward without permission and he made a sound—God, that sound—his fingers digging into my thighs through the silk.
He pulled back, forehead resting against mine, breathing like he’d been running.
“We need to stop.”
“We really don’t.”
“You were scared tonight.” His eyes were dark, blown wide, his voice strained in a way that told me stopping was costing him everything he had. “An hour ago you were shaking. I won’t—if you wake up tomorrow and think I—”
“Jack.” I traced his bottom lip with my thumb.
Felt him shudder. “I have been wanting this for weeks. I have lain in my bed replaying that kiss on the street until I thought I’d go insane.
I have been so stubborn and so afraid and I’m done.
” I held his gaze. “This isn’t fear talking.
This is the first honest thing I’ve let myself feel in seven years. ”
He searched my face. Whatever he found there broke the last of his restraint.
He stood—arms sliding under me, lifting me like it was nothing, and my legs wrapped around him on instinct and a laugh escaped me, bright and breathless against his mouth.
“Showing off,” I murmured.
“Absolutely.” He was already walking, carrying me out of the living room, his lips finding the spot beneath my ear, and my laugh dissolved into something else entirely. He kicked the bedroom door wide and the room beyond was darkness and glass and the whole city burning on the other side of it.
He set me down at the edge of the bed. I caught impressions—dark sheets, a massive headboard, the skyline reflected in a mirror I couldn’t look away from—and then he was kneeling in front of me and the room stopped mattering.
His fingers found the sash of the robe. Paused. His eyes lifted to mine—a question, clear and patient, even now, even with his breathing ragged and his hands not quite steady.
I pulled the sash loose myself. Let the silk slide off my shoulders and pool behind me on the bed.
He didn’t move. Didn’t speak. He just looked at me, and I felt that gaze the way you feel sunlight—everywhere, all at once, warm against every inch of skin.
The old insecurity flared—not enough, not built for this, not made for men like him—and died under the expression on his face.
Because he was looking at me like I was the answer to something he’d been asking his whole life.
“Come here,” I whispered.
He rose and I pulled him to me by his shirt, my fingers twisting in the cotton, and we fell back onto the bed and his weight settled over me and everything—the penthouse, the city, the seven wasted years—compressed into the space between our bodies.
His mouth traced my collarbone. I arched into it, a sound escaping me that I didn’t recognize.
His hand slid up my ribcage, slow, learning me like a language he’d forgotten and was remembering word by word.
When his lips found the dip of my throat I sucked in a breath so sharp it hurt, and he paused there, feeling my pulse hammer against his mouth.
I pulled his shirt over his head and ran my palms down his chest—broader, harder, the landscape of him changed in ways that made my fingers want to map every new ridge and plane.
When I traced the line below his navel his whole body clenched, a tremor that ran through him like a current, and the feeling of that—of making him shake—sent something blazing through my veins.
“Pauline.” My name in his mouth had turned into something new—low and broken and sacred, a prayer and a confession tangled together.
“I’m here,” I breathed. “I’m right here.”
He kissed my sternum. My ribs. The soft skin below my navel where I’d always been self-conscious. He kissed each place like it mattered. Like every inch of me was something he’d been missing, something he’d dreamed about in the years between us, something he was finally, finally allowed to touch.
When the last barriers fell away, when there was nothing left between us but skin and heat and the city light painting us both silver and gold, he paused. Held himself still above me. His arms were trembling with the effort. His eyes found mine in the half-dark and held.
“Stay with me,” he said. Not a command. A wish.
“I’m not going anywhere.”
He moved, and I moved with him, and the world narrowed to the rhythm we built together—slow at first, achingly slow, every breath drawn out, every sensation given room to bloom.
His forehead pressed against mine. My fingers dug into his shoulders.
He whispered my name and I whispered his and the sound of us filled the room like music.
I lost myself in it. In the heat of his skin against mine, in the way his breath stuttered when I wrapped my legs tighter around him, in the low sounds he couldn’t contain when I pressed my mouth to his throat and tasted salt.
The pleasure built like a tide—rising, gathering, pulling me toward something vast and inevitable.
His hand found mine on the pillow beside my head and our fingers laced together, and I held on, held on, held on—
I came apart with his name on my lips, my body bowing off the bed, every nerve singing. He followed a moment later—his arms locking around me, his face buried in my neck, my name leaving him in a sound so raw it wrapped around my heart and stayed there.
Silence.
Our breathing. The distant hum of the city. The soft ticking of a clock somewhere I couldn’t see.
We lay tangled in his sheets, his arm heavy across my waist, my cheek against his chest. I traced lazy, aimless shapes on his skin and listened to his heartbeat slow—from a gallop to a canter to something deep and steady that felt like safety.
He shifted. His fingers found my grandmother’s necklace—that thin silver chain resting against my throat, warm from my skin. He lifted it gently and pressed his lips to it. The gesture was so tender, so unexpected, that my breath caught.
“I love you,” he said, his mouth still touching the silver. “I have loved you since you were sitting at a pool party reading about serial killers and pretending the rest of the world didn’t exist.”
The words moved through me—through skin, through ribs, through the marrow of my bones. My eyes burned. I let the tears come because they weren’t grief. They were the feeling of setting down something so heavy that standing up afterward made you dizzy.
He lifted his head. Saw my face. His thumb caught the tear at my cheekbone and held it there, against my skin, like he was collecting something precious.
I wanted to say it back. The words were right there—sitting on my tongue, solid and true and ready. But my throat wouldn’t open. Not because I was afraid. Because the feeling was so big, so overwhelming, that trying to fit it into three small words felt like trying to pour the ocean into a glass.
So I pressed my palm over his heart instead. Held it there. Let my eyes close.
His arm drew me closer. His lips brushed my temple.
I fell asleep to the beat of him—steady, sure, unwavering—and for the first time in as long as I could remember, the dark held nothing that could hurt me.