Chapter 12 The Fall #2
He kissed me like he’d been waiting since Wednesday.
He kissed me like the garden had been a first draft and this was the revision.
Deeper, more deliberate, his palm sliding from my jaw into my hair and tilting my head back so he could find the angle that made my knees dissolve, and I grabbed his shirt with both fists because the ground had become genuinely unreliable and the only solid thing in the room was him.
The taste of him — mint over cedar-bare skin — flooded my senses with the garden all over again, but this time there was no wrought-iron bench between us, no careful distance, just his mouth on mine and my hands fisting cotton and the complete, terrifying, exhilarating absence of anything pretend.
He walked me backward — three steps, maybe, I lost count somewhere between the second and his mouth tracing down my neck — until my shoulders met the wall beside the closet door.
The cool plaster against my shoulder blades drew a gasp out of me, and his body followed, pressing flush against mine, chest to hip, his thigh sliding between my knees, and oh.
Oh. My spine arched off the wall before I’d decided to move.
His mouth found my throat, the spot where my pulse beat hard enough for him to feel it against his lips, and every careful inch of distance we’d maintained for ten weeks collapsed into friction and pressure and the sound of breathing that wasn’t quite steady.
His hands. God, his hands. One in my hair, tilting my head so his lips could trace down, and the other drifting down my ribs with a focused, unhurried attention that made each point of contact feel intentional — like he was drafting me, learning my dimensions through touch the way other people learned them through sight.
His thumb found the gap between my shirt and the waistband of my skirt, and that single inch of bare skin — callused fingertip against my stomach, the lightest drag above my hip — pulled a sound out of me I didn’t recognize.
My back arched into him. A low sound escaped his throat.
I couldn’t think. Couldn’t construct a sentence, couldn’t remember the name of my own show, couldn’t do anything except find the skin just below his ear where his pulse hammered so hard it pulsed in my fingertips.
And I said the two words that had been building since the Patience Test, since a dark room and a man who’d trembled when I said them, since the moment I understood that the most powerful thing you can give someone isn’t control. It’s permission.
“Good boy.”
The sound he made destroyed me. Something deeper than a groan, rawer, a sound that started in his chest and broke open somewhere between my name and a word he couldn’t finish.
His forehead dropped to my shoulder like his neck had simply given out, and I felt the full weight of his surrender press into me — his exhale ragged against my collarbone, his fingers gripping my hips hard enough to feel through the silk, his whole body trembling with the effort of being this open and still standing.
I pressed my lips against his temple. Held them there.
Felt the drumming of his blood under the thin skin, and he let out a long, shaking exhale — the kind that carries everything a person has been holding.
When he lifted his head, I couldn’t look.
His eyes were bright, almost wet — not crying, he’d been taught at eight years old that his tears were wrong — but the shine was there, terrified and undefended, and his face was so completely open I felt like I was seeing someone he’d never shown anyone.
The version that existed before he learned to hide.
He looked young. He looked stunned. He looked at me like I’d reached into his chest and found something he’d been told wasn’t there.
“Say it again.” His voice muffled against my collarbone, rough and wondering, the vibration of each word humming against my skin. “Please.”
The please. The please nearly killed me.
Rhys did not say please — he stated facts and issued observations and deployed sarcasm so dry it qualified as a climate event.
But here, with his face tucked against my neck and his hand gripping my hip like he was afraid I’d disappear, he said please like it was the most natural word he’d ever spoken.
And I understood, with a clarity that cut through every layer of desire and urgency, that this was what the show had been trying to measure all along.
The willingness to ask. The courage to need.
“Good boy,” I said again, slower this time, each word placed against the shell of his ear with a discipline that matched his own, and he lifted me — just lifted, hands under my thighs, smooth and effortless, the motion revealing exactly how strong those arms actually were — and my legs wrapped around his waist because physics demanded it and so did every cell in my body.
From this height his lips were level with mine and his eyes were open, close, burning with an intensity that made the garden kiss feel chaste.
“If we don’t stop,” he said, rough, strained, his forehead pressed against mine, “I’m not going to be able to—”
“I know.”
“The cameras—”
“There are no cameras in here.” My fingers followed the line of his jaw. The muscle flexed under my touch. “This room is mine.”
He kissed me again, and this time his mouth was open, urgent, edged with the hunger of two people who’d held themselves so still for so long that letting go felt like falling.
My fingers found the buttons of his shirt, undid two, laid my palms flat against his bare chest. His heart slammed against my hand — fast, hard, real.
I spread my fingers wider, and he shuddered against me, a full-body response to my hands on him that made me feel powerful and terrified in equal measure.
He was solid everywhere — under my palms, where his stomach tensed against my wrist, where his collarbone met the open collar and I pressed my lips to the hollow of his throat and tasted salt and cedar and the racing pulse beneath.
“You,” I breathed against his mouth, “are making it very hard to be the responsible one.”
“You were never the responsible one.” His lips grazed my temple, soft, reverent, a counterpoint to the grip of his hands. “You were the brave one. There’s a difference.”
I was going to reply — I had a whole Sloane routine ready about television shows and arm’s-length policies — but his mouth found the spot below my ear and his teeth grazed the tendon of my neck and the retort disintegrated.
I tipped my head back against the plaster and felt his lips curve into a smile against my skin, just for a second — a private, boyish grin I could feel but not see — and the tenderness of it, the play in it, hit harder than any of the urgency that had come before.
He dropped a kiss to my cheekbone, another to the corner of my eye, light and slow, tracing my face with his mouth like he had all the time in the world and intended to use it.
“Hi,” he murmured against my temple.
I laughed — a real laugh, breathless and surprised, because we were pressed together with his shirt half-open and my skirt bunched at my hips and this man had just said hi to me like we were meeting for coffee.
“Hi,” I said back. And his smile buried itself in my hair, and for one perfect, suspended moment the world was so small it only held two people, and both of them were exactly where they belonged.
My phone vibrated on the nightstand. We ignored it. It vibrated again — a persistent mechanical insistence that cut through the fog of his lips on my neck with the subtlety of a fire alarm at a spa.
“Ignore it,” I murmured.
“Ignoring it.” The buzzing stopped, and his mouth found mine again, and for three blessed seconds the world was just us.
Then it started again. Continuous this time, vibrating with a relentless urgency that meant only one person — because only Tessa Reyes had my Do Not Disturb override, and in fifteen years of friendship she had used the emergency code exactly twice: once when my mother had been hospitalized and once when the network threatened to pull funding.
She didn’t call CODE RED for drama. She called CODE RED for actual fires.
I pulled back. “I need to—”
“Go.” He set me down — carefully, so carefully, his hands sliding from my thighs to my hips to my waist, steadying me through each inch of descent until my feet found the floor.
His thumbs lingered on my hipbones for one extra beat, and then his hands opened and everywhere he’d been touching went cold.
My body had rewired itself around him in fifteen minutes and was furious about operating alone.
I crossed to the nightstand. Picked up my phone. Way too many notifications. Tessa’s name repeated — a distress signal: SLOANE. CODE RED. SLOANE. CALL ME NOW. CODE RED. THIS IS NOT A DRILL.
I opened Twitter.
The ground dropped.