Chapter 11 #5
His chest rises against mine in sharp, uneven bursts; his pulse thrums wildly where it presses into my ribs; his cock is still buried deep inside me, hot and thick and claiming, the final echo of a moment neither of us has come down from yet.
And neither of us moves. Not even an inch.
Not even a breath too loud. It’s as if the slightest shift might break whatever spell has wrapped itself around us.
His arms cage me in, his forearms braced on either side of my head, his forehead pressed to mine like he’s trying to fuse us together, trying to breathe me in before I vanish, trying to memorise the shape of me on his body like a man terrified he’ll never get this close again.
His breath is jagged, uneven, soaked with everything he hasn’t said and maybe never will.
“Fuck,” he whispers, and the word doesn’t sound like frustration or anger — it sounds like surrender. It sounds like something inside him has finally cracked open.
He drags his mouth along mine, barely a brush, almost a question.
“I should stay away from you,” he mutters, the words slipping out in a broken exhale, soft enough to feel like a confession.
“I should never have touched you. Should’ve walked the fuck away the second I saw you in those fucking bunny ears. ”
My heart pulls tight, but I stay silent.
I don’t push.
I don’t soothe.
I don’t rescue him from the truth he’s circling.
Because I want to hear it.
“I can’t just fuck you,” he murmurs, the words thick with guilt and longing that scrape down my spine like a bruise blooming. “I should walk away. I should let you go. But I can’t.”
He lifts his head just enough to look at me properly. His eyes search mine like he’s waiting for something — disgust, anger, a reason to end this before it ruins us both. Like he wants me to hate him so he doesn’t have to be the one who breaks first.
But I don’t.
I’m already ruined. Already his.
And something in his expression softens in a way that feels like a blade sliding between ribs, gentle but lethal.
Then — quiet, shaking — he says, “Let me take you.”
My brows pull together. “Take me?”
His hand glides down the side of my face, rough and warm and trembling just enough to betray how hard this is for him. “Out,” he breathes. “Somewhere normal. Somewhere you’re not on a stage and I’m not pretending I don’t want you.”
I blink up at him.
Once.
Twice.
“Are you…” A tiny smile tugs at my mouth, uninvited, impossible to stop. “Are you asking me out on a date, soldier?”
His jaw tightens on instinct, like the word date has teeth. “Fuck off,” he mutters — but the words aren’t sharp. They’re softened at the edges, reluctant, shy in a way he’d die before admitting.
I can’t help the laugh that slips out. “To be fair, you did skip a few steps. You went straight from war criminal to wrecking my soul to asking me out to dinner.”
“Jesus Christ,” he groans, dragging his face into the crook of my neck like he’s trying to hide how flustered he is. And God — the way he presses his nose there, breathing me in like he’s starving for something clean — it almost hurts.
“You’re ridiculous,” I tease softly, letting my fingers slide through his sweat-damp hair. “A very big, very dangerous, emotionally constipated man who apparently wants to take me for a burger after rearranging my insides.”
He lifts his head then.
Slowly. Carefully.
Like he’s afraid any sudden movement might reveal too much.
And despite everything — despite the war inside him, despite the fear, the violence, the instinct to run — he smiles. Not the sharp, weaponised smile he gives other people.
A real one.
But even that carries an ache.
He brushes his nose along mine. “You make me forget what the fuck I’ve done.”
His voice lowers to something intimate. Something raw. Something only meant for me.
“I look at you… and everything else goes quiet. I haven’t felt that in years.”
The teasing drains out of me instantly.
Because the pain behind those words? The truth in them? It’s too heavy to joke over. Too human.
“You don’t have to be anything for me, Dax,” I whisper. “Just be here.”
His eyes flick down to my lips, then back up, like he’s weighing the cost of kissing me again — and deciding he’ll pay it even if it kills him.
He leans in, his breath hot against my lips.
The first touch is barely there—a ghost of pressure that makes me chase his mouth.
Then his hand slides into my hair, gripping tight at the roots, and he consumes me.
His tongue sweeps in, tasting of whiskey and want, claiming every corner of my mouth like he owns it.
I whimper, and he swallows the sound, pressing me back until I'm trapped between his hard chest. His teeth catch my bottom lip, tugging until I gasp, the sweet sting making my knees buckle.
When he pulls back just enough for me to breathe, his eyes are midnight dark, pupils blown wide.
"Mine," he whispers against my mouth, and I can feel the word vibrating through every cell in my body.
When he kisses me again, deeper, hungrier, I know I'll never be the same.
His hand drifts to my hip, his callused palm now impossibly gentle against my skin. His thumb traces the curve where my waist dips, memorising me by touch alone. Our breathing synchronises in the quiet.
I press my forehead to his chest, inhaling the salt of his skin, feeling his heartbeat against my lips.
"You're shaking," he whispers, voice stripped of its earlier growl, replaced with something raw and unguarded.
I nod against him, unable to look up, afraid of what I might see in his eyes—this tenderness that makes my chest ache more than any bruise his passion left behind.
His fingers thread through mine, squeezing once. A promise neither of us names.
His mouth trails to my jaw. “Dax…” I breathe his name before I can stop myself.
His eyes open, blue and endless and full of ghosts.
And I hear myself say it — the question that’s been choking me since the moment we fell into each other again.
I swallow. “Are you going to leave again?”
The words spill out before I can stop them, my voice too small, too cracked, too honest. The question hangs there between us — the fear, the history, the ache — and I hate that it’s me who breaks the quiet first.
He doesn’t answer straight away.
And that silence?
It fucking kills me.
Cold creeps up my spine despite the heat of his body still pressed against mine. I start to pull back, shame rising like a tide I can’t outrun. “It’s fine. You don’t owe me anything. I get it, really—”
“Stop.”
His voice slices clean through the spiral, sharp as a command, soft as a plea.
He cups my jaw with a trembling hand and forces me to look at him — really look — and there’s something new in his eyes. Something fragile. Something raw. Regret sits there like a bruise. Longing like a confession he’s terrified to make. A softness I don’t think he lets anyone else see.
“I should never have left you in that club,” he says quietly, each word weighted, deliberate. “I shouldn’t have let you walk away.”
My breath stutters.
His thumb drags along my lower lip, slow and careful, like he’s memorising the shape of it. “I’m not good at this. Any of this. But I’m here now, and I’m trying, Butterfly. You have no idea how fucking hard I’m trying.”
God.
His words slide into the cracks I didn’t know were still open, filling every wound I pretended had healed.
“I just…” My voice wavers. “I don’t want to be another thing you leave behind.”
He pulls me into his chest like he can protect me from even that thought, like the idea of letting me go hurts him as much as it hurts me.
“You won’t be.”
He kisses my temple.
Then my cheek.
Then my mouth.
“You’re the first thing I want to keep.”
And fuck — that ruins me.
I bury my face in the warm, sweat-damp crook of his neck and breathe him in, letting myself believe it, letting myself pretend, just for this moment, that he means it in every way a man can mean something.
His arms tighten around me like he wishes he could fuse us together, like being inside me isn’t close enough.
And I could stay here — God, I could stay here forever — wrapped up in him, wrapped up in this impossible tenderness he doesn’t even realise he’s capable of.
But beneath all of it — beneath the heat and the heartbeat and the quiet — there’s a clock ticking.
Loud.
Merciless.
Because he’s leaving in thirty days.
And I don’t know if I can survive being the girl he remembers once he’s gone.
Lola passes me the ice cream tub like it’s wine and heartbreak and an entire time machine rolled into one, the kind you open only on nights when the world feels too sharp and too loud and too fucking fragile to stand without sugar as scaffolding.
“I got the cookie-dough one,” she says, curling her feet beneath her, her hoodie swallowing her whole in that way she always does when she’s bracing herself for something painful. “It felt like a cookie-dough kind of night.”
I try to smile. It lifts, barely, but never reaches my eyes.
Neither does hers.
For a long stretch of silence, we don’t talk.
We don’t even pretend to talk. We just sit there on her sagging sofa, legs tangled in a blanket patterned with stars, some stupid rom-com playing on the TV, the dialogue tinny and too bright for the way the air feels tonight.
It’s the kind of film we usually heckle, but tonight it’s background noise — a soft lie in a room that knows the truth.
She knows.
And I know she knows.
She’s been watching me come apart since the second I walked through the door, mascara streaked and lips swollen and pretending I wasn’t shaking.
She didn’t ask questions. She didn’t force comfort.
Just handed me a blanket, flicked the kettle off because she knew I wouldn’t touch tea, and sat beside me like she’s done a hundred times before — like she’s built a home around all my broken pieces.
Eventually, she speaks.