Chapter 15
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Five minutes into the jacuzzi and I already know inviting him was a mistake.
Not because it's bad. Because it's exactly as unbearable as I should have known it would be, sitting three feet across from Enzo Bianchi in steaming water with nothing between us except the jets running low and whatever this thing is that's been pulling tighter and tighter since the other night.
I stare at the hills beyond the tree line and try to look like I'm relaxed.
I'm not relaxed. I'm acutely, painfully aware of every single inch of him across from me, the width of his shoulders above the waterline, the way the steam catches on his jaw, the column of his throat when he tips his head back slightly.
His arms are resting on the edge of the jacuzzi and the water runs down his forearms and I am not thinking about those forearms.
I invited him because I was certain he'd say no.
That was the plan. Ask, get rejected, at least feel like I tried to be normal about this, like I'm capable of sitting in the same space as him without combusting. He was supposed to say no and I was supposed to come out here alone and have twenty minutes of peace and quiet and cold air on my face.
He said yes.
I don't know what to do with that. I've been sitting here for five minutes trying to figure out what to do with that and I still have nothing.
"This is weird," I say, because apparently I've run out of ways to stay quiet.
He looks at me. "What is?"
"This. Us. Sitting here and pretending."
"We're pretending?" He raises his brow.
"Yeah, you know? That nothing happened." I keep my voice easy, like this is a casual observation, like my pulse isn't doing something embarrassing. "Between us. Years ago. We've never actually talked about it."
Something shifts in his expression, subtle and controlled, the way everything about him is subtle and controlled.
"No," he says. "We haven't."
"I've always wondered." I look at the water instead of him, at the way the jets move the surface in slow patterns. "Do you remember that night on the porch? As clearly as I do?"
He goes very still.
"Yes," he says finally.
"I go back to it sometimes. In my head." I pause. "I've rewritten it a hundred different ways. What I should have said. What you should have said. How it could have gone differently."
"How does it go?" His voice comes out quieter than usual. "In the version where it goes differently."
I turn and look at him directly. "In the version where it goes differently, you tell me the truth. Whatever the truth actually was. I didn't need you to feel what I felt. I just needed you not to lie about what you felt."
Something in his jaw tightens.
"And what do you think the truth was?" he asks carefully.
"I think you wanted me. I've always thought that. I just couldn't understand why wanting me made you so cruel."
He's quiet for a long moment, and I watch him decide something.
"I come to the cabin," he says finally. "More than makes sense for a man who says it was nothing.
Every time I'm on that porch, I'm back there.
Standing where I was. Watching you walk out in that dress and knowing exactly what you were going to say before you said it.
" He looks at me directly. "I stand there and I let myself remember it because I can't seem to stop. "
My breath catches.
"Then why—" I stop. "Why did you handle it like that? If you knew. If you felt something. Why did you make it so ugly?"
"Because ugly was the only version that would work."
"Work for what?"
"For making sure you actually left. If I'd been gentle about it, if I'd said the right things, you would have stayed in reach. You would have kept hoping."
I stare at him. "So you humiliated me on purpose."
"Yes."
"Do you have any idea what those words did?
Not the rejection. I could have survived the rejection.
The words. Pathetic. Embarrassing. Following you around like a lost puppy.
" I say them back to him flat and clean.
"I was eighteen years old and I trusted you and you chose the most devastating version of not available to you. "
"Yes."
"Stop agreeing with me."
"What do you want me to do?"
"I want you to defend yourself." My voice cracks slightly and I pull it back hard. "I want you to give me something to argue against."
"What would you do with me?" he asks. "If I defended myself. If I gave you a reason that made sense. What would you do with that?"
I open my mouth and close it.
The water steams between us and I don't have an answer.
"I'm still furious at you," I say finally, quieter. "I want you to know that. Four years of barely looking at me. Four years of treating me like I was something inconvenient. That doesn't disappear."
"I know."
"So you're not going to defend yourself?"
"No."
"Why not?"
"Because you're right." He says it simply, without qualification. "The way I handled that conversation was wrong. I was cruel when I didn't have to be. I've known that since the second you walked back inside that night." He holds my gaze across the water. "I'm sorry for that. For all of it."
I stare at him.
I've imagined this conversation a hundred times. I imagined him explaining himself, justifying it, or doubling down, or pretending it didn't matter as much as it did.
I didn't imagine him just saying I'm sorry like it cost him something.
The humility of it shakes something loose in my chest that I'd spent years cementing shut.
I don't say anything. I don't trust what would come out.
We're closer than we were a few minutes ago. I notice it gradually, the way the space between us has narrowed without either of us making a conscious move.
He's maybe eighteen inches away now.
I can see the scar on his arm below the waterline, the raised line of it distorted by the moving water. I can see the controlled set of his jaw and the way a muscle moves there when he looks at me.
His hand moves under the water.
Slow. Deliberate. His fingertips find my forearm where it's resting against the edge of the jacuzzi, barely touching, just the light drag of one finger along my skin beneath the surface.
I shiver.
He pulls his hand back immediately, his expression shifting into something careful. "I won't—"
"Don't." I reach under the water and find his wrist before he can pull it all the way back, wrapping my fingers around it. "Don't pull away."
"Isabella—"
"Your touch is the only touch I don't fear." I say it plainly because I'm tired of not saying things plainly to him. "I don't know what that means. But I'm not afraid of you. I'm not afraid of your hands. So don't pull them away."
He looks at me for a long moment. "For the record, Isabella… I want you. I want you a little too much," he whispers while I sit there, frozen in shock.
Then he turns his hand and his palm slides along my forearm slowly, and I feel every inch of it like he's leaving a trail of fire under the water.
He moves closer.
The eighteen inches becomes twelve, becomes eight, and the water shifts with his movement and his knee brushes mine under the surface and neither of us mentions it.
His hand moves from my forearm to my waist and he pulls me in slowly, giving me every opportunity to say no, and I don't say no, I move with it, until we're close enough that I have to tilt my head slightly to hold his gaze.
His other hand comes up out of the water, and his fingers trace the line of my collarbone, following it to my shoulder, down my arm, back up, patient and unhurried like he has all the time in the world and no intention of rushing a single second.
"You're shivering," he murmurs, and his voice is lower than usual, rougher at the edges.
"The water's hot," I manage.
"So you shouldn't be shivering."
His thumb traces the strap of my swimsuit top, following it to where it crosses my chest, and his knuckles graze the swell of my breast so lightly it barely counts as contact.
My nipples harden immediately, embarrassingly, visibly, the thin fabric doing nothing to hide it, and I watch his jaw tighten when he feels it under his fingers, watches the sharp intake of breath it pulls from me.
"Fuck…" he whispers. He does it again. Deliberately this time, his thumb dragging slowly over the fabric, over the peaked point of my nipple, and the sound that escapes me is quiet and involuntary and makes his eyes go somewhere very dark.
"E-Enzo—" My voice comes out wrong, breathless and too open.
"I know, Princess," he purrs, low and even, his mouth close to my ear. "Fuck, I know."
His lips brush the curve of my neck and I tilt my head without meaning to, giving him more access, and I feel him almost smile against my skin before his mouth opens and he drags his lips up the side of my throat and I dig my fingers into his shoulder.
My hands find his neck, pulling him closer, and when I slide my fingers down the column of his throat he makes a sound low in his chest, a rough groan that vibrates under my palms, and something about hearing that from him, from Enzo who controls everything, does something catastrophic to my ability to think.
I slide my hands down his chest under the water, feeling the planes of muscle under my palms, following the line of his stomach, and when my fingers brush lower he goes very still.
I wrap my hand around him.
The gasp that leaves me isn't planned. It's completely involuntary, the shock of it, the heat of him, the hardness that my brain knew was possible but my body apparently wasn't prepared for, the confirmation that this is real, that it's me doing this to him, that Enzo Bianchi is hard in my hand because of me.
"Isabella." His voice is wrecked. Barely recognizable.
"You're—" I can't finish the sentence.
"Yeah." Just that. Just that one word in that voice.
He kisses me.
It's not the kiss I'd imagined when I was eighteen and foolish and thought I knew what wanting something felt like. It's nothing like the soft, tentative thing I'd constructed in my head.