24. Kat #2
The phone keeps ringing. He doesn't answer it. He kisses me like the sound isn't happening, like the building could come down and he'd stay exactly here with his hand spread across the back of my skull.
My shirt rides up where the locker handle digs into my back. His mouth moves to my jaw, my throat, and my head tips because my body has stopped consulting me about anything. Heat spreads fast and low.
His hand slides under my thigh, hitching me higher, and there's the hard press of his cock against me through two layers of fabric, and a sound from me that's mostly need.
The ringing stops. Starts again ten seconds later.
Somewhere under all the noise in my head, a thought surfaces.
He hasn't said one word.
Not my name. Not okay. Not anything.
I know what his silence sounds like when it's full. This one is a man trying to shove something back inside himself with his hands.
His fingers find the button of my jeans.
"Stop."
He stops so fast it's like I threw a switch. He goes rigid, his forehead drops against my collarbone, his breath comes out ragged against my skin.
My whole body screams at me. Every nerve below my waist is furious, still open, still reaching for him.
I want to take it back. I want to put his hand where it was and let him finish what my mouth started, because I nearly died on a rubber mat forty feet from here and being wanted is the loudest proof of life there is.
And that's exactly the problem.
I press both palms flat against his chest. Not pushing. Just there.
"Put me down."
He does. Slowly. My feet find the tile and my legs don't fully agree to hold me, so I keep one hand on the locker.
He won't look up. His hands are braced on the metal on either side of my head, arms locked, head bowed like a man waiting for a sentence.
"Naveed." I wait until his eyes come to mine. "Do not touch me like a panic response."
He flinches. Not much. A muscle near his eye.
"I want you. I have wanted you since the night you slept against my door and I'm not going to pretend otherwise standing here with my shirt halfway up.
" My voice cracks and I let it. "But that back there wasn't wanting me.
That was you needing to hold something you almost lost so your hands would stop shaking. "
He opens his mouth. Nothing comes out.
"I'm not the thing you use to feel in control again. I won't be that." I swallow. "Not even for you."
The truth I would confess to no one, is that I wanted to let him.
A man who could take that whole dark room apart with his hands, undone, needing to hold something and the something was me.
There is a starved and reckless version of me I keep in the same place I keep the family failing, that would have climbed him like a monkey and called it being needed and mistaken being needed for being loved, never seeing the difference between them until it’s too late.
I have watched other women make that trade. I have pitied them. Now I stand here one tap away from becoming one of them. I have finally found the one thing I want more than I want to stop being alone, and it is to be seen clearly by the single man who can do it.
The fluorescent tube buzzes over us. Green-white light, tile, the smell of old metal and my own blood drying on my arm.
He steps back.
One step. Then another. His hands leave the lockers, drop to his sides and close.
The phone rings a third time.
He steps back and stays there.
That's the part that undoes me. Not the stepping. The staying.
Every other time I have drawn a line with this man, he has found some tactical route around it. Extra operators. A car change. A tail I wasn't supposed to see. He agrees with his mouth and disagrees with everything else he does.
Now he stands three feet away in a locker room that smells like rust and bleach, and he doesn't move.
The phone stops ringing. Nobody calls back.
"You're right."
Two words. His voice wrecked, sanded down to nothing.
My throat closes.
"Say that again."
"You're right." That touches something deep in me before my brain catches up. "I wasn't asking. I was taking. To make my hands stop."
The tile is cold through my shoes. My arm throbs from wrist to elbow, and the pain is somewhere far away, filed under later.
"I've never had anything I was so afraid of losing this badly, until you," he says. "So, I held it tighter and called it protection."
"Naveed."
"It's not." He looks at the floor before locking his gaze with mine. "It's fear. You named it."
Something breaks open in the middle of my chest, warm and awful. My eyes sting, I refuse to let it go further than that.
He heard me. Not agreed with me to end the argument. Heard me.
My shoulders drop. Bracing for the moment a man decides my boundary is a suggestion, and my body finally puts something down.
"I'm not going to thank you for stopping," I say. "You don't get thanked for that."
I'm on a roll now, being a brute and I know it. I was the one who initiated that kiss but I can't seem to stop. My mouth just keeps going.
"No."
"But I'm telling you I felt it." My voice does something embarrassing on the last word. "The stopping, I mean. I felt it in my whole body."
He breathes. Deep, as if he's putting things in perspective.
"Your arm needs cleaning."
"I know."
"I have a kit in the car."
"I know that too."
"You'll have to bear with it. I didn't drive. I rushed out too fast when I heard you ditched the bodyguards."
Neither of us moves. The fluorescent tube buzzes above us, throwing that awful green light across his face, he looks tired.
"I'm still angry you left the route," he says.
"I'm still angry you put a tail on me."
"Understood."
"That's not agreement."
"No. It's not."
He doesn't step forward or reach for me. He picks my torn coat from the floor, shakes the sand out of it, folds it over his arm, and waits.