8. Novak #2
There was no heat in the statement, no accusation, just fact. I didn’t like it. The contact had been brief, but it put him closer than I’d allowed. Closer than I’d assessed. I preferred the space around him to be clear.
The usual six feet separated us in the parking lot now, rain beading on metal and asphalt, and I held his gaze without blinking.
“Fucking. Psychopathic. Killer. Robot!” Caleb snapped and turned to leave.
“Does my being all of that upset you?” I asked as he reached his door, and I was so close that I’d caged him between me and the car. My body reacted before my brain caught up.
“Move away,” he said, but I shook my head.
“Does it upset you?” I repeated. “That I watch you, and I don’t like other people touching you.”
“It upsets me that you talk about killing a boy in front of his brothers and don’t even blink.”
“I wouldn’t hurt you ,” I reassured him, but clearly that wasn’t what he wanted to hear, because he placed a hand in the middle of my chest and shoved me away again.
“Back off,” he snarled.
I didn’t shift an inch.
The shove had been solid, and I’d let the force take me half a step back again because escalation required calibration, and I was measuring him. His breathing was elevated. His pupils were blown wide. There was anger there.
Rain slid down the side of the SUV, tapping the metal in an uneven rhythm. Caleb’s hand was still half-raised between us, as if he was unsure whether to push me again or fist it in my shirt.
He tried to step around me. I could have moved, but I didn’t.
The six-foot distance closed again, not fully blocking, just narrowing the space. I should have stepped back. I didn’t.
His jaw flexed.
“Get the fuck away from me.” I meant it. Mostly. That should have been the end of it.
“I can’t.”
“What the hell are you doing?”
I considered the most accurate answer and chose it. “I don’t know. Maybe testing.” I rubbed my neck, found the scar there, and waited for the next question.
“Testing what?”
“You.”
He laughed once, sharp and disbelieving. “I’m not an experiment.”
“No. You’re not.”
He stepped into me then, deliberately this time, chest brushing mine, chin tilted up in challenge.
If this was intimidation, it was flawed; I wouldn’t respond to this as he expected.
But I registered the proximity, the steady refusal to look away, the fact he didn’t retreat even knowing exactly what I was capable of.
“You’re angry because I don’t hesitate,” I said quietly. “And because part of you doesn’t want me to. You’re conflicted.”
His breath hitched. “Fuck you.”
“You know if it comes down to it, you’d want me in front of you.”
“That doesn’t mean I want you on top of me.”
The silence that followed was different as he realized what he’d said. I would enjoy being on top of him. Under him.
I caught his jaw in my hand, not hard enough to bruise, firm enough to stop the words he was about to throw at me. His skin was warm, rain-cool at the edges, pulse strong beneath my thumb.
He should have hit me, but he didn’t. Instead, his hand came up, gripping my wrist—not to break it, not to shove me away, but holding it there.
“What are you doing?” he snarled, attempting to get me to back off.
I had this overwhelming urge to kiss him, but what if I couldn’t breathe?
His fingers fisted in the front of my jacket, and he tugged me closer instead of pushing me away, his mouth on mine with an exhale that sounded almost like anger.
I began to panic. His body was solid against mine until he broke it first. His hands stayed in my jacket a fraction too long before he shoved me back, breathing uneven, eyes bright in a way that had nothing to do with rain.
“Don’t.” his voice cracked. He scrubbed a hand over his mouth, then dropped it, jaw set hard. “It doesn’t mean you get to—” he cut himself off again, because the rest of that sentence required admitting there was something to get.
Rain ran down his temple and along his jaw. He didn’t wipe it away. He just stood there, chest rising and falling too fast, gaze locked on mine.
He searched my face. I didn’t know how to give him softness; I wasn’t going to apologize or retreat.
I kissed him. Brief. Hard, and then backed away.
His mouth fell open. That wasn’t a smooth kiss at all. Maybe I should have been softer, but what did I know about kissing? I’d never kissed anyone in my life.
“What the hell, asshole!” He wiped his mouth.
“I wanted to kiss you.”
“You wanted to—” He stopped again, teeth clenching. “You don’t get to kiss random people,” he said.
“You’re not a random person.”
“Novak—”
“No one else touches you.”
The certainty in my own voice registered a fraction of a second after the words left my mouth, and Caleb’s expression sharpened.
“Fucks sake,” he muttered, but I didn’t know what the issue was.
The statement had been accurate. There was nothing to debate.
Because the truth was, the moment he said it, my mind had already run the scenario and rejected it outright.
Caleb with someone else? Someone else’s hands on him, someone else leaning into his space the way I had earlier.
The image formed quickly and triggered a deep, immediate sense of wrongness that sat heavily in my chest.
It wasn’t what I understood jealousy to be, more like the irritation I experienced when a tactical situation didn’t align with the facts.
The idea of some random man touching him made me furious.
I folded my arms across my chest as I studied the tension in his shoulders and how his breathing had quickened.
He was furious, but there was something else under it, too, the pink tip of his tongue darting out to taste me on his glossy spit-shined lips.
I might not have wanted the kiss, but he tasted of me now.
He shoved me back again, then climbed into his vehicle and shut the door. I stood in the rain and watched his headlights flare to life, watched him sit behind the wheel for a second longer than necessary before pulling out.
Inside me, the feral edge resolved into something else.
I’d been studying Caleb for months.
I wanted to touch.