Chapter 28 WREN
WREN
He doesn’t look at me.
I’m leaning back against the elevator wall with my arms folded around myself and my head tipped back and my eyes closed while the car climbs forty-two floors in silence.
He hasn’t spoken to me since the curb.
The doors open and I walk out ahead of him into his foyer. I make it as far as the middle of the wood floor before I stop. Turn around. Face him.
“Are you going to talk to me, Jace, or are we doing this all night?”
He closes the foyer door behind him. Takes three steps into the room.
“You got out of the car.”
“I did.”
“I told you to stay in it.”
“I know what you told me.”
“And you got out anyway.”
“I did.”
“Because—what—you thought you were going to confront him?”
“Yes. I wanted to give that asshole a piece of my mind.”
He looks at me.
“A piece of your mind.”
“Yes.”
“Wren. He is not your ex. Not anymore. He picked your lock yesterday and put a photograph on your pillow and tonight he was on a sidewalk a hundred feet from where you sleep.”
“I know that.”
“You don’t go give a piece of your mind to a man like that. You don’t go anywhere near him. He is not the boyfriend you broke up with. He is dangerous and he is fixated and the only thing keeping him off you tonight is the order in his hand and the two men I have on this corner.”
“Jace—”
“Do you know what could have happened on that sidewalk?”
“He didn’t—”
“Do you know what could have happened?”
I close my mouth.
“He whistled at you. He looked at you. He took every inch of you in. I had to choose, in the middle of the street, between killing him and walking back to you. Because you got out of the car.”
“You can’t just say things like that, Jace. You can’t tell me you almost killed a man on the sidewalk like it’s a weather report. And what was I supposed to do, sit there and be scared in that car for one more second—”
He closes the gap between us in two steps.
“This is not a fucking joke, Wren.”
“I know it’s not a joke!”
“Then why didn’t you stay in the goddamn car?”
“Because I am not a child , Jace! I am not your little —”
He turns away from me. Runs a hand over his head. His other hand is in a fist at his side.
He turns back.
“You think this is about that?”
“What else is it about?”
“Jesus Christ, Wren. It’s about a man who picked your lock turning up on my sidewalk. It’s about you stepping out from where I could protect you. It’s about the fact that I asked you to do one thing and you didn’t. That’s what it’s about.”
I am staring at him. My eyes are wet. My chin is up.
“You asked me to do one thing—”
“Yes.”
“And you’ve been angry about it the whole way up, Jace. Get over it.”
He lets out a sound that is not a laugh. Not really.
“Get over it.”
“Yes. Get over it. I’m fine. He’s gone. Nothing happened.”
“Nothing—”
“Nothing happened, Jace.”
“Wren.”
“I am not going to apologize for the rest of my life because I opened a car door.”
“Goddammit, Wren. I needed you in that car and you weren’t.”
I go still.
“You did the one thing I asked you not to do at the moment I asked you not to do it.”
“Jace—”
“He could have had a knife on him.”
“Oh, please—”
“He could have had a fucking gun on him.”
I stop.
I blink.
“A gun?”
“Yes.”
“Like—an actual—”
“Yes, Wren.”
“On a sidewalk in Manhattan?”
“Yes.”
I am staring at him.
“Do you have one on you right now?”
He doesn’t answer.
I look down at the line of his belt. At his back. Up at his eyes.
“Jace.”
“Yes.”
“You—”
“Yes.”
“Right now.”
“Right now. And every other time I have walked you anywhere.”
I close my mouth and take a breath.
“I didn’t know that.”
“I know you didn’t.”
He closes the last of the space between us. My eyes are blazing.
I look up at him and I break.
Not soft. Not crying. Furious .
“Do you have any idea how sick I am of this, Jace? Five weeks. Five fucking weeks I have been hiding and looking over my shoulder and pretending I am fine and not picking up calls from a number I do not recognize. I am twenty-six. I have a life . I have a shop. I want to walk down a sidewalk in this city and not have to wonder if a man is on the corner.”
“Wren—”
“I want my life back . I want to be able to leave a room without three men in suits between me and the door. I want to drink a coffee in my own apartment in Brooklyn— my apartment, my bed , the one a man stood over yesterday—without thinking about him. I am so tired , Jace.”
“I know.”
“And maybe— maybe —if you hadn’t walked back into my life he would have laid off by now.”
He goes still.
I look at him. I shake my head—once, fast, no, no, no.
He nods. Once. Slow.
“I didn’t mean that.”
“Yeah, you did.”
“I—”
I am staring at him. My chest is rising and falling and we are six inches apart in his foyer with five weeks of every fucking thing I have been holding in still vibrating off me.
He takes my face in both hands and crashes his mouth onto mine.
There is no soft in it. Every place his mouth is on me is something he is refusing to argue about anymore.
I kiss him back exactly the same way.
I am furious . With him. With Tyler. With every minute of the last five weeks.
I feel it in the way my teeth catch his lower lip and the way my nails dig into his back through his shirt.
His hand drags from my face into my hair, fists it, tilts my head back, and the sound that comes out of me lands deep in my throat and I feel his body answer it.
He breaks the kiss to breathe.
His mouth is at my ear.
“I have been hard since the car, Wren.”
Heat pools low in me.
“I’ve been hard since you came on my hand on the bridge. The fight didn’t fix it. What you just said didn’t fix it. The sound you just made into my mouth has made it considerably worse.”
“ Good .”
He walks me backward through the foyer and into his kitchen. I get his buttons open. He gets my tank off over my head. My bra goes—I don’t know how.
“Jace —”
“Yeah.”
“Are you going to keep being mad at me?”
“Yes.”
“Then make it count.”
His hands go under my ass and he lifts me off my feet and sets me on the edge of his kitchen table, bare from the waist up, his hand at the back of my neck, his hips between my thighs.
I bite his lower lip.
He groans. Drags his hand from the back of my neck down to my breast. Cups it. Drags his thumb across my nipple.
“You are not going to do that again, Wren.”
“No.”
“Say it.”
“I’m not going to do that again.”
“Say it like you mean it.”
“Make me.”
His jaw locks.
He lifts me off the table, spins me, and bends me over it in one swift motion. His hand goes flat between my shoulder blades and presses. Holds.
Down I go without a word. My cheek turns toward him on the wood.
I am wet.
I am wet bent over his kitchen table with his hand pinning my back, my cheek on the wood, my body humming and my heart pounding and the corner of my mouth lifting because this —this man, this version of him, this whole night—is the hottest thing that has ever happened to me.
“Are you smirking, Wren?”
“Maybe.”
He lifts the back of the little white skirt up over my hips. Hooks his fingers in the waistband of my panties and drags them down—fast, over my thighs, gone.
His foot nudges the inside of mine and pushes it wider. Then the other. He spreads my stance until I’m open and braced and exactly where he wants me.
“Tell me what you want, Wren?”
“I want you to fuck me, Jace.”
I hear his belt. His zipper. He drags the head of himself through me once and I’m soaked—from the car, from the fight, from his hand still flat on my back and a breath punches out of me.
He gathers my hair in his fist and pulls—just enough to arch my spine under his other hand.
“Are you ready?”
“Yes.”
“Yes, what?”
“Yes, please , Jace.”
He drives into me in one hard stroke.
I cry out into the wood of the table.
He holds there. Buried. Hand fisted in my hair, other hand splayed flat between my shoulder blades, hips pressed flush to my ass.
“Listen to me.”
“Yes—”
“You stay where I put you. Are we clear?”
Stay where I put you. The words I refused an hour ago. And now I want nothing more than to do exactly as he says.
“Jace—”
His fist tightens in my hair.
“Are we clear, Wren?”
“Yes.”
“Good girl.”
He drives into me hard.
My hands brace flat on the wood and my cheek stays against it and his hand stays fisted in my hair and his other hand stays pinning my back and he is fucking me on his kitchen table like a man who has been holding his control all day and is finally letting it slip.
My hips push back to meet his. My hand goes white on the edge of the table.
“You’re going to come for me, Wren.”
“Yes,” I pant.
“Right here. On this table.”
“Please—”
“While I am still mad at you.”
“Yes—Jace, yes —”
My nipples are dragging across the wood with every thrust. I feel it building—low and tight and right there—and I am so close.
“Harder, Jace.”
He gives me harder.
“Harder.”
He gives me harder than that.
“Don’t stop—please don’t stop—”
It builds—fast, hot, blinding—and I cannot hold it.
“I’m coming—”
I cannot hold any of it.
I come apart on his cock and his kitchen table, shaking and sobbing his name like it’s the only word I have left, and he rides me through every second of it without slowing his hips—and the way I clench around him as it tears through me is what finally snaps his.
He comes hard. His hand fists in my hair, his hips slam flush to mine, and his whole body shakes through it. He spills into me with a sound I feel in my back, and then his fist unclenches from my hair and he bends over me and buries his face in the side of my neck.
He’s draped over me, his breath going hot against my skin, my cheek still pressed to the wood.
After a moment he lifts his head and presses a kiss to the back of my neck, and another to the curve of my shoulder, and I hum softly, melting under it.
He pulls out of me slow, and I shiver at the loss. Then he brings me up off the table and turns me around in his arms.
My face is flushed and my hair is wrecked from his fist and I am looking up at him like I don’t know which one of us is in charge anymore.
I slide my hands up his chest, and there’s something on his face I have never seen there before.
I break first.
“Jace, I am so sorry.”
“I know.”
“I shouldn’t have said that. About you walking back into my life. It’s not—none of this is—”
“It’s okay, Wren.”
He takes my face in both hands and just looks at me—long, steady, like he’s memorizing something—his thumb moving once across my cheekbone, his other hand sliding into my hair to hold me there. He doesn’t say anything.
I close my eyes, and when I open them he’s still looking at me. Whatever’s on his face is the closest thing I’ve ever seen to him without armor, and neither of us says the word that’s sitting between us in his kitchen, and neither of us has to.
He kisses me, and we breathe into each other with the thing that almost got said staying where it is for now.
He takes my hand and walks me down the hall to his room. In the dark we undress each other the rest of the way, and he pulls me down into the bed with him.
He gathers me into his chest, holding me there like he isn’t letting me go tonight. Skin to skin, nothing left between us.
I tuck under his chin. His heart is going steady against my cheek and his breath is warm in my hair.
I let myself have it.