Chapter 36 WREN
WREN
I reach for him before my eyes are open and my hand finds cold sheet.
I sit up fast.
The bedroom is dim. The bed is empty beside me. The hallway beyond it is dark.
“Jace?”
No answer.
My heart kicks against my ribs — then I see the note propped against the lamp.
Back soon.—J
Where is he? Why didn’t he wake me? What was so urgent in the middle of the night that he—
I stop and swallow.
Tyler.
I sit up in the dark and I know where he is and I know why and my heart is pounding because the man I love is somewhere across the city right now doing something I will never ask him to describe.
I should be horrified. I’m not.
I get out of bed and walk through the dark apartment barefoot, the hem of his t-shirt brushing the middle of my thighs, and I go to the windows because I don’t know what else to do with myself. Part of me is afraid of what I might see out there. The rest of me wants to see him no matter what.
Manhattan is still dark. The city is a field of lights below me. Across the water Brooklyn is quieter.
I stand there with my arms folded over my stomach and I wait.
* * *
I don’t know how long I stand there before I hear the elevator and the apartment door.
Footsteps stop.
I turn around and he’s there.
Jace.
In a dark shirt I haven’t seen him wear before. Something tells me there was a reason for it.
His right hand is wrecked. Even in the half-light I can see it. The split across his knuckles is dark and swollen.
We look at each other.
Neither of us moves.
His throat works.
“Wren.”
It comes out rough.
I cross the apartment to him.
I’m walking and then I’m running the last few steps and I reach up and I take his face in both my hands and I pull his mouth down to mine.
He stops breathing.
I kiss him like I have been waiting to kiss him my entire life. Like the bedroom in my parents’ house didn’t happen. Like the hallway and the Uber and Tyler in my apartment and the lamp and the sidewalk didn’t happen. Like the only thing in the world is his mouth.
He’s not kissing me back.
He’s holding still.
I pull back just enough to look up at him.
His jaw is locked. His good hand is at the small of my back but he hasn’t moved it. His ruined hand is held away from my body like it doesn’t belong near me.
“Jace.”
“Wren.”
His voice comes out wrong. Rough. Like he’s holding the rest of it down.
“You just—” He stops. Starts again. “You just had the worst night of your life. I am not about to take anything from you in a state like that. Not tonight. Not ever.”
“I’m not in shock, Jace.”
“Wren—”
“I’m not asking because of what happened. I’m asking because I have been awake for an hour standing in front of the windows waiting for you. Because I knew exactly where you were. Because I know exactly what I want.”
His eyes close.
“I want all of you. The version of you who just walked through that door. Not a softer one. Not a careful one.”
He opens his eyes and slides his hand slow up my back until it’s cradling my head.
“I don’t want to touch you with this hand.”
“Touch me with that hand.”
“Wren—”
“Jace. Touch me.”
He doesn’t move.
I take his ruined hand in both of mine, gentle, and lift it to press my lips to the inside of his wrist.
His pulse is hammering against my mouth.
When I look up at him he’s wrecked. His green eyes have gone dark.
“I am not afraid of any part of you, Jace.”
Something gives in him the second I say it. His hand slides into my hair and he pulls my mouth back to his and kisses me like he’s done waiting, done holding the door shut on himself, his other arm banding around my waist to drag me in against him. There’s nothing careful left in it.
I get my hands between us and find the hem of his shirt and draw it up, and he breaks the kiss just long enough to let me pull it over his head.
I take my time with the right sleeve, easing the fabric down over the swollen knuckles like the cotton could hurt him, and his mouth finds my neck while I do it, open and hot against my pulse.
He’s all bare chest and ink and breath, and his hands haven’t stopped moving over me once.
Then I go still.
I pull back just enough to look at him, and for a second he doesn’t understand—his hands stilling on me, his brow drawing in, like he’s braced for me to change my mind.
I haven’t. I lay my palm flat against his chest and press, slow, walking him back the last step until the couch catches the backs of his knees, and I watch it land—watch him understand what I want and let himself sink down onto it.
He sits looking up at me, and his hands come to the backs of my thighs and drag up to grip, holding me there in front of him.
I reach down and catch the hem of his t-shirt—the one I’ve been wearing at the windows for an hour—and pull it up and off and let it drop. Then I’m standing over him, bare, and I let him look.
His eyes move over every part of me, hungry and wanting.
Then I climb into his lap, knees on either side of him, his hands sliding to my hips and gripping my ass, while I reach between us and work his belt open, and the button, and free him.
I sink down onto him slow, taking him in inch by inch, and we both moan—loud, the sound tearing out of us at the same time in the dark.
There’s nothing held back in him now. He moves with me from the first stroke, up into me as I come down. His hands slide up from my hips to my breasts, his thumbs finding me until I gasp, his mouth on my jaw, my throat, like he’s trying to be everywhere I am at once.
His hand drags up my side and his thumb finds the bruise on my arm—four marks the shape of someone else’s fingers—and for a breath he slows and presses his lips to it, so gently it undoes me, and then he looks up at me with everything that put him in that warehouse tonight still in his eyes.
He says it before I can.
“I love you.”
It doesn’t come out the way it has before. There’s no warning. No build.
“Nothing and no one is taking that from us again. Do you hear me?”
“Yes.” I whisper it down at him.
His hand comes up and his fingers tighten on my jaw.
“Say it.”
“Nothing and no one.”
He pulls my mouth down to his and kisses me like the version of him I have never had—the one who almost lost me and just came home from somewhere I will never ask about.
I meet him there. I match him. I let him hear me say his name the way I have never let him hear it—full and breaking and unhidden.
We move together, and he doesn’t look away the whole time, and those green eyes alone could make me come.
“I love you,” I tell him again, and I kiss his jaw. His cheek. The corner of his mouth. “So much.”
His breath catches.
“I love you, baby. God, I love you.”
His hand at my back drags lower and grips my hip hard enough I know I will find his fingerprints there tomorrow and I don’t care. I want them. I want every print of him on me to replace every print of someone else.
My arm wraps around his back and clings, and I find his eyes.
“Don’t let me go.”
His arms tighten around me, all of me.
“Never.”
When I come apart it’s with his mouth on mine and his hand at the back of my head. He follows me a few seconds later, a hard shudder going through him, his face dropping to my neck on a low, ragged sound.
We stay like that, not moving, his face still buried where it fell, his arms locked around my back, both of us breathing slow. After a moment I find his ruined hand and bring it up between us. He lifts his head then, watching me, as I press it flat over my heart and hold it there.
He doesn’t look away. He lets me keep it there.