Chapter 17 An Extremely Poor Time for Chemistry #3
“But you do not get to decide that my wanting is only magic because it makes you feel safer.”
His hands opened at his sides. “I am trying not to take from you.”
“Then stop taking my answer!”
Ian looked as if I had struck him, and I almost wished I had because a slap would have been cleaner.
“All of you keep doing it,” I said, my voice lower now.
“Ronan decides when I know things. The council decides whether I should die. Evelyn decides my survival is manipulation. Grant decides my injury means he gets to remember my body. And now you’re deciding that if I want you, it cannot be real enough to count. ”
His throat moved. I hated the pain in his face. I hated more that it didn’t make me wrong.
“I do not know what is real either,” I said. “That is the truth. I don’t know how much is the bond. I don’t know how much is fear. I don’t know how much is being trapped in a room with the only person my body trusts right now.”
The mark pulsed warm, cruel and honest.
“But I know I kissed you,” I said. “I did that. And if I decide tomorrow that it was a mistake, that will be mine too.”
Ian didn’t speak.
I shifted on the bed, intending to stand again because apparently I had not learned a single lesson about gravity. The room tilted before my feet touched the floor. Ian moved before my body finished swaying, then stopped himself again with his hands half raised.
The sight nearly undid me. Careful, even now. Furious with himself, aching with want, eyes still gold, and still waiting.
Damn him.
“May I help you lie back?” he asked.
I wanted to be petty. I wanted to say no and crawl if I had to, but my knees were shaking, and pride was not the same as self-respect, though I had confused them often enough to know the difference by now.
“Yes,” I said.
He helped me settle against the pillows, then reached for the blanket at the foot of the bed. His hands were careful when he pulled it over my legs, so careful I wanted to scream at him and kiss him again in equal measure.
Then he stepped away but I caught his sleeve before he could go too far.
He froze.
I didn’t look at him. “I’m still mad.”
“I know.”
“Don’t sound relieved.”
“I am not.”
“You are.”
A pause. “Yes.”
The honesty almost pulled a laugh from me. It didn’t quite make it.
“I am mad,” I said again, because it mattered that he understood the shape of it. “But I am not ashamed.”
His breath caught.
I looked at him then. “Don’t make me carry shame for wanting you. I have carried enough things that didn’t belong to me.”
His face changed and the gold in his eyes dimmed slightly, not gone, but softened by something that hurt worse than hunger.
“I don’t want that,” he said.
“Then help me not do it.”
He looked down at the hand I still had curled in his sleeve. “Tell me how.”
I released his sleeve and lay back carefully. The bite ached now, the heat fading into a dull pulse that felt too much like loneliness for my comfort.
“Stay close,” I said.
His gaze lifted.
“Not in the chair by the door. Not across the room pretending distance solves things.” I looked at the chair beside the bed. “There.”
The request cost me, and he knew it.
“You are angry,” he said.
“Yes.”
“You still want me close.”
“Yes.”
The word came out hard. A challenge. A confession. A problem.
Ian’s face changed. Then he nodded once and sat in the chair beside the bed, not touching me, not taking the hand I had not offered, not hiding across the room where both of us could pretend the kiss had not happened.
For a long time, we said nothing. The moonlight shifted across the floor. Outside the windows, the ocean moved in the dark, steady and indifferent to werewolf politics, accidental mate bonds, and women who kept making decisions their survival instincts considered questionable.
Inside, the bite pulsed under my bandage, no longer only a wound and not yet anything I trusted.
At last, Ian spoke. “You are right.”
I kept my eyes on the ceiling. “I know.”
A quiet breath that might have been almost amusement left him.
“I will try not to decide for you again,” he said.
“Try harder than that.”
“Yes.”
The answer was immediate.
Good.
I turned my head toward him. “And Ian?”
He leaned forward slightly. “Yes?”
“If you ever stop kissing me like that because you think I am too fragile to know my own mind, I will become very difficult.”
His eyes held mine, dark and gold and wounded in ways I was beginning to recognize.
“You already are,” he said.
“That better be admiration.”
“It is.”
The bond warmed.
I should have hated how much comfort I found in that warmth.
Maybe tomorrow I would. Maybe tomorrow I would wake up furious, embarrassed, confused by my body and his restraint and the way I had nearly let him put his mouth between my thighs in a hotel suite while my supernatural bite glowed under bandages.
Tonight, I was too tired for the clean version of myself. Tonight, I had kissed him. I had wanted him. I had made him stop taking my answer away from me. Tonight, he had stayed close because I asked, and that would have to be enough.