22. Chapter Twenty-Two #2
He looked at me for a long second, too long, honest-answer long.
"I'm tired of pretending we weren't real," he said. "I'm tired of being the only one who has to swallow my own name when someone asks who broke me."
My eyes burned. Rude. Completely unnecessary.
"You weren't the only one swallowing things."
His gaze flicked to my mouth. My brain, which had apparently been raised in a barn, supplied three deeply inappropriate responses.
I picked the least destructive. "Don't."
"I didn't say anything."
"You thought it loudly."
"Yeah," he said. "I did."
A laugh broke out of me, wrong time, wrong place, very us.
His face softened for half a second, and that was worse than the fight. So much worse.
He reached for me, then stopped. Hand suspended in the space between us, a choice offered, not taken. I hated how badly I wanted to close the distance for him.
"Lila."
Just my name again. The room narrowed to the bed behind him, the door behind me, the thin strip of carpet between us.
I crossed it first.
His mouth met mine hard enough to make the door rattle behind my back.
The kiss wasn't patient. We had already used up patience in hallways, green rooms, songs, stages, years.
His hands caught my waist, and mine went to his shoulders, skin warm under my palms. He tasted like sleep and mint and the coffee he must have chugged before passing out.
He kissed me like silence had been a punishment for both of us. I kissed him like I hated that it worked.
His fingers slid under the hem of my shirt, then stopped at my ribs. Still asking. I broke away enough to breathe.
"This is stupid."
"Yes."
"We are stupid."
"Historically."
"I'm still mad at you."
"Same."
I kissed him again, because apparently that was my rebuttal.
He backed me toward the bed, or I pulled him, or the room conspired. My knees hit the mattress. He followed me down, one arm braced beside my head, careful not to put his weight on me. His mouth found my neck. I forgot at least three principles.
Then he said, against my skin, "Tell me if you want me to stop."
My fingers tightened in his hair. What came out was, "I want you to stop making me want this."
He went still. The heat thinned, not vanished, shifted. He lifted his head, eyes on mine. There was no anger there. That made it harder.
"Okay," he said. He moved back immediately.
My body complained. Loudly. Treasonously.
I sat up, yanking my shirt down with hands that did not feel attached to a stable person.
"I didn't mean..."
"I know." He stood, breathing hard, running a hand through his hair. "But I'm not going to translate that into yes because I want it to be."
Now he was being decent. This night had no respect for narrative consistency.
"I should go."
"Yeah."
Neither of us moved.
I found one sock near the dresser and realized it was not mine. "Is this yours?"
He glanced at it. "Miles."
"Why is Miles's sock in your room?"
"Band."
"Disgusting explanation."
"Accurate."
I tossed it like it had venom. He laughed once, quiet and rough.
I wanted to stay. That was why I had to leave.
Except my feet didn't move. And he was watching me not move. And the room had gotten very quiet in a way that felt less like silence and more like a held breath.
"Lila."
"Don't."
"I didn't say anything."
"You're about to."
He wasn't. He crossed the room instead. Slow enough that I could've stopped him. I didn't stop him. He stood close enough that I could see the rise and fall of his chest, the line of his jaw, the specific quality of restraint in his eyes that I'd spent years trying to forget.
"Tell me to go to sleep," he said.
"Go to sleep."
"Tell me like you mean it."
I couldn't. He knew I couldn't. That was the whole problem.
He touched my jaw with two fingers, just that, so careful it made my stomach drop. His thumb traced my cheekbone and stopped like he was memorizing the measurement of it.
"I need you," he said quietly.
"I know."
"I need you to help me keep being good here."
I looked up at him. "That's not what either of us wants."
The restraint in his eyes collapsed. He kissed me again, slower this time, nothing like the door.
This one asked instead of taking, which was somehow worse because I had to answer it.
I answered it. I kissed him back with the full weight of longing and every song that had ever been about us without saying our names.
His hands moved into my hair. He made a sound against my mouth that I felt in my sternum.
"Still mad at me?" he murmured.
"Enormously."
"Good."
He walked me back toward the bed, and this time I didn't qualify it. My knees hit the mattress, and I sat, and I pulled him down with me, hands in his hair, and his weight settled against me in a way that my body recognized before my brain could issue any further objections.
He pulled back to look at me. The lamp was still on. I would have preferred darkness, for obvious emotional reasons, but he always needed to see. I remembered that. I had cataloged every version of the way he looked at me, and filed it somewhere I had subsequently tried to lose access to.
"Hi," he said.
"Don't get sentimental," I said.
"Too late."
He kissed my neck, my collarbone, the curve of my shoulder. I stared at the ceiling and pretended I was a person who had this under control. The pretense lasted approximately four seconds.
His mouth came back to mine, unhurried this time. He kissed down my throat, my sternum, and back up, and I stopped cataloging what was happening in favor of actually experiencing it, which my nervous system had opinions about.
"Evan."
He looked up.
“This means nothing.”
"Lila." His voice was quiet and certain and completely infuriating. "I haven't been able to make it mean nothing for four years. I'm not going to start tonight."
My chest did something complicated. I chose not to examine it.
"Okay," I said.
"Okay."
He kissed me again, slow and deliberate, and the last of the conversation dissolved.
He went between my legs, kissing slowly up my thighs.
He knew exactly how to drive me crazy; every second was deliberately slow, until he finally reached my core.
He acted like a man who was starving, and I was the only meal ever worth enjoying.
He licked and sucked, inserting a finger and curling it in just the way only he knew how, until I screamed his name while he didn’t stop until I was done.
What followed next was not graceful. There was a moment where my elbow caught his chin.
He swore. I laughed. He gave me a look so profoundly betrayed that I laughed harder, which he punished by pressing his mouth to that spot below my ear until I stopped finding anything funny.
He slid inside me, his piercing hitting my g-spot over and over; the pleasure was so intense I didn’t know what I was doing.
At some point I said his name the wrong way, the way that doesn't mean stop, that means the opposite of stop, and felt him go very still for half a second before he started to thrust again, harder this time, giving me exactly what I needed.
After, we lay in the particular quiet that doesn't need filling. His breathing was still uneven. My heart rate was having a personal crisis.
"You okay?" he asked finally.
"Structurally sound."
He made a sound. Laugh-adjacent.
I looked at the ceiling a while longer. His hand was on my waist. I considered moving it and then didn't.
"This doesn't fix anything," I said.
"I know."
"I'm still going to be difficult."
"I know, Lila."
"And I still think."
"Tomorrow," he said. "We can fight tomorrow."
I turned my head. He was looking at the ceiling too, jaw tilted up, hair destroyed. A version of him I had loved very specifically and tried very hard to edit out of my system.
It had not worked.
"Fine," I said.
"Fine."
A beat.
"Miles's sock is still over there," I said.
"I know."
"It's witnessing this."
"I'm aware."
"That's actually worse than the paparazzi."
He laughed, real this time, the version that went all the way up, and I felt it in the mattress and tried not to feel it everywhere else. I mostly failed.
I got up. Found my shirt. He watched me with the specific brand of warm attention that I had spent years not missing. He had not gotten better at keeping it off his face. That was a him problem. I was choosing not to engage with it.
"Sleep," I said.
"You're leaving."
"Obviously."
He didn't argue. He sat up, though, which meant I had to look at him,the whole picture, all at once, lit up and recent, before I made it to the door.
"Lila."
I stopped.
"Nothing," he said. Then: "Goodnight."
I looked at him for one second too long. Noted it. Did not explain it.
"Goodnight, Evan."
I went to the door, fixed my hair as much as possible, then glanced back at him. Rumpled, shirtless, barefoot, not untouched by the song, not untouched by me.
"You're still wrong," I said.
"So are you."
"Good talk."
"Terrible talk."
I opened the door.
The hallway was empty. For three seconds, I thought the universe had shown mercy. Adorable.
I almost made it down the hall, almost.
That was when I saw them. Three paparazzi across the hall, cameras up, already waiting. For me, for him, for anyone famous enough to monetize at midnight. Didn't matter.
The first flash went off, white and violent.
I froze with one hand still on the door.
Behind me, Evan's door opened. Of course. Because the universe was not a writer. It was a tabloid intern with caffeine poisoning.
"Lila?"
He stepped out shirtless, hair wrecked from my hands, mouth still red from mine.
The second flash hit.
Click. Flash. Fuck.