Chapter 14
DEZ BOUNDS OFF THE COUCH and toward the open door to her suite. She never thought she’d say this, but Rafe’s the only person she wants to see right now.
“Rafe. What the hell is going on—”
She breaks off when she realizes he’s been …
crying? His face is flushed, and he looks shattered, though it seems like he’s trying not to let it show.
He holds the doorframe as if he needs it for support.
When he meets her gaze, his eyes are damp, the cobalt of his irises so deeply pigmented Dez has to remind herself to breathe.
“Can we talk?” His voice is low. He looks past her, into the common area where Yael and Simon have taken front row seats facing them on the couch. “Alone?”
Dez takes hold of Rafe’s white shirtsleeve, feeling the heat of his forearm through the thin fabric. “Come on.” She leads him to her room.
“Got protection, Rafe?” Yael calls after them as Dez clicks her bedroom door closed.
Inside her room, Rafe stands facing the window, raking a hand through his dark hair. Dez lingers by the bed, measuring the distance between them in the seconds it would take to close it. Three if she walks. One if she surrenders to the magnetic tug she feels now that they’re alone.
She makes herself linger by the bed, a safe distance away.
“He was my friend.”
Dez tips her head, confused. “Who was your friend?”
“Charles.”
“Charles?”
So he’s in on the story now, too? And he wants Dez to believe he and Charles were friends?
“I’m sorry,” she offers, but what does he want her to say? “Look, Yael told me what Moriah told the last-years. I get that there’s an official story, but let’s be honest, you and I were there, Rafe. We heard it—”
“I never thought it would end like this for him.” He turns to face her, catching her off guard with what looks like actual, open vulnerability. He’s serious. Is he serious?
“Don’t lie to me, Rafe.”
He closes his eyes. “As your mentor, I’m forbidden from lying to you. A tradition started by my own mentor. For better or worse, I can’t break it.”
Dez doesn’t know what to think about this. What if it really happened like they’re all saying it did? She was far away, and it was dark. And yeah, the sound was like something from a nightmare, but maybe that’s what it sounds like when someone leaps to their death. Who is Dez to say?
She’s so tired. So emotionally beat up. Her sense of reality has been undermined at every turn ever since Mo showed up at the Dairy Barn. She feels herself about to break.
And here’s this gorgeous guy openly breaking in front of her.
“What was Charles like?” she asks.
“He wanted,” Rafe says slowly, “more than anyone, to be a part of things.”
Rafe talks like lying’s never been invented. Like he’s truly grieving, raw, in a state of shock.
A second later, she’s standing at his side.
“Hey.” She puts a hand on his shoulder. Feels his heat again, warmer always than she expects him to be. “I’m sorry.”
He looks at her hand, really more on his chest than his shoulder. His muscles are taut under her fingers, the kind of body it could be a lot of fun to hold on to. He looks at her. Dez’s cheeks flush. Should she take her hand off? Has it been there a weird amount of time?
Then his hand comes over hers, his fingers closing gently around her fingers. A ripple passes through her, and she wants …
Him, in spite of everything.
His lips part, and she finds herself staring at his full lower lip, wondering what happens next, how the two of them got like this in the first place. How they’ll ever go back to not holding hands against his chest.
Desire fizzes inside her. At moments since she got here, Rafe’s arms have felt like the only solution to the most fucked-up equation.
Now she finds herself imagining what it might be like to be held by him, with and without clothes.
Mindless sex with Rafe might be the only thing that could take Dez’s mind off her life.
Let her forget about being a fugitive from justice for a while.
Let Rafe’s muscles be the only thing she has to focus on …
She thinks again about what his bare chest would look like moving over her in bed. What his back would feel like if she ran her nails up and down it.
“Dez?” He steps toward her, both of them now only about a foot away from her bed. She holds her breath and meets his eyes and—there—attraction throbs between them.
Oh fuck, he wants her, too.
This isn’t going to end well.
“I keep asking myself what I could have done differently,” Rafe says. “What could have stopped this from happening.” He runs one hand up and down his biceps, a nervous habit maybe. One that shows off the toned muscles of his arms.
“But I can’t go back in time,” he continues. “I can only look ahead. You know? Because there’s more out there I’m needed for.”
Dez meets Rafe’s eyes, surprised to find familiar torture mirrored back at her.
The longer she looks, the warmer she feels.
And the more she believes him. Okay, there are still gaps in the logic.
The kinetics are confusing, and that sound …
But she’s no expert on acoustics. If Dez is an expert on anything, it’s recognizing a cinematic moment.
And this is one. In real life. This is the close-up shot in the movie where the audience watches two people forever bond over the kind of suffering that transcends reason.
These are the kind of scenes in movies that defy dialogue. Dez and Rafe don’t have to say a thing.
She feels him reach for her hand. The simplest touch coming from Rafe makes her tingle. Then she feels a weight in her hand. He’s giving her something.
A phone.
“What’s this?”
“We call them cellular phones. You use these buttons, dial someone else’s number, and occasionally, they pick up.”
Dez elbows him. “I thought first-years couldn’t be trusted with such revolutionary technology.”
“They can’t.” Rafe presses a finger to his lips. Shhh. “Take it for the night, and don’t tell anyone.”
“Why?”
“I know you have people back home who want to hear from you.”
Dez swallows and pockets the phone. She wants to thank him, but her voice gets caught in her throat. It’s kind, unexpectedly kind, what he’s just done without her asking. A tear runs down her cheek.
“Oh,” Rafe says quietly, stepping closer, reaching out.
Gently, with his thumb, he wipes the tear away. She holds her breath and tips her head toward him, new tears welling. It’s too much, the sweep of his gaze across her face, like he’s reading her every emotion. She turns her head, turns her body away.
“I’m fine,” she says, wiping her eyes, taking a breath.
“You don’t have to be.”
“Please,” she says, her back to him, “go back to being a dick. I know how to deal with that.”
“What don’t you know how to deal with?” he whispers.
She turns to face him, and he’s right there, his body so close to hers their chests touch on the next inhale. If she leans in a little closer, if she lets her body take over, her mind can finally turn off.
They’re staring at each other. He smells like petrichor. Like snow. Dez can barely breathe.
“Don’t,” he says. “Don’t do that with your lip.”
“What?” Her hand goes to her lips, embarrassed.
“That trembling business. Stop it.”
Dez grimaces. “We’re not shooting a scene, Rafe. You can’t direct how I cry.”
“This is not an aesthetic preference. It’s self-preservation.”
“Excuse me?” She crosses her arms over her chest, her elbows jutting into his very taut abs.
“Your mouth is driving me crazy, and I swear if you draw any more attention to it—”
“What’s wrong with my mouth?”
“It’s too fucking sweet,” he says, annunciating every syllable.
Dez opens her mouth, closes it. She feels Rafe’s eyes watching these motions like he’s hungry, like she’s his favorite kind of feast. He lets out a soft, frustrated moan that sends a targeted bolt of heat right to Dez’s core.
He’s given her no choice. She grabs his shirt and pulls him to her, pressing her objectionable lips to his. Serves him right.
And serves her right, too. Because the way Rafe kisses her back—his mouth hot and firm and pliant, his teeth toying with her lower lip, and his hands so firmly tangled in her hair, then around her neck—it changes Dez on a cellular level.
His kiss is strong, knowing exactly what it wants. The precise right amount of pressure, the heat of his tongue exactly where she wants it in exactly the right dose, the way his face fits against hers as she tips her head back and moans.
Who kisses like this? Who’s this fucking good at kissing?
He’s cast a spell on her, put her in a kind of ecstatic trance, so it takes her a white-hot thirty seconds to ask the all-important question:
What the hell is she doing, kissing her mentor?
She pulls away, her hands on his chest as she glares at him and gasps for air. She’s furious that he’s gotten her so turned on. And she finds in his eyes the exact same accusation, the same exact fury and desire.
Interesting.
“Fuck it, it’s fine,” Rafe says, his voice breathy and short as he pulls Dez back to him and kisses her deeply again, and again, and again. His mouth is intoxicating, his hands, firm on her back, decadent and thrillingly possessive.
So, they’re doing this. She might as well enjoy it.
She slides her hands up his chest, grips his shoulders and pulls her body to his. He tears at the neckline of her white button-down shirt, popping buttons, liberating her breasts.
“No bra,” he says with obvious relish as he dips his head and draws her to his mouth.
He sucks her nipple firmly. She cries out in pain and pleasure, pulling his hair until she makes him do the same.
She hikes a leg around his waist, pleased when he responds by deftly lifting her up, so that the heat of him is right against the heat of her, and God, he’s hard and fucking huge.
“You’ve been thinking about my mouth?” she teases as his tongue circles her areola.
“On an endless loop.”
“What is it,” she gasps, hips writhing against his—the friction agonizing and insane—“about my innocent mouth that tortures you?”
“It’s not innocent in my fantasies,” he says with a shuddering breath. “It gets in all kinds of trouble.”
“I’m going to need examples.” She lowers her leg to climb off him, only so that she can climb onto him better from the bed. She tugs him with her, needing to be horizontal with this man, his muscles, and his mouth.
“In my fantasies,” he says, his voice breathy and hot, “the way you suck dick is unholy.”
“Well, let’s see about that.” Dez pulls the duvet back and climbs onto the sheets, her hand at the waist of Rafe’s pants, like she owns what’s inside there, like she knows how good it is. Desire has never made her so bold before.
She licks her lips, eager to show him what she can do.
She gets only the first button undone, glimpses the dark hair beneath his navel that she longs to put her mouth to, before Rafe steps away, forcing distance between their bodies.
“Wait,” he says.
Dez is so out of breath, she thinks she must be confused. She tugs at him again. “Come on.”
“I can’t.”
She blinks up at him and sees the sudden distance in his eyes. “You … what?”
“I should go,” he says, reaching to rebutton his pants.
“What are you talking about? What happened?”
“What shouldn’t have happened.”
His words actually hurt, like someone’s punched her in the stomach. “Are you serious right now?”
“Look, I am in physical pain over how much I want to bend you over this bed and fuck you into oblivion right now. But …”
“But what?” Dez clutches her torn shirt over her breasts. “You’re committed to your weird brand of sadomasochism?”
“I just can’t.”
She flops backward onto the bed. Why should she have expected anything else from Rafe but this arbitrary mind game? She’s still so turned on, so in need of him—and now she’s wild with fury, too.
“I’ll see you tomorrow?” Rafe says, already at the door.
“Can I count on you to be a giant dick again?”
He tosses his head. “Odds are good. But before that”—he has the fucking nerve to smile at her—“I’m going to make myself come several times imagining that soft little whimpering sound you made when I sucked on your tits.”
“Get out.”
“That was supposed to be hot. That was not supposed to make you hate me more.”
“If you want me to stop hating you, you can start by tearing off the rest of my shirt and throwing me up against that wall.” She points.
“That wall? That’s your wall of choice?” He studies the wall next to the window as if making plans, imagining the angles.
Dez throws a pillow at him.
“Good night, Dez.” She can hear the bastard smiling as he ducks. “Good night, Dez’s bad aim. Good night, Dez’s filthy mouth. Good night, Dez’s superfine ass.”
“Don’t let the door break your dick on the way out.”
Too soon, he’s gone, and Dez is alone in her room.
She lets out a frustrated grunt as her hand slips down inside her thong.
Her fingers make slow circles around her clit, remembering his mouth on hers.
How she’s never been kissed like that before.
She can’t believe how wet he made her—right before he walked out.
She hates him.
But she comes fast and hard as she thinks of him, thinking of her, later in his bed.
It’s only after she’s spent and exhausted, getting up to brush her teeth, that she sees it.
The long white snakeskin between her sheets.
Still warm, as if it had just been shed.