"It's not that."
I watch his throat move as he swallows. He's not going to reach for me. He's going to sit there and let me decide, the way he held out the jacket on two fingers, the way he opened the stairwell door without touching me.
He keeps giving me the choice. And I keep choosing wrong.
One more step, close enough that I can see him swallow.
"I need—"
The words stop in my throat.I don't know how to finish that sentence, don't know what I'm asking for. His hands on me, his mouth, the oblivion of letting someone else carry the weight for five minutes?
All of it. None of it. Something I can't name but my body remembers after years of trying to forget.
His hands stay flat on the desk, deliberately still, giving me the choice he's always given me—the jacket on two fingers, the door opened without touching, this moment where he waits for me to decide.
I take another step.
nine
Angelina
Iclose the distance between us and kiss him.
Not soft. Not tentative. I grab the front of his shirt and pull him up from the chair, and his hands finally leave the desk to catch my waist, and I'm kissing him like I'm drowning and he's air.
He lets me lead. Lets me take. His mouth opens under mine and I taste coffee and want and something darker I don't have a name for, something that's been waiting twelve years for this exact moment.
You're kissing your stalker. The man who watched you through cameras. The man who left you.
I kiss him harder.
When I pull back, we're both breathing hard and his hands are on my hips, light, not gripping, ready to release if I flinch. Ready to let me go if I change my mind.
I don't flinch. I don't change my mind.
"Not here," I say, and my voice comes out rougher than I expect, scraped raw by need I've been suppressing for days. "Chesca's room shares a wall with this one."
He understands immediately. The guest room at the far end of the hall, far enough that an eight-year-old won't hear anything she shouldn't.
I turn and walk toward the door without taking his hand, without looking back. The surveillance room disappears behind me with all those monitors showing empty rooms, my life reduced to pixels, and I keep walking because if I stop, if I think, I'll remember every reason this is insane.
I'm leading my stalker to his bedroom. I should have called the police earlier. But I'm wet and aching and if he doesn't touch me in the next sixty seconds I might actually lose my mind.
Nonna Rosa would be horrified. Or maybe she'd laugh. "Tesoro, the heart wants what it wants. The body wants it faster."
The guest room door opens under my palm and I walk through, leaving it open behind me.
An invitation. A choice. His choice now.
His footsteps follow. I hear them even though he moves quietly, feel the slight shift in air pressure as he enters the room behind me. I knew they would. I knew he'd follow.
The door clicks shut and he walks by me.
I don't give him time to think, either. My palms hit his chest and I shove hard, sending him backward onto the mattress with a grunt of surprise, and I'm already climbing over him with my knees bracketing his hips before he can recover.
I'm in control. I need to be in control.
I kiss him again, hard and taking. My fingers find the hem of his shirt and drag it up, and he helps by sitting up enough to pull it over his head, and then my hands are on his bare shoulders,his chest, the ridges of muscle I've been pretending not to notice for five days.