“I know you wouldn’t do it on purpose,” I snapped, my voice shaking now, my chest tight, my hands useless at my sides. “But that doesn’t matter. That’s not how this works. One mistake—the wrong tiny thread that gets pulled—and everything unravels.”
I swallowed hard.
“And I can’t afford that,” I added, the truth settling in behind the fear. “I don’t have anything to fall back on.”
I forced myself to meet his eyes.
“That’s what this is,” I admitted, fight draining out of me. “This is me losing control of something I need to keep contained. And I don’t know how to do that with you.”
For a second, I wished I could take every word back—reshape them into something cleaner, something that didn’t expose quite so much—but it was already too late. They were out. Between us. Real in a way nothing else I’d said had been.
He didn’t move right away.
Didn’t answer.
Just watched me. Like he was seeing something he hadn’t before and wasn’t entirely sure what to do with it. Or maybe he did.
My heart kicked, uneven and too loud in the quiet, my breath hitching as the space between us stretched again—charged.
“Then don’t.” The words were low. Simple.
I blinked, thrown off just enough that my next breath came shallow. “That’s not?—”
“Don’t control it.” He stood as his words filled the air, the movement unhurried. The dress slipped from his knee to the cushion beside him, forgotten, unfinished.
His full height closed the distance between us without him taking a single step.
My body reacted before my brain caught up. A subtle shift forward. A breath that didn’t come out even.
“You’re asking me to let everything fall apart,” I whimpered.
“I’m not asking you to do anything.” His voice dropped, threaded lust and memory.
My stomach flipped.
His gaze held mine.
“This doesn’t fix anything,” I whispered.
“I’m not trying to fix it.”
The honesty of that hit harder than anything else he could’ve said. Because it meant he wasn’t trying to make this easier. He wasn’t trying to make it safer.
He was just… standing in it. With me.
And for the first time since we walked through that door—I stopped trying to pull us out of it.
His fingers brushed my jaw, the touch lighter thananything that had come before and somehow more devastating because of it.
My eyes slipped closed for half a second. Just long enough to feel it. To register the difference.
When I looked at him again, something in my chest had already made the decision my brain was still trying to catch up to.
Something in his expression shifted—a faint flicker, but enough.
Then he kissed me. It wasn’t rushed. Wasn’t sharp or consuming the way it had been before.
It was slower. Deeper.