I have my ways.I pointed at the chain lock, fury shaking through my finger. “Take down this shit and let me get inside, Jo. I won’t say it again.”
Her eyes bounced around the story corners again before she looked down and closed the door. The silence lasted more than one second. Fist prepared to tear down that fucking door if she didn’t open it, I snarled, about to yell her name at the top of my lungs. But then the door opened a tiny crack. That was all I needed to slip in.
She wasn’t standing by it when I entered. I shut it and called for her. When she didn’t answer, I stalked across the place, searching. “Jo, please. I have to talk to you.”
She appeared from her bedroom, one hand pushing shades up her nose, the other clinging to the thick cardigan covering her. I could still see the outline of her tits underneath. She wasn’t wearing a bra under that flimsy pale pink gown, and the cardigan fabric only accentuated the plumpness of her chest. I wanted to take the arms she was using as armory down so I could see her nipples, how taut they could become under my gaze. I strode toward her, but she slammed the bedroom door shut, keeping the room from my curious eyes, and took a step away from me. “You can’t call me Jo or come to my place in the middle of the night totalk.”
“If you like, we can do something a lot more fun than talk.”
“Tirone!”
“After what we had, that moment at the library, you can’t tell me what I can’t do, Jo, and I wouldn’t be here if you didn’t pull that shit. Unlike you, I made you a promise I intended to keep.” I moved toward her, and she kept taking steps back until her ass hit a wall and she had nowhere to back away from me. “We had a deal, and you broke it. Why?”
Her breath stuttered, fanning my face. “What deal?”
My palms pushed against the wall on either side of her, caging her in. “You know exactly what deal. Why did you stop coming to school? You missed two classes in a row. You promised me you’d be mine, Jo, and I promised you I’d wait. Why would you disappear on me?”
“I never made you any promises.”
“Yes, you did. Not in words, maybe.” I lifted my thumb, and she gasped, knowing what was coming. Slowly, the pad of my thumb rubbed against her lips, the softest thing I’d ever touched. “But these lips sealed our fate. You told me everything with your lips between mine.”
“You forced me into kissing you,” she panted.
“You have no idea what you’ve been doing to me, Jo. I’d battled myself for months and lost the fight. I had to make a move or I’d have gone mad. Literally. And you… You kissed me back.” My eyes dropped to where I was touching her. The engrained feeling of her mouth on mine in my head needed an encore, not as a reminder but as a fix. “You can’t take that away from me.”
She gulped. “Tirone, please leave me alone. This is insane.”
“Insanity is letting you go after I’ve found you.” I leaned in, both our breaths getting louder. “Insanity is not devouring your lips every day for the rest of my life.”
“No…Ty…”
I didn’t give her a chance to protest anymore. I breathed through her, reminding her of our bond that should never be untied. I took what she was still reluctant to give because I didn’t care what she had to say about it. She was mine either way. She just had to know it. It was my job to make her see it. One way or another.
She pulled away from me, her lips swollen. I wanted to bite on them until they bled, until she bit back and we stained each other with our blood. “You can’t do this,” she said.
“What did I just say? Don’t tell me I can’t be with you or touch you or kiss you. It’s you who can’t do this. You can’t go away whenever you like.”
“No, Tirone. I have to go away. As far away from you as possible.”
Don’t say that.“Why?”
“You know why.”
“I told you I’d wait.”
“Waiting isn’t kissing me whenever you feel like it, without permission. Waiting isn’t stalking me everywhere I go. You think I don’t see you when you lurk outside the stores I go to, the restaurants I eat at, and outside my building?”
“I wasn’t trying to be invisible. What’s wrong with watching over you? You’re a young woman living alone. I have every right to protect you.”
“I didn’t ask for your protection.”
“You don’t have to. You’re my girl. It’s my job.”
“I’m not your girl. Why can you not understand this is wrong and sick? I’ll never be with you.”
My patience had its limits, and my darkness wasn’t even as virtuous as I was. Her words spat flames on a monster she didn’t want awaken. “Don’t say that.”
She pushed my chest and ducked, slipping away under my arm. “That’s all I’m ever going to say. So you either leave me alone and I go back to school as your teacher, putting all this behind, or I’ll have to leave this whole city to get away from you.”