Total pages in book: 81
Estimated words: 75833 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 379(@200wpm)___ 303(@250wpm)___ 253(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 75833 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 379(@200wpm)___ 303(@250wpm)___ 253(@300wpm)
I should have bridged that with a joke, with something easy, but my mouth forgot every word except the ones that would betray me, so I said nothing. The silence wasn’t empty. It carried the thud of the washer, the scald of bleach in my throat, the steady knock of my heart against my ribs.
“Thought so,” he murmured, like he’d followed a thread from the party to this room and pulled it tight as if to reel me in like a fish on a line. The way he watched didn’t feel like he was checking a box. It felt like I was the only thing he’d come down here to see.
Then he kissed me.
No warning. No ask. His mouth found mine like he’d known exactly where to land. Warm, sure, tasting faintly of smoke and wintergreen like a mouthwash from this morning. The rough scrape of stubble shocked me enough to gasp, and he used it to angle deeper, to slide one palm up along my jaw and cup my cheek.
Everything in me went electric and liquid at the same time.
I didn’t think. My hands were already in his cut, fingers fisting leather like I had to hang on. The towel slid off the table and fell to the floor in a soft collapse. A dryer behind me thudded—zipper, belt buckle, or maybe it was my life roaring inside my head. I pressed into him as if he were the only cool thing in the heat or the only heat in my cold. I couldn’t tell which. The room narrowed. It was hard to breathe. A subtle break in our kiss allowed the soft sound I hated hearing myself make when his thumb skimmed the hinge of my jaw escape.
He angled to deepen the kiss, careful in a way that didn’t match the size of him, the violence people attached to his name. His other hand found the small of my back and anchored there, not pulling, just holding. He had just enough pressure to let me know I wasn’t getting away until he decided to let me. He was in control and somehow, that didn’t bother me a single bit. My knees relaxed. I arched without meaning to, lost every rule I’d ever written about who I could be around men like him.
When he lifted his mouth just enough to speak, his breath stroked my lip. “New bunny, huh?”
He said it lazy and sure, like it was the shape I’d arrived in, the box I belonged to. The words snapped like a rubber band in my chest.
“I’m not—” The rest tripped over my tongue. Not a bunny. Not a anything. Not for him. I didn’t know how to finish the sentence without sounding like a girl who wore turtlenecks to biker parties and trembled in laundry rooms.
He didn’t wait for my explanation. His mouth found the hollow under my ear and pressed, open and slow. I made another sound I didn’t recognize as mine. The heat behind me turned molten; the heat in me burned hotter. My hand slid up into his hair without permission from my brain, and my body leaned with a prayer, and as a problem.
I forgot to be careful. I forgot everything.
He moved with that same steady intention, not fumbling, not greedy, like he could take me apart in six motions if he wanted and he was choosing, for now, to map my body instead of dismantle. The small of my back hummed where his hand held me. My breath broke into pieces I couldn’t collect. I pressed my thighs together and felt a jolt of shame and want that made me dizzy.
And then he stopped.
Not because I pushed him. Because he felt me go tense and he read it like a road sign. The hand at my back didn’t pull away, rather it eased. His mouth lifted from my skin. He looked down at me from that dangerous height, and for a half beat, the eye-contact felt like a kiss we couldn’t survive.
“You’re nervous.” He didn’t say it like a complaint. He said it like he’d dropped a pin on a map.
I swallowed and wished there was a sink nearby so I could pretend I needed water. Something to escape. My lips tingled. I could still taste him. A part of me begged for him to ignore me and another wanted to keep going.
“I—” I started.
“I know,” he said, softer than anything I’d heard out of him. He stepped back a single step. I followed half a centimeter without meaning to, like a tide that hadn’t decided its direction. He noticed. His mouth twitched. It wasn’t a smile. It was a man learning me. I didn’t like the scrutiny of his attention.
The dryers droned. A washer hit spin and rattled hard enough that the metal table shook against my hip. Somewhere above us on the second floor, a cart squeaked along tile. Life kept going like my heart hadn’t just re-written itself around a stranger.