This thing between us.
A livewire that bound us together.
It had been there since the beginning. Since that first moment our eyes had collided in my once favorite coffee spot. The place I’d gone every day for months after, hoping he’d be there, waiting on me again. Only, he never had, and I wasn’t that desperate that I’d go and hunt down one of the eligible O’Donnellys—I wasn’t about to make an ass of myself over a fool man who’d ghosted me.
Even as I accepted that he didn’t deserve me after what he’d done, I also accepted that I knew why he had.
Without putting words in his mouth, I’d seen the second he’d had to take a business call at the end of our meal, and how a mask had come down over his features as a result.
Like any joy, any feeling, any sense of pleasure that was to be found in our time together had immediately disappeared.
Washed away like dirt in the rain.
It had hurt to behold. Even now, the memory of it was enough to make me cringe, because that level of control, that ability to shut everything off and become an automaton wasn’t something to envy but to dissect.
After being ghosted though, it made a woman doubt herself. And as confident as I was, I wasn’tthatconfident. Still, the way he looked at me now was a reminder of what arced between us.
Of the heat and the tangled whip of fire that lashed at us both.
It sounded like an exaggeration, but it wasn’t. It was the wholehearted truth.
My breath stuttered in my chest as I watched him watch me, his gaze dropping down to the knot of my bathrobe.
"If I tugged on that," he rasped, "what would I find underneath it?"
I swallowed. "Me and little else." A bandage didn’t count as a covering, did it?
He growled under his breath, and then his hand dropped to the knot and he pulled on it.
Once.
Then he stopped.
My heart did too.
He kept his fingers there, around the loose tie, and I waited, heart in my throat now, as I wondered if he’d tug on it, carry on until it opened, revealing my bare body as I promised.
The ache in my head and wrists were memories of another time, another place.
They’d gone, whispered away by the non-existent breeze in the gym.
I was pretty sure the clock froze as well as the rest of the world, the universe itself contracting as he stared at me. As I stared at him. Our gazes tangling with the force of the atoms themselves in the Hadron particle collider.
Then, he did as we both wanted, but neither were willing to say.
He tugged.
The knot parted, the tie falling away, and a sliver of my body was revealed to him.
He groaned under his breath as that same hand slipped to my waist, parting the two halves of the robe and showing even more of my form to him. I didn’t do anything, determined that he’d make this first move, seeing as he’d been the one to make the last.
At that moment, my brain was wired to focus on him and only him, which, with the clusterfuck I’d made of my life, was exactly what I needed.
I felt the pressure of his fingertips against my skin as if each one were a burning brand. It was insane how deeply they seared me, as if he’d pressed them against a fire then pushed them into my skin. Crazier still that it felt so good.
He gripped me there, for a second, before he traced my ribs, soaring higher and higher until his hand cupped my breast.
All air stuttered out of my lungs, my lips parted noiselessly as I looked down at where his tan hand connected with my pale flesh.