Breaking me out of my own mindfuck, Scarlett reached across to set the halfway-gone bottle on the nightstand and then sat back on her heels. She needed to leave back to her own bed, and in that head of hers, she knew it. She was just ignoring it completely.
“Have you ever thought about getting a tattoo?” she asked suddenly, her gaze trained on my chest.
“No.”
She pondered my bare skin for a moment, tilting her head to the side with a pinched mouth. “I think you’d look good with one.”
Then she wiggled closer on the bed, and every muscle in my body tensed as she reached out to me.
“Right here,” she breathed, grazing delicate fingertips across my left pec.
I sucked back a sharp breath as she touched me and held it. Warnings flashed through my head in neon green not to look at her, not to dare smell her sweet skin, and certainly to not be enough of an idiot and touch her back.
She’d come so close her knees were sitting at my thigh, and when she finished outlining where she thought I should permanently mark my skin, she didn’t move back.
Not one goddamn inch.
“I have a tattoo, you know.”
Her voice was such a soft purr, I nearly missed the words encased in it. But I caught them and dropped a glance down her body in confusion.
“I’ve never seen a tattoo on you.”
And I’ve seen much more of your body than I should.
She rolled to sit on her side, getting comfortable. “It’s right over my heart, but I had it done in white ink.”
Her proximity was closing in and she was pretending not to notice, but I did. Her act wasn’t sly, but it was pulse-racing. The closer she settled to me, the harder my body warred with itself until physical pain became a part of the battle.
Half of me was roaring to push her back and bark at her to get into her own bed. The other half of me was tearing itself to pieces the longer I sat there without dragging her against me to smother her in bad decisions that would feel so fucking good.
Barely keeping the timbre of my voice in check, I asked, “What is it?”
She blinked at me. “A scar.”
Judgment worked at my scrunching expression, and I was too exhausted to stop it.
“Why would you scar yourself with a scar?” Mindlessly, I lowered my stare to where her heart was behind my shirt. “Seems redundant.”
“It’s poetic,” she insisted. She picked up the sheet laying over my legs between her fingers and started to play with it. I wondered with curiosity if she was nervous. “I got it for Johnny right after he died. He was the only person ever allowed to call me Scar.”
My gaze that kept an eye on her wayward fingers ripped up to her face. For the first time since she’d come over to my bed, she refused to meet my stare. She kept her entire focus on the sheet she fussed with, and the ache Scarlett put in my chest from nearly the first day we met intensified.
Now it felt like an open gash, bleeding out fire instead of blood.
“I figured I scarred my heart already by making him get on that plane that day to come see me, so why not have the evidence of it visible?” She shrugged just one shoulder, a habit of hers when she was uncomfortable I’d noticed. “I like to think it's two-fold. A scar to remember him and the nickname he always called me, and then also a reminder of what I leave on everything I touch. A big, nasty scar.”
Her voice dropped, falling like a teardrop, and the half of me that demanded I take her and hold her wailed until the smarter half of me disappeared in one of its screams. The need to touch her vibrated in my veins until my fists shook.
The strain to hold on to the boundaries that kept my world shaped was unimaginable.
Like she was holding a lit match to my hand and was waiting to see how long I could withstand the burn before I crushed the flame out with a searing pinch.
In the dimly lit room, Scarlett’s fingers were a pale motion sliding slowly up the buttons of my shirt on her body. The burning strain scorched my lungs, and it felt like I was inhaling flames as I watched her. She paused over the top button, hovering in wait as beads of cold sweat built on my hairline.
“Do you wanna see it?” she whispered, teasing the first button.
What I really wanted was to rip the fucking thing off completely, buttons bouncing off the walls, and tie her wrists together above her head with the strands of fabric.