She stomped her way back in front of me, the tip of her crimson head not even reaching the base of my chin. She jabbed hers up at me, clocking the aggressive gesture through my peripherals.
“Are you gonna look at me?”
The whiskey had warmed unpleasantly in my mouth, but it was holding my tongue down so I couldn’t complain.
“James.”
Fuck me. I’d blame it on being drunk if my name didn’t sound like that every time it rolled off her lips—like a bite right down to the core of the sweetest fruit. It dripped out of her, curling gently around her sharp tongue and making me itch to suck it right off. My name was a succulent hypnotism when wielded by her voice, my brain going all sorts of stupid when she used it.
So it stood to reason that stupidity seized control of my functionality when she pitched another cloying call of my name, and I swallowed the body-temperature whiskey right down.
God-fucking-dammit.
“What?” I stabbed the single syllable her way but kept my eyeline straight.
No way I was risking a look down when she was wearing so very little, and I’d reached my limit for bad decisions tonight one twenty-one-year-old’s orgasm ago.
“As nice as the underside of your chin is, I’m not gonna talk to it. Look at me.”
Just over her wet head was a framed painting of a farmhouse with a white picket fence curling around a stalky meadow of flowers. I started meticulously identifying every color of bloom brushed onto the canvas.
Pink. Lilac. Ivory.
“What, are you scared to look at me now too?”
Teal. Plum. Yellow.
“James, I’m serious. Stop ignoring me,” she asserted. Or tried. There was an odd quiver stitched into her attempt.
Orange. Red. Burgundy.
An unsettling beat stoked the silence before two small hands cupped the sides of my face and yanked my focus down.
“Please?”
Then, colors to count didn’t exist in my world anymore.
Not a single one except for green.
Green was all that mattered and all that I saw. Big and round. Intoxicated on a high dosage of livewire emotion. Solely dedicated to one point of focus. A harsh crinkle of worry was right between those undoing eyes as she moved them between mine.
The wild way she was staring up at me kicked a brand new hole through the middle of my chest, her plea lodged inside and never coming out. It was worse than all the poison in the world, that one word. It didn’t inflame my blood or twist my muscles or even stop my heart.
It stopped my entire world.
My hands had curled around hers on my face, meaning to pry them off. But somehow our fingers ended up entwined together on an impulse I forgot to fight.
She squeezed my fingers through her little ones, and I did it right back with pressure meant to hurt. Meant to make her let. The fuck. Go.
She didn’t.
And I couldn’t.
I couldn’t do anything I was supposed to around this woman.
“I’m looking at you.” She didn’t even flinch at the bullish strike of my voice. “What do you want, Scarlett?”
I was shaking, practically vibrating with hot tension. It’d expanded every single muscle in my body with heat so furious, I’d never felt so large, so mountainous, or prone to attack in my entire life.