He started tugging on my arm, and I looked at him. He wasn’t leaning on the steering wheel anymore. Now he was leaning toward me.
“What are you doing?” I asked him warily.
His answer was to keep tugging me to him, not stopping until my resistant head was pressed to his faithless chest.
Still without speaking, he started stroking my hair.
“Stop it,” I demanded.
He kissed the top of my head and kept stroking, a soothing, familiar motion, his heavy hand moving with just the perfect amount of pressure from my temple to the ends of my long hair.
Perfect because he’d done it a thousand times. More. This used to be how he’d soothe me down from a temper.
“Stop it,” I repeated faintly.
Just like the bastard to declare a truce and then launch an attack.
And somehow it was working. I was leaning into him, relaxing into his familiar embrace.
I caught myself and tried to push away.
He wouldn’t let me. And he was stronger than me, the bastard.
I struggled harder, then harder. It did me not one bit of good. He held me to him easily, both of my wrists captured in one of his hands.
He knew me, knew how I fought. The first thing he’d done was restrain my hands, or more specifically, my vicious nails.
“Why are you doing this?” I panted at him. I was still struggling, but not as hard now. I’d quickly worn myself out.
“Why won’t you let me comfort you?” he said, the words mumbled into the top of my head.
I don’t know how, I thought. Even if I wanted that, wanted to pretend with you long enough to feel better, I don’t know how.
But I said none of it. Instead I kept on struggling in his hold.
Finally he let me go, and I turned away from him to stare back out the window.
“You were always like this.” His tone was fond, damn him. “Even when you were just a scrappy little kid. Always so extreme. You take things either with a stoic face or you lose your mind. Never any middle ground. I miss that, you know. You always challenged me.”
I had nothing to say to that.
“But today,” he continued, voice going softer with a tender emotion that he had no right to, “give me some middle ground. Let me comfort you, or at least, comfort me.”
“Please,” he said, closer now. “Comfort me.”
I blame the please. Hearing that word coming from those lips was hopelessly disarming to me, so when he pulled me to him again, I didn’t fight him. I laid my head over his black, traitorous heart, and let the tears fall.
I was weary of trying to suppress them, and they came out freely for a time as I quietly sobbed against my enemy’s chest.
How could you find comfort in the soul that had shattered you?
I didn’t know, but perversely, I found it anyway.
Eventually I pulled back, not looking up at him, eyes trained on the wet spot I’d left on his beautiful suit jacket.
My hands went to my face, feeling at my cheeks as I realized that my makeup was in ruins.
“I’ll need to go upstairs and redo my makeup when we get back,” I said blankly. My mind was worrying about something small in an effort to avoid thinking about something big.
“Well, there’s no hurry. The bloodsuckers will be there all day I’m sure,” he murmured, and not so much the words but his proximity had me stiffening.
His face was moving closer to mine, then closer. His hands cupped my face, angling it up to his.
I kept my gaze pointed down, but it didn’t matter. He wasn’t concerned with my eyes. He wanted my lips.
He took them unrepentantly, passionately, devouring me like he always did, as though he’d never have enough.
And I let him have them, the fight gone out of me. I’d always had a weakness for his kiss. That’s why I hated them so vehemently.
I started shifting, falling against my seat back, though there wasn’t far to go.
It was the damnedest thing. Every time he kissed me, all I wanted to do was lie down flat on my back. That urge was quickly followed by one to open my arms, and then my legs.
It was a natural inclination. Instinctual and all the more powerful for it.
CHAPTER
TWENTY-ONE
“I have to remind myself to breathe—almost remind my heart to beat!”
Emily Brontë
PAST
“Let’s ditch school,” I told Dante.
“And do what?”
“Go watch movies at my grandma’s house.” She wouldn’t be there. She was gone from seven a.m. to seven p.m. every single working day like clockwork.
And Dante never said no to movies at my house. It had become our thing lately.
In fact, it had become my favorite thing in the world.
He shrugged. “Fine. Whatever. I’m not in the mood for school anyway.”
We walked back toward my place leisurely, side by side as we strolled, so close that our arms and hands kept brushing against each other.
The third time it happened, he took my hand and laced our fingers together.
A thrill ran through my entire body, and I couldn’t hold back a smile.
Neither of us said a word about it. He’d been doing it more and more lately when we were alone, but we never talked about it.
We’d been doing lots of things when we were alone together that we never talked about.
Nothing like what his mom had suggested, in fact all of it could be called more or less innocent, just physical contact that kept progressing, lingering until we couldn’t seem to stop.
But he’d never even kissed me. I was starting to worry about it. From what I heard other girls talking about concerning boys, it seemed like if he wanted to he should have tried to by now.
It didn’t take us long to walk to my grandma’s house. Okay, house was a generous term. It was a rundown two-bedroom trailer on a plot of land that belonged to Dante’s family.
Still, it was the only place we had where we could be alone.
I let him pick out the movie.
He chose Gladiator even though we’d already seen it like five times. But neither of us actually cared what we watched. The movie was not why we’d started spending all of our free time doing this.
I turned it on and Dante sprawled out on the couch, his big body taking up most of it.
As much as I complained about how fast I was growing, he was growing much faster. He towered over me, and his lean body had started to develop muscles I couldn’t help but notice.
And as fast as he was growing, he was still as graceful, as comfortable in his own skin as he’d always been. I hadn’t seen him suffer through one awkward faze yet.
It was infuriating.
I shot him a pointed look at his spot on the couch and moved to sit on my grandma’s ancient recliner.
This was another game we played. I wouldn’t sit with him until he asked me.
No. Cajoled me into it. I resisted every time. I knew I couldn’t make anything too easy for him. Grandma had slapped that bit of wisdom deep into my skull.
“Psst,” he called to me.
I ignored him, eyes glued to the screen.
“Scarlett,” he tried. “You don’t have to sit on your grandma’s nasty old chair.”
“That couch is just as nasty,” I pointed out. Everything in the place was nasty. Old and cheap and dirty. I lived here and even I thought so.
“Well, you don’t have to sit alone over there.”
“You’ve taken up the whole couch. Where would I sit?” As I said it, I shot him an arch look.
He grinned at me. He was sprawled out, long arms perched at the top corner of the sofa. He kicked one knee up, throwing the other on the ground, and patted his thighs. “You can sit right here.”