Happy Place(62)

It’s not that I think what happened downstairs was an act. But it was part of an agreement.

This isn’t. And neither of us seems to have decided what happens next.

My body has one idea. My brain isn’t a fan of the plan.

You’ve spent months trying to forget what you’re missing, I tell myself. How will you survive being reminded? Living the loss of it all over again?

His pulse is drumming into my chest. My weight shifts into him, my breasts brushing against his soaked T-shirt, and he lets out an unsteady breath.

I’m starved of him. I’ve been stranded in a Wyn-less desert, my throat bone-dry, and that first sip downstairs has made the thirst worse. My nervous system doesn’t care that this is a mirage. The violent kinetic thrumming is back, the air particles between us sparking.

“Is this okay,” he asks thickly.

I lift toward him like a charmed snake, my knees buckling a little when his palms touch my stomach through the damp satin, start to glide heavily up me. His lips skirt along my collarbone, his breath diffusing over my skin.

His dark eyes lift as his palms settle against my chest. I rock into his touch. His hands move to cup me more fully. When his thumbs graze my nipples, he groans, catches them between his fingers, watching the way my breath staggers and my body bows upward.

He slips one of my straps down my shoulder, kisses the bare skin where it used to be. His fingers find the other strap and tug it away too. My head tips back as I try to get a good breath, and he slips a hand into the now loose top of my bodice, his fingers curling against me.

He steps in close, his knee batting my thighs apart. I wrap my hand around his neck to keep from collapsing when his mouth drops to my chest, his lips closing over me. My existence narrows to that point, to the gentle pressure and fierce heat of his lips. He yanks my dress down until I’m bare to the waist, kisses his way across me, his palm moving to roll heavily against me.

“Tell me to kiss you, Harriet,” he rasps.

I don’t know if it’s wounded pride or fear of this all-consuming want or something else, but I can’t stand to ask for more of him.

“Tell me to kiss you,” he says again, nudging my thighs wider to ease in between my hips.

I rake my hands down his back, take hold of his waist, keeping us pinned together. I feel his pulse in his groin, or maybe it’s mine. The lines between him and me have become fuzzy, insubstantial.

“What are we doing?” he asks.

“I thought that was obvious,” I say.

His hips rock into me, and god help me, my hands go straight to his ass. He lifts me against the door, my thighs around his hips, my arms hooked behind his head, his erection hard against me.

I want him on top of me, beneath me, behind me. I want him in my mouth, his clothes in a pile on the floor, his sweat on my stomach, his voice rough against my ear. I want anything other than to stop.

“What does this mean,” he asks raggedly, still cupping me, kissing me.

“I don’t know,” I say.

A low, frustrated sound dies in the back of his throat, and he stills, holding me firmly against the door.

“This is a bad idea, Harriet,” he says hoarsely after a few seconds, lowering me but not stepping back. “We can’t be together.”

The words knock the wind out of me.

“I know that,” I say.

And I do. He broke my heart, destroyed it. And even if I could forgive him, he’s happy in his new life. I know there’s no going back.

So why does hearing it make my chest feel like a split log?

I push against Wyn’s shoulders, pull my straps back up.

He steps back, murmuring, “I’m sorry. I wasn’t thinking.”

“I’m not sure you started it,” I get out.

He runs a hand up the back of his head, his brow deeply grooved. “I’m not sure that I didn’t either.”

“Then I guess I should say I’m sorry too,” I say.

His mouth twitches, a smile that’s anything but happy. He sighs. “This place.”

This place, indeed. It’s too easy to forget about the real world here, our circumstances, the things that broke us.

All the reasons there’s no finding our way back.

I flatten my palms against the door’s smooth wood. “We got swept up in it. That’s all.”

After a beat, he says, “I don’t want to do anything else that hurts you.”

“You didn’t,” I say.

I hurt myself, I think.

He looks over my shoulder at the door, almost guiltily.

“I think I should take a walk. Cool down.”

The thought of being any farther away from him than this is torment. I nod.

His eyes scrape down me and back up once more, heat washing from my head to my toes, a heavy pulse of need between my thighs.

“The bed’s all yours,” he says, and stalks past me. I slide out of the way so he can open the door. “Don’t feel like you need to wait up.”

It’s not that I wait up for him. It’s that as soon as I climb under the sheets, it’s like he hasn’t left at all, only multiplied. Every breeze from the cracked window is his mouth. Every brush of the sheets is his hand, moving across my thigh, over the curve of my stomach. Every creak of the settling house is his voice: Tell me to kiss you.