Come to Me Quietly(38)

My voice was soft. “I draw and you wish you could erase.”



His lids dropped closed, stayed that way for a moment, his jaw clenching and unclenching, before he opened them to me. “You create and I destroy.”



I slowly shook my head, my words hoarse. “That’s not what I meant.”



Sighing, he turned his attention back to his feet. “It doesn’t mean it’s not the truth.”



Silence settled over us for a few minutes, and I could feel the shift, the way he’d tucked our words somewhere inside himself, as if maybe I’d earned a token of his trust.

Then he looked at me with an amused smile, gesturing to my sketch pad with his chin. “Can I see?”



Shaking my head, I buried a smile by biting my lip. “You should know better than that, Jared.”



A throaty chuckle filled my room, and he lay back on my bed. My toes were pressed into the covers just at his side. And I loved it, loved that he wanted to be here with me, loved that what I saw in him was kind.

Even if he couldn’t see it himself.

He wove his fingers together and rested them on his chest, the incongruous numbers tattooed across his knuckles meshed. He sat very still, and seemed to drift away in his thoughts.

I kept my attention on my page, until I felt the gravity of his stare burning into my forehead, like I could sense a pull. Drawn to him. I always had been.

When I turned to him, the grin on his face was something I almost didn’t recognize because it’d been so long since I’d seen it. But I had, so many times before. I’d witnessed it in the carefree boy who had meant everything to me.

His blue eyes danced as they flitted from my sketch pad to my face. “It used to drive me f*cking crazy that you wouldn’t let me see what you kept hidden inside those books.”



I gasped when he suddenly moved. He twisted onto his knees in almost a crouch, his chin tucked and his gaze peeking at me from just above the top margin of my book. Predatory. As if at any second he was going to pounce and wrestle it from me. My breath caught. Tingles sped under the surface of my skin, and he hadn’t even touched me.

My hands tightened around the edges of my sketch pad like a vise.

“And you know what, Aly?” His eyes darted everywhere, absorbing, taking in the lines of my face, my mouth, my hands, the pad I clutched to my chest, before they fixed firmly on my own. “It still drives me f*cking crazy.”



Strength bunched in the muscles rippling along his shoulders, but in his movements there was this playfulness, so much like I remembered. An echo of our childhood sounded in my ear, the way he’d pestered and begged me to let him see, but never forced me into anything I didn’t want to do.

At that time it was because I was embarrassed and afraid he might make fun of me. I didn’t want him to see the inexperience in my drawings. Now it was because it’d be like slicing my heart open and exposing everything I wasn’t ready for him to see.

It’d scare him as much as it scared me.

Shock stunned me when he abruptly grabbed me by the ankles and dragged me down, forcing me flat on the bed. The sketch pad slid off my lap, facedown on the sheets.

Suddenly I was staring up at Jared’s gorgeous face as he hovered over me. He straddled my waist, and I couldn’t think, couldn’t breathe, could only feel the blood coursing through my veins and pounding in my ears.

His nose was an inch from mine, his hands resting on both sides of my head, but he was everywhere – everywhere – sinking into my consciousness and my spirit.