Never Sweeter (Dark Obsession #1)(15)

So she simply went for it instead. She got hold of his shoulder and hauled herself around just like he had suggested, the move surprisingly easy now that she was motivated. It barely even occurred to her that her breasts brushed his arm and her butt was supremely visible to him for a good few seconds. There was no self-consciousness at all, despite the proximity of her gross body to his fantastic one.

Or at least there wasn’t until she had to put her arm around his neck.

Then things got kind of…awkward and sweaty and weird. She had to almost force her arm into position, but even then she couldn’t get it to go right against his throat. There was something too unsettling about it—too violent, she thought, as she leaned in, even though there wasn’t anything violent about it at all. If anything, it seemed more like a bizarre kind of embrace. Any closer and you could probably call it a cuddle.

And that was when it clicked.

“You know I think maybe that’s enough.”

“You do? But you’re not even in the right spot.”

The right spot is too much like intimacy, she thought.

But of course she couldn’t say it aloud. She just had to try, pushing her arm uncomfortably deep into the space between his enormous jaw and his throat. Breasts squashing against his broad back, legs too spread around his side, every inch of her bristling and bristling. The urge to back off was a living thing, writhing underneath her skin. It drove her steadily to the point where she had to pull away again.

And she would have, if it wasn’t for his laugh.

God she’d never been so grateful to hear him laugh.

“Letty, honestly, is that what you think a headlock is?”

“Well, your head is locked by my arm.”

“My head is not locked by your arm. I could blink and get out of this.”

“Because you’re a goddamn wrestler at the top of his game. You get out of headlocks for a living.”

“Okay, fair enough, fair enough, just…here, lemme show you how to—”

She didn’t mean to jerk away when his hands closed over her forearm. It just happened, like feeling pain when someone stabbed you in the gut. She tried to grit her teeth against it, but still it came.

“Easy, easy.”

“Sorry, I just—”

“It’s okay. It’s cool. You want me to just tell you how?”

“No. You can…you can put your hands on me.”

“All I’m going to do is just…”

He reached up again, and this time it was better.

Partly because he went real slow.

Mostly because he was weirdly excellent at saying soothing things. That laid-back drawl she used to loathe so much swung effortlessly into a low sweetness. And each time she tensed, he gave her a little more of it. He doled it out like good medicine, until she was barely thinking about the closeness of their bodies at all. Instead, she focused on squeezing right where he told her to squeeze. At first gently, but then as hard as he prompted her to go. Go on, he urged, so she did. She tensed the muscles in her arm and tightened one hand around the other, until her heart was pounding and her breath was coming fast.

With the effort, she told herself.

But had no idea if that was true.

It could have been something else that made her bare her teeth and bear down hard. He’d told her to do it, but telling her to do it wasn’t a great excuse. Not when she could nearly feel the pulse in his throat and the hand on her arm had slipped away and he was…he was…

Oh, Jesus, he was sagging forward like a puppet with its strings cut.

“Oh my god, Tate. Tate are you going to sleep? Am I putting you to sleep? Jesus Christ no, no, wake up, wake up, this is not cool. It’s not cool. I don’t like this, wake up now.”

She released him and jumped back, but that was a mistake. Now he was falling backward instead of forward. She had to brace herself against his shoulder blades to stop him from crashing to the ground—though it wasn’t exactly a successful move. Her feet started sliding as soon as she did it. She just wasn’t big or strong enough to hold his enormous bulk, and now he was going to crush her.

This was how she was going to die.

Squashed like a bug beneath Tate’s dead body.

“Tate, f*ck, I can’t hold you up,” she said, but still he kept coming.

She was almost on the floor by the time he shook himself awake.

“Yeah,” he half slurred as he staggered woozily to his feet. “That’s much more like it.”

“So knocking you unconscious and getting crushed by your body was the aim?”

“Pretty much. Except, you know, if I attack you, just let me crash to the ground.”

“I was more afraid for it than I was for you. Probably would have punched a hole to the floor below.”

He grinned, not in the least bit offended.

And then he told her why.

“Feel a little more comfortable now?”

She answered yes, because it was true. She did in fact feel more comfortable about being close to him. How could she not, after spending an hour play-wrestling with him in the goofiest possible way she could imagine? Hitler would probably seem like a great guy to hang out with, after that.

Yet when they sat down, it suddenly seemed like a lie.

Their knees bumped beneath the table, and when they did, a strange, slithery tingle ran right up the inside of her thigh. Like the kind of thing that usually happened when she felt embarrassed, only more intense somehow. Sharper, as though humiliation had just stabbed her. She had to spread her legs around the bulk of his to avoid it happening again, but doing so only seemed to make it worse.