Never Sweeter (Dark Obsession #1)(46)

No matter what happens between us, I will never make your life hell again. Mess with my head, turn me upside down, f*ck seventeen guys behind my back, humiliate me in the middle of the cafeteria…it won’t make any difference. I am yours now. And nothing you say or do will ever change that.

She paused, before replying.

But only because she had to fight back tears—because of the underlined never, for the anger that was only at himself, for the way he kept proving her wrong whenever she was sure their whole paper house was about to be blown away or burned to the ground.

That was a really cool thing to say, she wrote.

Keep it. Keep it as a reminder.

Like you kept the piece of paper where I wrote that you were my friend?

Yes exactly like that. Oh, did you think I would deny it?

Maybe, she started, then gave in and crossed the word out. Wrote the truth, to match what he had offered her. Yes. Yes, damn it.

How I feel about you is not a secret.

It is to me. Can you not see why it would be to me?

No, I really can’t. I know I make it obvious every day.

You do you do you do. But this is pretty obvious every day to me, too.

She didn’t intend to grab his hand to show him. She was just going to lift her hair—you could see the scar without a ton of effort. Yet when it came to it, somehow seeing didn’t seem like enough. She wanted him to touch it, to really feel it, to know right down to his bones that it was there. Here was the evidence, and to hell with whether it made him uncomfortable.

Or whether it didn’t. At all.

Not even a tiny little bit.

She closed his fingers over that curving knot around her ear, and he just stayed there. He stroked his thumb over it, so tender and direct she wasn’t sure what to do for a second. This was not the way she’d imagined it going in her head. He was supposed to pull away sharply and tell her to get over it, and instead he just went ahead and doubled down. He put his whole hand over that terrible place, like the slight touch she’d encouraged wasn’t enough.

And even that fell short.

He needed words, to go with it.

“I know there’s nothing I can do to erase this. I wouldn’t want to erase it, or act like it never happened, or pretend that it’s not in your heart as well as right here under my hand. I get that this is always going to be there, saying you should doubt me. But I’m gonna work every day on making it easier for you to ignore. I want you to believe in me, and I got all the hours in the world to help that happen.”

This time, she couldn’t fight the tears.

One just streaked down her left cheek before she could stop it. And when she went to swipe it away, he got there before she could. He swiped it for her, with his thumb. Held her gaze, as if he never wanted to let it go. And in that moment, she wasn’t sure she wanted him to.

This was as good as life got, and she knew it.

“That was even cooler than the whole humiliate-me speech.”

“I could write this down for you, too, if you want.”

“No, no that’s okay. I now have it burned into my brain forever.”

He grinned then.

He grinned so wide it warmed her insides.

“Well, that sounds like a start to me.”

“As starts go it was pretty f*cking good.”

“Then what are we waiting for?”

Instead of answering right away, she took his hands in hers. Maneuvered them slowly away from her head and her hair, until they were spread beneath hers over her open books.

That way, she didn’t have to do this while he was holding her face.

It was hard enough as it was, without him drowning her good sense in affection.

“The rest of me to catch up.”

“Tell me which part is lagging behind.”

“The part that says you want me.”

“I thought we covered that.”

“No, we covered emotional damage. Now we have to get into the enormous f*cking disparity between the way you look”—she waved a hand in front his face, then her own—“and the way I look. Because even if we pretend for a second that you are Bob and I am Betty and neither of us have any connection to each other at all, you still have to admit that Bob is way, way, way hotter than Betty.”

He snorted and shook his head.

“I don’t have to admit that at all.”

“So you’re going to claim, objectively speaking, that you are not hotter than me.”

“Actually, I’m going to claim objectively speaking that the other night I shot my load all over your back after about thirty seconds of fondling your right breast. Your move, Counselor.”

“I don’t have a move, damn it, you just f*cked my move.”

“Yeah, and I came really, really embarrassingly fast when I did it.”

“It wasn’t embarrassing okay, it was—” she started, but then couldn’t finish.

He had been talking in the abstract. She was referring to the real thing.

And the real thing was complicated and weird and scary.

“It was what, Letty?”

“You know what.”

“So lemme get this straight: you get that I came so fast because of your hot tits, and the fact that I did come fast turns you on, and you are fully aware that this means I must want you—”

Now it was her turn to cut him off.