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She exhaled in obvious relief.
“Here I thought you’d want to dissect what I said this morning. Pin me to a board under some giant fucking spotlight so you can figure out all the bullshit in my head.” Wariness was heavy in my tone, dripping off every word.
She didn’t smile. She didn’t laugh.
Because she saw straight fucking through me when I said it.
Panic was icy cold, prickling ominously up my spine, because if that was the direction in which she took this ... if she asked me to slice that part of myself open, I’d probably fucking do it.
“We don’t ever have to talk about it again if you don’t want to,” she promised me. “I willneverask that of you.”
“Simple as that?” I asked in a rough, disbelieving voice.
Zoe shook her head slowly. “There’s nothing simple about it, Liam. I hate that you’ve carried this for so long, but I understand why you did. And the only thing I can tell you,” she whispered, coming closer until her nose brushed lightly against mine, “is that I trust you, and Iknow I’m safe with you. I believe that enough for the two of us, until you believe it too.”
Her thumbs traced gentle lines over my cheekbones as she pulled back to look into my face, and that gentleness was my undoing.
I didn’t stand a chance against it.
Maybe that’s why I’d always poked at her, stoked the flames of contention and irritation, knowing that I was the only one who brought it out of her.
If she’d treated me likethisfor all those years, it would’ve been a million times harder to watch her live a life without me.
Slowly, I plucked her hand off my cheek, turning the palm toward my mouth. Her fingers curled helplessly as I pressed a fervent kiss on her soft skin.
“I don’t know what to do with all the things you make me feel, Zoe,” I whispered. “Every time I look at you, it’s like someone is ripping out my fucking heart. When you smile, I can’t bloody breathe.”
I’d never be a poet. Even the clunky way I tried to tell her I was in love with her came from my chest like someone had pried it out with a crowbar.
And she simply smiled.
Maybe after all the uncertainty, all the hesitation, this was the part I needed to make peace with. Whatever I was, whatever I had inside me, it was exactly enough for her.
Rough edges and all.
“I do have one question for you,” I said quietly, slipping my hands up the line of her back, tracing my fingers over the impossibly thin strings holding up her suit. “I think it’s my turn after all.”
“If the question has anything to do with permission to untie my top, then the answer is yes.”
“That’s not it,” I said, my lips brushing against her temple.
“That’s . . . sad.”
My mouth curved into a smile. “Is this how it would happen in your books?” I ghosted kisses over her forehead. Brushed my fingersalong the curve of her waist. “Something like this to get the fairy-tale ending?”
“Sometimes,” she said shakily. Her hands tracked over my stomach, sliding around my back. “But in a lot of them, we’d have fought. Yelled about the things we couldn’t say earlier. Someone would’ve stormed out. Probably you,” she teased.
“I don’t want to fight with you, Valentine. I’m done fighting.” I nipped at the shell of her ear. Her breasts were pressed tight against my chest, and my palms skated over the curves of her ass. “I think this suits us better, yeah?”
She moaned in assent. “In some of them, when you’d come back, and we had our big realizations, you would’ve torn my suit off, and we’d be having highly improbable pool sex by now.”
A chuckle escaped from low in my chest. “Whyimprobable?”
She hissed when I mouthed the line of her jaw. “I-I don’t know. It always seemed ... highly illogical that all the chemicals make for a pleasurable”—her voice hitched higher when I wrenched her thigh up against my side and pressed her tight to the side of the pool—“p-pleasurable experience.”
I pulled my face back to study her. Zoe’s cheeks were flushed pink, and so was her chest. Her nipples were hard points behind the fiery red of her suit.
My hands itched to do exactly that. Give her all the pleasure I was capable of. Tug off those tiny scraps covering her body, and sink inside her.
