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Her throat moved in a delicate swallow, and she blinked a few times. “You don’t?”
“Don’t need to,” I told her. “No one’s complaining, trust me.”
She sucked in a slow breath. “Too intimate for you, I’m guessing.”
Kisses created feelings. A false sense of what was possible and what they expected. It was easier, years earlier, to make that distinction in my head.
“Something like that.”
Poppy tilted her head. “And what if you fall in love someday?”
I sucked in a short breath through my nose. “Okay, fine, in the catastrophic event that pigs are flying and hell freezes the fuck over, then sure, I’d kiss that person. But I won’t ever do that, so it’s a moot point.”
The pink of her tongue flashed when she licked her lips, something quick and fast, and I wasn’t sure she did it consciously. All the blood rushed south … immediately.
“But sex is … safe?” she said quietly. “You can fuck them and move on, and there’s no attachment because you didn’t do this one, little thing.”
Poppy sayingfuckdid strange things to my insides, the tightening of a screw and the lifting of the hairs on the back of my neck.
I made a small noise of concession, probably because I didn’t dare speak for fear of what might come out. The room already felt like it was on fire with this change of subject. My brain defiantly conjured a host of vivid images, and no matter what I did, I couldn’t stop them.
What would happen if…
What if. What if.What if.
If my hand snaked around the back of her graceful neck, fingers digging into the mass of her dark hair, and I licked into that soft-pink mouth to see how she tasted and what she’d do. If her body would arch into mine and if she’d moan helplessly while she wrapped her arms around my shoulders and pressed up on tiptoe to get closer.
I could wreck her with a single kiss. Drag us both into some fiery pit where the only way out was through naked, writhing skin and the kind of release that split the world open.
Fuck.
Fuck.
We held like that for an impossibly long moment, her chest heaving as she breathed deeply, an anxious tell that she was just as stunned by what she’d said as I was.
Her eyes searched my face, a desperately confused sort of wrinkling in her brow.
Did she know? Could she guess what I was imagining? That I could immediately recognize how good it would be, and that I wanted it so badly that my hands shook from the restraint needed not to touch her?
“What if I was a one-night person?” she whispered. In the dark room, firelight danced off the graceful features of her face. “What if that’s all I wanted from you, and I promised we could walk away tomorrow unscathed?” Underneath the cage of my ribs, my heart thundered wildly. The hesitation was damning, and she knew it as she took a small step closer, eyes glowing, her tongue darting out to wet her lips. “I want you out of my head, Jax.”
Again, my eyes pinched shut, and fuck, my throat dried out so thoroughly that I couldn’t force a denial. The words were anchored heavy in my stomach, and I couldn’t push them up and out.
Then, then, a whisper-soft brush of her fingers over my forearm had my eyes snapping open.
Why was she so close to me? The sweet scent of her had my head swimming, and I sucked in a slow breath, desperately yanking on every shred of discipline buried deep under my skin.
“One night,” she said again. “I think you want it too. But if you tell me you don’t want me, I’ll never speak of it again.”
Why couldn’t I lie to her?
They were just words—easy to speak out loud.It didn’t matter whether they were true or not, I told myself.
I don’t want you.
Idon’twant you.
Say it,I screamed in my head.Say it.
