Page 33 of Cruel Demands

“Of what?”

I give him a look. “Mostly of you.”

His expression changes. Heat flashes through his eyes, fast and dark, and then he leans down and kisses me again like I have said something filthy. Maybe I have. Maybe anything honest is filthy if you say it in a room like this.

His hand moves under my thigh, lifting my leg until my knee rests against his hip. The position opens me more than I expect. I feel the shape of him through his trousers, hard and unmistakable, and every part of me goes tense at once.

Not because I don’t want him. Because I do. Because I want him so much that the wanting has outrun my knowledge of what happens next.

Mikhail feels it and doesn’t ask. He goes completely still and lowers his forehead to mine, his breathing ragged. “Taylor,” he says.

I close my eyes. If I don’t look at him, maybe I can still save the version of myself I’ve been pretending to be. “What?” I whisper.

His hand leaves my thigh. Not fast. Not like I have burned him. But deliberately. He places it on the bed beside my waist instead. “Look at me.”

I shake my head.

“Taylor.” The second time is quieter. I open my eyes. He’s close enough that I can see the little lines beside his mouth, the shadow along his jaw, the hard control in his face that looks almost painful now. “What have you done before?” he asks.

The question is so direct that my whole body turns cold. I blink at him. He waits. I try to laugh. It comes out small and awful. “Wow. Okay. That’s one way to kill the mood.”

“The mood is not my concern.”

“Could’ve fooled me,” I snap, looking down at the hard shape of him.

“Answer me,” he responds, just as snappy, unbothered by my commentary on his hardness.

Anger flickers up, bright and welcome. “You don’t get to interrogate me.”

I stare at him. He stares back. The silence stretches between us, filled with everything I don’t want to say.

The truth is stupid. The truth is painfully ordinary. The truth is that I’ve kissed boys at parties and in dorm rooms and once in the back of a car that smelled like old fast food. The truth is that I’ve even kissed a girl a time or two in a closet and under a blanket. The truth is that I have let hands wander and then moved them away. The truth is that I have wanted until the pressure of someone else wanting too made my body lock up like a door.

“I haven’t done this,” I say simply.

The sentence falls between us like a glass shattering. His face goes blank. Like a door closing. He moves, not completely off me, but he straightens his elbows so that there is a humiliating space between us that there wasn’t before.

I rush to fill the silence because I can’t stand it. “I mean, not nothing. I’m not—” I stop, because I have no idea how to make this sound less childish. “I’ve done some things.”

His jaw flexes. “Taylor.”

The softness in his voice is worse than anger. I push myself up on my elbows. “Don’t do that.”

His eyes sharpen. “Do what?”

“Look at me like I just told you I have a disease.”

“I am not.”

“You are.”

“I am looking at you like a twenty-year-old girl just told me she has never had sex while she’s underneath me in my bed.”

My face burns. “Well, when you say it like that, it sounds bad.”

“It is bad,” he says. I flinch before I can stop myself. His expression tightens. “That is not what I mean.”

“Could have fooled me.”