coarse. He moved to my neck before gliding along my collarbone. Anticipation and need coursed through me.
Our eyes bored holes into each other. My pale ones awash in the warmth of his brown ones. Our hearts pounded furiously. I could feel the force of his even though his body wasn’t touching mine. The thunder of it thrummed through me as if it were my own.
His hand barely grazed the tip of my breast. It was so light it could almost not have happened, but my body felt it, sending signals directly from my breast all the way down to my core. One more touch and I would explode. Cesium exposed to water. An exothermic reaction ready to ignite until there was nothing left of me.
Then, he was moving away, pulling himself back from the edge, crossing his arms over his bare chest. I wanted to scream. I wanted to throw a tantrum so large I would be exactly the child he insisted on treating me as even after all these years. Even after I’d done a whole host of things in the time we’d been apart so this moment, this very second with him, would prove to him I was the exact opposite of the child he thought I was.
Six months ago, starting my relationship with Silas, I’d told myself I’d finally put Dawson behind me. That I no longer ached so badly for him it literally tore my soul away from my body. But standing in the kitchen with him this close to me, I knew it was all a lie.
A lie I’d told myself to survive.
I wasn’t sure I’d survive it this time. I wanted him so much it physically hurt.
Maybe it was better he hadn’t kissed me.
Because, as Jada had said about her and Dax, I wasn’t sure I could have stopped with a simple kiss. And what would become of me then? What would it do to our family? To Jersey and Truck and the makeshift people we’d assembled in our lives?
In a couple of days, Dawson would be flying across the Atlantic at speeds no one had ever seen before. When it was done, he’d move on to the next big adventure. The next big race. I’d be left in New London. We were worlds that would never fully collide.
I closed my eyes, willing myself to move, to walk away, and was surprised when my body obeyed. Surprised when I heard his guttural call of my name as I left, the timbre of it deep and painful as if I’d stabbed him in the stomach when it was really the other way around.
Had always been.
Would always be.
The boy I couldn’t have had turned into a man who was even more off-limits.
Dawson
BROKEN ARROWS
“Seems like every little word I say,
Keeps getting twisted,
Or coming out wrong, so baby hold on.”
Performed by Daughtry
Written by Kelly / Lardieri / Daughtry
I was unable to sleep once I retreated to my room. In the past, I’d been worried that if shit went down, Ken’Ichi would use Jada against me. Now, he had Violet in his sights, and that scared me at a level I couldn’t shake. I’d tried desperately for four years to keep my family out of it. I’d known the disadvantage of being undercover as yourself meant your family was exposed, and it was part of the reason I was rarely with them these days. Distance meant safety.
I needed something to take the edge off. To force my body to forget enough to let sleep wander in. I went in search of the alcohol I hadn’t drunk earlier when I heard a noise from the kitchen. What I found had every nerve ending bursting to life, each of them competing against the other, longing to touch her. Violet was in a silk nightgown that might as well have been goddamn nonexistent. I could see the flowers on her underwear, the curve of her back, the small slope of her breasts. And when she turned toward me, I had a front-row seat to the way her dark pink areolas hardened for me.
I responded without thinking, caging her in. Wanting to claim what should have been mine for years. Wanting to claim the kiss that Ken’Ichi had interrupted.
The smooth silk of her skin beneath my coarse fingers only lit the fire already growing in me. Opposites. Beauty and the beast in a way that was so much truer than Violet would ever know. She leaned into every movement my hand made,