Page 74 of Defend Me
Unconsciously, I removed one of my hands from my pocket. When Tilian came up beside me, I brushed my fingers over his.
“You’re being weird,” he said.
“I’m not.”
“Whoever you were just now, I’ve never seen him before.”
I shrugged nonchalantly. “You must be pretty unobservant. I was just being me.”
I could feel his stare burning a hole through the side of my face, but I kept looking forward. Just when I was about to reach the counter, he grabbed onto my arm and pulled me to the side. We stopped inside the arcade, mostly hidden next to a claw machine. When I turned to look at him, his face was pinched, and he was much closer than I’d expected.
“What’s going on?” he asked.
“I really don’t know what you mean.”
“Stop with the formal shit. If you didn’t want to come, you could’ve said no.”
Running my teeth over the length of my tongue, I tried to avoid looking at him, but it was impossible. His hand was still on my bicep and I felt every inch of that touch. My heart was beating faster than my baseline of seventy-five beats per minute, and I just didn’t think that could mean anything good.
“Brooks.”
Fuck.
I reached up and stroked my fingers down the column of his throat. His lips parted, giving me too much of a glimpse into his own desire. I knew it was a bad idea to come here.
This motherfucker…
Wrapping my fingers around his throat, I tightened my grip and turned us around. I thrust him into the wall hard enough to force the breath out of him. My own were coming too quickly, the cadence glaringly obvious in the way my chest rose and fell.
My head was reeling. Everything I held back every second of every day was trying to escape all because he turned those blue eyes on me. It was an endless beat in my head.
I wanted to beg him to save me. I didn’t know how, but maybe he did.
Maybe he could defend me from… something. The future. My parents. Holly. Me. I didn’t want to be the person I was becoming. After Monday, I might not have any hope left.
See me. Please fucking see me.
“Stop doing this to me,” I demanded.
He gripped my wrist, but he didn’t attempt to remove my hand. If anything, he was holding me to him. “What am I doing?”
I leaned forward, then stopped just before our lips touched. “I don’t fucking know, Tilian.”
He tried to close the distance, but I held him against the wall. It was clear that he wanted to fight me. It was also clear that he didn’t want to. That look in his eyes right now was exactly what I craved. It was too fucking much and it was made worse by the fact that he wasn’t just some random person I met in the city. He was… him.
“I shouldn’t have come,” I said.
Before I could fully release him, he used his other hand to pull me closer by the back of my neck. Maybe I didn’t fight him enough. I knew that I was stronger than him, but I ended up a hairsbreadth from his face anyway.
He shook his head. “Don’t come at me like that, then run away. Over and over again, Brooks. Just stop.”
“Nothing can happen here. You’re not…”
“I’m not what? Good enough for you?”
My brow tightened. “I’d never think that. I just have other things to focus on. Too many things. I can’t dothis, Tilian.”
“I’m not asking you for anything.”
