Easy’s a fucking lie. It’s fake smiles and ‘I’m fine’s and holding your breath around people who say they care but bolt the second your darkness shows. She doesn’t do that. She never flinches. Not when I’m rough. Not when I’m silent. Not even now, when I’m trying to be soft and failing so fucking hard.
I want to tell her she’s dangerous. That she makes me worse and I fucking love it. That I’d burn every goddamn bridge I’ve ever built if it meant keeping her in my bed one more night.
Instead I say, “You want water?”
Because I don’t know how to say all the things clawing their way up my throat. So I try useful. I try gentle.
She smiles. “Only if you feed it to me like a Victorian invalid.”
I snort and roll out of bed.
Still naked. Still hard.
Still fucking hers.
God help me.
And her.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Delilah
Jett went to get dinner.
That’s… not what I expected.
He’s supposed to bolt. That’s the script. He runs, I go full Tasmanian devil with a crush. He runs faster, I throw something flammable and sparkly. Our love language is felony-adjacent domestic terrorism and glitter crime scene cleanup fees.
But instead he asked me what I wanted as if he didn’t just growl “mine” with his teeth in my throat like a confused, emotionally repressed werewolf in heat.
I told him burgers and fries because that’s the one thing he can’t get delivered to this crusty little motel and I needed time. Time to breathe. Time to spiral Time to scream into a pillow, throw my bra on the ceiling fan, maybe climb into the ice machine out back and live there now. Just me, a frostbitten cryptid, hiding from the terrifying possibility of emotional connection.
Will he come back? Or will he leave me here like a sad, cum-sticky gremlin squatter left sobbing in crime scene sheets with the scent of his dick still haunting my soul like a horny ghost?
This isn’t like Benji. He’s emotionally literate. He drinks water. He asked if I’d eaten vegetables today and meant it. Terrifying in a whole different kind of way.
But Jett?
Jett feels like me.
Which is its own kind of horror.
Because if he’s like me, if he’s the one with a dented attachment style and a chokehold kink masquerading asintimacy, then someone has to be the stable one, and guess what, it’s not fucking me.
So obviously I do the sane, healthy thing: stare at Rhys’s contact photo like I’m trying to psychically summon a therapist through my phone.
This is an emergency.
Right?
Because if Jett actually has feelings for me, and I’m not having some post-orgasmic fever hallucination, I could break it. Break him. Break me.
I could fuck it up.
Or worse…
Fuck him up.
