“Coal,” he says my name like one of those hymns I imagined moaning. “Kiss me.”
A shiver charges from the back of my neck down my spine, setting off a series of smaller, no less destructive quakes in my lungs, my stomach. “You’re not asking for me to just kiss you.”
“No,” he says with Mephistophelian simplicity. “I’m not.”
I rear back. “We’re both exhausted. We’re… emotional. Or at least I am. And I don’t want to… take advantage of that.”
“If anything, I’m taking advantage of you.”
“That’s a flat-out impossibility.”
“So kiss me.”
“Stop telling me to do that.”
“Why?”
My hand is a vise on his ankle.
Hex takes the top of his vest in a fist that could rip apart the fabric of reality, I’ve seen him do that, dance magic from those fingertips. Only now he specifically undoesmyreality, because he tugs apart the first latch.
“Hex,” I growl, and I clamp my hand over his. “You don’t—fuck, this vest.”
He leans back in an air of such delicious, sinful defiance that I’m no longer merely on the edge, I’m plunging into the abyss. “What does this vest make you want to do to me?”
“Don’t. Don’t. I’m begging you—”
“And I’m beggingyou.”
“You can’t be. I—I’m not—hang on a second.” I’m babbling. Full-on mental breakdown of all the ups and downs of emotion from today coupled with how heisasking me, how hewantsthis.
My eyes are shut. I don’t know when I closed them.
The pillow of his thumb brushes across my eyelids. “Coal,” he says again, more tender than enticing. “We don’t have to do anything. I shouldn’t have pushed—”
I catch his hand as it slides off my face. “That’snotwhere my reaction is coming from.” And I look at him, aching, how are there still raw parts of me I can show him after today? But here I am, fatalistic in the way I open his fingers, kiss the lines of his palm with my trembling lips.
Part of me will never understand how you can see something worthwhile in me. Will never understand how I got lucky enough that you not only came back to me, but want me. Is terrified that this is all some joke I’m not getting because what the fuck did I do to deserve you.
“You’re nervous,” he fills into my silence, a wavering, stilted guess, and I hear his own nerves in it, winding up.
My laugh is broken and frantic. Holy shit, he can read me—I don’t think I’ve ever beennervousbefore being with someone, but yeah, that’s what this is, isn’t it? At the root. Nerves.
“You know what? Yes.” I laugh again, that pathetic warble. “That’s—yeah. Fuck. I am.”
Hex presses his thumb to my chin. “Just nervous, though? Not wanting me to leave?”
“Yes. I mean, no, don’t leave. Don’t ever leave my bed again, in fact—unless you want to. Unless you’re—”
He inches his thumb up to cover my lips. “I can work with nervous.”
“Yeah,” I mutter against his thumb. “Nervous is good, honestly. We should be nervous. An overabundance of cockiness in situations like this is generally—not a sign of—” He puts my hand on his vest. Uses my fingers to work off another clasp, another. “A sign of—not a sign of—” The vest falls apart and he’s in my bed and he smells like popcorn and citrus and a fantasy. I splay my hand in the center of his abdomen and can feel the erratic cadence of his heart beneath his button-up, the swell of his stomach blossoming to fit my palm. “Of—shit, what the hell am I talking about?”
“Nerves.” His voice is all tangled in a bated breath.
“Yes. Yeah. Nerves.” My fingers have little anarchic minds of their own and pull up the hem of his shirt, and when I spread my hand on his bare stomach I careen into the sky, stars and darkness and swaths of velvet warmth.
I think, in another reality, in another version of myself, I’d be capable of making the better choice. If there is a better choice.
