“I’m fine.” I manage a cracked whisper.
He laughs. “I wasn’t born yesterday, honey. Try again.”
My eyes prick. “I’m sorry to disturb you.” I force my body into motion, push past him.
He grabs me by the bicep, spins me back around, and I’m pulled up against his hard warm broad chest. “You haven’t disturbed me. The opposite, if anything. Take a minute. No need to rush off.”
“I have to go.”
“All the better reason to stay, then.” Holy gods above, that voice.
Warmth, like afternoon sunlight through a window on closed eyelids, warming skin. The warmth of early morning, before true consciousness has taken over, when all of existence is narrowed down to the cocoon of blankets.
I don’t understand what he means, but his hands are gently, politely, firmly on my shoulders, my cheek is against his chest—not at all politely, not at all appropriately. And I do not want to move. Not ever. I am at a height that my ear is over his heart, and I hear it...
Bumpbump—bumpbump—bumpbump.
Slow and steady and reassuring.
“What’s your name?” he asks, a single fingertip tracing an intimate line from my temple around the curve of my ear, down to the base of my jaw.
A simple thing, asking one’s name. So easy for everyone else. Something I never considered until today—how impossible a normal interaction such as this could be, away from what I know.
I panic. Push away. Stumble. I am caught, held up. “Hey, hey, it’s okay. I’m sorry, it’s okay.”
I shake my head. “I have to go.”
“Just tell me your name.”
I won’t lie. “I can’t.”
A snort of amused disbelief. “What, it’s a secret?”
“I shouldn’t be here.” I manage another step away.
“No kidding. It’s a men’s bathroom, and you are most definitelynota man.” His hand wraps around my wrist, easily engulfing it and keeping me in place.
A tug, and I’m back up against the tectonic wall of his chest. His fingertip, the one that traced behind my ear, across the delicate drum of my temple, it touches my chin. I must look, though I know I should not—I must look into his eyes, so nearly purple, so arresting in their strange shade of blue. So knowing, so warm, seeing me somehow as if the book of my soul is bare to him, laid open.
“Listen, Cinderella. All I want is your name. Tell me that much, and I can do the rest.”
“The rest?” I know—intellectually, cerebrally—that I should pull away, leave, get out of here before anything compromising happens. But I can’t. I am a creature in the deep, deep sea, hooked on a line, drawn up to the light. “The rest of what?”
I swallow hard. Everything in me is in a boil, weltering and coruscating and dizzied and mixed up and lost and wild.
“The rest of you and me.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Yes you do, Cinderella. You feel it. I know you do.” He frowns, and even this expression is dizzyingly gorgeous. “I shouldn’t be here either. Not at this party, not in this bathroom, and certainly not with someone like you. I don’t belong here. And neither do you. But here I am, and here you are, andthere’s...something. Fuck if I have a word for it, but there’s something going on between us.”
“You’re crazy. I have to go.” I back away.
My hands shake. Something in the deepest shadows of my being rages against each inch of space I put between us, between him and me. Something in the fabric of my being demands that I stay, that I tell him who I am, that I give him what he demands of me.
But that’s impossible.
“Yeah, I am crazy. Not gonna argue with you there. But that has nothing to do with you and me, honey.”
