But at the last moment, I catch myself, stop. I could weep from the need to taste his kiss, to taste whisky-honeyed flesh. Instead, I touch my thumb to his mouth. Wipe. Smear. And then...
I suck the hint of moisture off my thumb. Logan’s chest makes a sound as of mountains colliding. A groan? A murmur?
Sense returns, albeit in dizzy snatches. I lurch to my feet, stumble away, bedroom bound.
He is too much. Too close. Too intense, too embedded in the meaning of my need and embroiled in the substance of mydesire. I cannot fathom moments without him now. Yet I cannot breathe because he is all of the fractal seconds I possess, he is every stuttered fragment of time, and each breath is a drink of him. Intoxicated, I breathe yet more of him. Drowning, I am become nothing but the taste of his presence, the flavor his eyes on mine and the glance of knuckle past knuckle, the feast of a memory of kiss.
I close my bedroom door and collapse backward against it. I hear nothing. Only the thunderous pound of my heart, the knowledge of my guilt. The promise of what cameras have seen, and what I will suffer for it.
I hear my front door open. It’s a subtle sound, aclickof the knob twisting, the latch sliding in. The whisper of weather seal on hardwood.
Suddenly, panic seizes me.
If he leaves now, I will collapse inward like a star under its own weight.
Unthinking, I tear open my bedroom door, flee out, across the living room, the tumbler, now empty, alone on the coffee table. My front door is closing. I catch it.
“Logan?”
I don’t know what comes next; I haven’t thought this far ahead. I just knew I couldn’t let him leave like that.
I see him now. Back turned to me, broad shoulders bowed and hunched, hard fists clenched, beautiful head ducked. An imposing, virile, masculine figure, arousing and erotic.
“Cinderella.” He hears my door, twists his head to look at me over his shoulder. He is not smiling, and his chest is heaving as if his breath has been leeched by intense physical combat.
“Prince Charming.” It is whispered, barely audible, a small, sibilant sound.
I have stepped across my threshold. Out into the hallway. Out of the purview of the cameras.
Another unspoken rule, violated.
What comes next?
I crash against his chest, and his hands are on my back, low, pulling me against him. We twist, a dancing series of steps, his mouth slanting across mine, not just kissing but tasting, feeling, probing, daring, teasing. We spin. I am lifted free of the ground, and my spine is up against the wall beside my door, a full 360-degree rotation. His hands on my back. Oh... lower. Fingertips digging into the soft bubble of my backside’s upper swell. I feel his heart beating a double-hammer rhythm in his chest, as furious as my own. My arms... slipping serpentine around his neck, hands cupping the back of his head and his nape beneath his hair, soft, firm, warm, strong.
I kiss him.
Push up with my mouth and engage his kiss.
All the world ceases to exist. Fades. Flickers and gutters, a candle flame extinguished.
Oh, this kiss.
It isall.
The whole of history and the entire potentiality of the future.
The minutiae of the present, compressed into the singularity of his mouth on mine, his hands tender and strong and confident, gently exploring the curve of my bottom and the bell of my hips. Tug, keeping me taut against him.
I feel his erection thickening between us, so flush against his hard body am I.
I am condensed into a mass of need.
The kiss is rapture, his tongue sliding between my lips, tasting me, slipping and seeking. I taste him in return, kiss him back. Demand with my body his kiss, his touch. His hands move down to the backs of my thighs, cup, curl, and suddenly I am airborne, and my legs seem to know what to do. They wrap around his trim wedge of a waist. I writhe. Moan. Is that mythroat, making so needy a noise? It is. His hand is at the back of my neck, under the knot of my hair, his other arm beneath my bottom, supporting me, holding me.
Our kiss is one of starvation, as if we’ve both gone all our lives without this, knowing in our guts we needed it and not having a name for it or a definition of it but now here it is and we cannot live without it another moment. A kiss of utter need.
I writhe, my legs around his waist, my core grinding against his belly. My breasts crushed against his chest.
