Page 112 of Never Alone
He took my shirt off, inch by inch. His hands at the hem, lifting, his eyes on mine until the shirt was off and his eyes weren't on mine anymore. He hadn't been able to keep them there. They were everywhere—my collarbone, my shoulder, the place on my chest where my pulse was, the curve of my waist.
He stopped.
He just stopped, with his hands on my hips and his eyes on me, and didn't move.
"What's wrong?"
"Nothing."
"Cole."
"You're beautiful."
He said it plainly. Like he'd already worked it through.
I smiled.
I pulled him down to me.
The bed took us. The lamp was still on. I didn't ask him to turn it off. I'd spent ten years with a man who needed it dark, and I wasn't going to spend my first night with a man I'd chosen pretending I was someone different.
Cole didn't need it dark.
He moved over me carefully, and his hands found everywhere they could find. He kissed my throat. He kissed my collarbone. He kissed the place on my chest where my pulse was, and his mouth stayed there for a second longer than it needed to, and I felt him register the way I was breathing.
His hand went up my ribs.
He found it.
I felt him find it before he did anything about it. The pause was small—a fraction of a second where his palm stilled, took the shape of the mark under it, and then went on.
The scar was on the left side of my ribcage, just under the curve of my breast. It was old. It was thin and pale and a little shiny in certain light. I didn't know if it had been a buckle or the corner of a coffee table. I'd decided, a long time ago, not to remember.
Cole didn't ask.
He didn't flinch. He didn't lift his head to look at it. He didn't stop in any way that asked me to explain. He just bent his head and put his mouth there, soft, for one count. Two.
Then he moved on.
I hadn't known I'd been carrying something there. Something braced against the day a man would find it and want to know. He hadn't wanted to know. He'd just put his mouth on it and let it be part of me.
Something inside my chest came untied.
I turned my face into the pillow and felt my eyes wet.
Cole noticed. Of course, he noticed.
"Tessa."
"It's good."
"You sure?"
"It's good. Keep going."
He kept going.
He took the rest of my clothes off the way he had taken my shirt off—slow, with his eyes coming back to mine. He took his off the rest of the way. He came back to me.
