Page 78 of Dark Billionaire Stalker
He removes his arm and looks at me. His expression is unreadable.
"What do you want it to be?"
"I don't know." The honesty hurts. "I don't know what I want. I don't know who I am anymore. Three weeks ago, I was a florist with a struggling business and a normal life. Now I'm—"
"Now you're mine."
"That's not an identity. That's a possession."
"Is there a difference?"
I don't answer. I don't know how to answer.
He rolls onto his side, facing me fully. His hand comes up to cup my face, thumb brushing across my cheekbone.
"You're thinking too much," he says. "Trying to fit this into categories that don't apply. What we have doesn't need a name. It doesn't need to be defined. It just needs to be."
"That's easy for you to say. You have a life outside of this. A business, a family, a—" I catch myself before I saybrotherhood. "A world. I've given up everything. My friends, my work, my—"
"You haven't given up anything that mattered."
"How can you say that? You don't know—"
"I know you." His grip tightens, not painful but firm. "I know that your friend Bea never understood the darkness in you, the part that needs more than she could give. I know your mother's fear has been suffocating you your whole life, making you small, making you hide. I know your work was a way of touching beauty without letting it touch you back."
"You don't—"
"I know you drew a serpent whispering to a flower before we ever met. I know you kept the dahlia I left you instead of throwing it away. I know that when you look at me, you see something you recognize. Something you've been running from your whole life." He leans closer, his breath warm on my face. "Tell me I'm wrong."
I can't. Because he's not.
"I'm not asking you to give up anything," he continues. "I'm asking you to stop pretending you want things you don't want. Stop performing a version of yourself that doesn't exist. Stop—" He pauses, searching for words. "Stop hiding from what you really are."
"And what am I?"
"Mine." He kisses me, hard and possessive. "You're mine. And I'm not letting you go."
***
It happens on a Thursday night, three weeks into whatever this is.
We've just finished—him on top of me, inside me, his hand wrapped around my throat in a way that should terrify mebut doesn't—and we're lying in the aftermath, bodies cooling, breathing slowly returning to normal.
He's told me about his day. The meetings, the negotiations, the tedious details of running an empire, I barely understand. I've told him about the flowers I used to grow on my grandmother's windowsill, the ones that never survived but that I planted again every spring anyway.
Normal conversation. The kind of thing any couple might discuss after sex.
Except we're not a couple. We're not anything that has a name.
"Stay," he says, as he does every night.
"I should go home."
"Stay." His arm tightens around me. "Not just tonight. Stay."
I turn my head to look at him. "What do you mean?"
"Move in. Here. With me."
