Page 165 of Cross Checked
Her fingers dug into my shoulders.
I nuzzled against her neck, my mouth dragging along her jaw before I looked at her again. “The thought makes me feel crazy.”
Her eyes were wide now, her breathing uneven. “That’s how I feel,” she whispered. “Except yours is real. I don’t have a sexual history. It’s all hypothetical.”
Something low and possessive twisted through me so hard I almost kissed her teeth. “You don’t need one. There isn’t enough room between us for you to have a past.”
Her mouth opened, probably to deflect, but I didn’t let her.
“You’re different,” I said. “There isn’t a girl from my past that I ever gave this side of myself to. No one has ever come close to this.” My hand framed her face again, forcing her to stay with me, to hear me. “This feeling is uniquely us. I don’t have a clean name for it, and I’m done trying to shove it into one that fits other people. It’s addictive as hell, and I’m not pretending it isn’t.”
For once, Bliss didn’t joke.
That scared me more than the jokes ever did.
Her eyes filled slowly, not in the broken way they did earlier, but in a way that told me I had finally gotten past the armor and the smart mouth to the thing underneath she never let anyone touch.
“You scare me, Cade,” she whispered.
I didn’t move.
“If this is real, if you’re real, there won’t be a rebound from this.” Her voice shook, but she kept going, and I swear to fuck it felt like watching someone hand me a loaded weapon and trust me not to aim it at her. “I’m so scared, Cade. Because if I give you what you want—if I give in to this and I trust you to protect my heart, then in the same breath, I give you the power to hurt me.”
My chest went tight enough to hurt.
“Nothing will ever scare me the way you do,” she whispered. “I wouldn’t survive that level of emotional destruction.”
I stared at her for one long second.
Then I kissed her. Not because I had the right answer. Because there wasn’t one.
There was only her beneath me, telling me I scared her more than the dark because I was the light she wanted badly enough to burn for.
I kissed her like I understood. Like I had every intention of making myself worth the risk. Like I would rather take a stick to the throat in every game for the rest of my life than be one more reason this girl added a marble to that sculpture.
When I pulled back, her eyes were wet and furious.
I brushed my thumb beneath one of them before it could fall. “You just used emotional correctly.”
Her face went completely blank.
Then outrage sparked through all that vulnerability, bright and immediate and so fucking her that my chest almost cracked open.
“I hate you.”
I smiled despite myself, lowering my forehead to hers while she glared up at me like she wasn’t still holding onto my shirt with both fists.
And holy fuck, I was in so much trouble.
26
Bliss
I wake up because Cade is trying not to wake me.
Which is stupid, honestly, because Cade Mercer has the subtlety of a bank robbery when he is fully dressed in black hockey workout gear, moving around my bedroom before sunrise like a six-foot-something emotionally expensive burglar.
The room is still dark, washed in the faint blue-gray light that sneaks through the blinds before morning has fully committed to being morning. My body feels heavy in that post-cry, post-emotional-destruction, post-Cade-had-his-hands-on-me way that makes every muscle slightly useless and every thought come wrapped in cotton. For a few seconds, I just lie there beneath my blanket and watch him move quietly through my room, pulling a black hoodie over his head, finding his socks near the foot of my bed, checking his phone with his jaw already set like the day has personally offended him.
