Page 29 of Break Me Open
“You’re playing a dangerous game, Sergeant,” he says, his voice low.
“Mm, that’s the tone I like,” I murmur, pleased.
“What tone?”
“The one you use when you can’t decide if you want to choke me,” I say, watching his mouth, “or push me against the nearest surface and see what other noises I make.”
His eyes flare wide for a second, then he jerks like I’ve hit a nerve.
“Fuck you,” he breathes.
“Potentially,” I say. “But we’d need more than ten minutes for that, and your Sergeant would miss you.”
“You think too much of yourself.”
“I think plenty about you as well,” I reply. “Very generous of me, no?”
He makes a sound low in his chest that sounds suspiciously like frustration. “Do you talk like this to all of your allies?” he asks. “Is that why your CO keeps sighing at you?”
“Jealous?” I ask.
“You really want to know what I’m jealous of?” he asks. “The way you get to walk around this place like the rules are optional. Everyone’s so busy trying to keep up with you, they don’t make you pay for any of it.”
Interesting. That’s not where I expected him to go.
“Is that right?” I ask quietly.
“You push, all the time. You push me. You push Niko. You push the command. And somehow, it works. You never get punished or shut down. Men like me are told to keep their heads down and their mouths shut. But you get to cause chaos and call it a fucking personality.” The words come out like gunfire. It sounds like he’s been holding that in for a while.
“There’s the real Caiden. Touchy, touchy,” I murmur. “Who knew you were so obsessed with me?”
“I’m not—”
“Yes, you are. You think about me in your bunk at night. You count all the ways you hate me, and you don’t dare admit that you only hate me because you want me.”
“You’re unbelievable,” he hisses.
“So I’ve been told,” I say.
He jerks his vest out of my grip, and for a second, I think he’s about to step back. He snaps instead, shoving at my shoulder, hard. I fall back a step, then catch myself and laugh.
“There we are,” I say softly. “Good boy.”
“Don’t call me that,” he says, moving forward and crowding me. “Don’t fucking—”
“Why?” I ask. “Because it makes you think about getting on your knees?”
His nostrils flare, and his hands ball into fists at his sides. “You think you’ve got me figured out,” he grinds out. “You don’t know shit.”
I take another step back, deliberately giving him room, testing if he follows.
He does, so I press into him, getting right in his face. “You’re right,” I say softly. “I don’t know everything. I don’t know, for instance, what kind of noises you make when someone puts their hand on your throat and squeezes just enough to remind you that you’re alive.”His breathing picks up as I lean in as close as I can, my lips hovering over his. “I don’t know whether you like people telling you what a good job you’re doing when you’re trying to hold it together,” I murmur. “Whether anyone’s ever looked at you and said, ‘such a good boy, Caiden,’ following every rule while you’resecretly dying to break all of them.”He swallows. Hard.“And I don’t know,” I finish, my voice barely above a whisper, “how long you’re going to keep pretending you want me to shut up, when every word I say makes you breathe harder.”
There’s silence for a few seconds, then his fists grab the front of my vest, shoving me backwards, then slamming me into the nearest tree. The bark digs into my shoulders, and my rifle bangs against the trunk with a dull thunk.
I’m delighted, and my laugh bursts out of me. “Finally,” I say, grinning in his face.
“You’re going to get yourself killed,” he snarls in my face. “You know that, right? One day you’ll say something like that to the wrong man and he’ll—”
