Page 46 of Break Me Open
The thought sends a hot dart of anticipation through me.
I want him. Not just the clever, stubborn soldier parts and the challenge. I want his body and to see what happens when all that discipline burns off, and there’s nothing left but raw want. I want to hear what he sounds like when he comes.
I exhale slowly. Okay. Plan, then.
The first step — test if he regrets it in the morning. If he can’t meet my eyes at breakfast, or if he goes stiff, formal and starts avoiding me, then I know I misjudged, and I’ll have to dial it all the way back. We can’t have a skittish British lamb bolting at the first sign of his own desire. I don’t have the patience to coax him out of that kind of self-hate.
But if he looks at me like he did just before he kissed me — like he’s torn between throttling me and dragging me into a dark room — then we proceed. Slowly, carefully, and absolutely not on base.
We can steal time in small ways. Walks that go a few minutes longer than necessary. Conversations that drift after official business is done. The odd ‘accidental’ overlap in schedules — we can stretch that. A weekend pass isn’timpossible. Niko would sign off on my absence for a couple of days if I frame it right. But that’s a problem for later.
One catastrophe at a time.
For now, I just have to make it through tonight without getting up, walking across the base like an idiot, and sneaking into his room. If I did that, this would stop being tactical and would start being... something else. I know better than that. I’ve done it before, and it nearly ended badly.
So I’ll stay in my bunk, stare at the underside of the bed above me, and replay the taste of his mouth in my head.
At some point, finally, my body decides it’s had enough and drags me under. My last half-coherent thought before sleep claws me down isn’t anything remotely wise.
It’s just his name. Caiden.
In the morning, my alarm goes off at 0500 like it has a personal issue with me resting. The sound drills into my skull until I slap it off, swearing under my breath. My knees crack when I swing them over the side of the bunk and my lower back aches with the kind of tension that only comes from spending half the night in that place between sleep and thinking about someone you shouldn’t.
I scrub a hand over my face and swing my feet down onto the cold floor, then I dress on autopilot. I check my face in the tiny, warped mirror by my bunk, head out into the corridor, the chill yard, then finally toward the mess.
I step into the hall and let my eyes adjust while scanning the room. I find Niko first, as always. He’s at one of the side tables, gesturing with a fork. Next to him… Caiden.
He’s in his T-shirt again with his jacket slung over the back of the chair. He’s laughing at something my brothers just said, his head tipped back, and his eyes are crinkling. He looksnormal. No frosty avoidance, or hollow-eyed misery about having kissed the wrong person behind the equipment shed.
As if he feels my attention, his gaze drops from Niko and flicks toward the entrance, and our eyes meet. His expression does a quick, tiny shift of surprise, then something like relief, then a flare of... Oh, good. There it is, hunger.
It’s small and contained, as if he’s trying to sit on it. But I see it. The slight parting of his lips. The way his cheeks turn a little red, and the micro-tension in his jaw.
I let a slow, small smile curl one corner of my mouth — nothing big enough for anyone else to notice — then I look away deliberately and join the queue for food, ignoring the fact that my heart is suddenly beating somewhere in the region of my throat.
He wants more, great news for me. He can have it, on my terms, obviously. I grab whatever they’re serving, make my way to the table, and drop down opposite Niko like it’s any other day. My brother grins, says something about the weather being an asshole, and I answer automatically, trading insults about the snow.
But under the noise, there’s a current. Every time I speak, I can feel Caiden’s attention brush against me. Whenever our knees bump under the table — entirely by accident, of course — I can feel the way his body goes taut for a second.
He’s trying to keep it together, and I’m going to see exactly how long that lasts.
I smirk into my mug. Last night was the first move.
Now the real game starts.
Seventeen
Caiden
I don’t sleep at all. I lie there in my bunk, staring at the underside of the bed above me, counting the flaking chips of paint on the metal frame, the cracks in the concrete wall, the seconds between each drip in the pipes somewhere in the building. Anything except counting the number of times I replay that stupid fucking kiss in my head.
One Russian sergeant with soft lips backs me into a fence, I kisses me back, walks away, and apparently that’s enough to completely brick my operating system. Every time I close my eyes, I’m back there. The heat of his body crowding mine, as if he’d decided how much space I was allowed to have. That low, lazy, infuriating tone he used right before my mouth hit his — and Christ, the way he kissed.
I’ve kissed boys before, after too much vodka and not enough sense. Quick, messy, and forgettable. Every time, the point of those kisses was to get to something else. This wasn’t like that.
He kissed me like he already knew what it would take to drive me over the edge — his fingers pulling my hair, the other braced by my head, not quite touching — And he went slow.
I opened for him before I’d even consciously decided to, my traitor brain just kicking the doors wide and leaving a sign out that said ‘Come on in, we’re open, rob us blind’.
