Page 214 of Wild Card 13

My hand spread at the small of her back. Hers tightened in my hair. The kiss turned hotter, messier, still tender somehow beneath the want. Her sweater bunched under my fingers. Her breath caught when my mouth moved along the corner of hers, then lower, just beneath her jaw. I felt the sound in my chest. Felt it everywhere.

I wanted to lay her back against the couch.

I wanted to carry her upstairs.

I wanted to make every empty room in this house learn the sound of her.

The wanting scared me because it was not only physical. Physical I understood. Physical had rules. Limits. Consequences. You could want a body and still walk away from the feeling after.

This was Lucy in my house, in my arms, making the whole place feel like it had been waiting for her to breathe inside it. This was the life I had built by accident showing me exactly what it had been missing. This was my hand on her back and her fingers in my hair and the unbearable certainty that I had never stopped belonging to the moment before everything went wrong.

I kissed her slower.

Tried to.

Failed when she made that tiny sound again and pulled me closer.

“Luce,” I breathed against her mouth.

Then she pulled away.

I let go immediately.

Both hands off. Space open. Breath wrecked.

Lucy sat back, one hand pressed to the couch cushion as if she needed to steady herself. Her lips were swollen. Her curls had fallen wild around her face. Without her glasses, her eyes looked too exposed. Too brown. Too full of everything she had been trying not to let me see. “Okay,” I said quietly, though nothing was okay. “Okay.”

She reached for her glasses with fingers that were not steady. Put them on. Blinked once behind the lenses like she needed the world to sharpen before she could survive it.

I moved back another inch.

Dottie kept sleeping.

The fire kept burning.

The lake stayed dark beyond the glass.

Lucy looked at me, and whatever I saw in her face cut straight through the want, through the hope, through the stupid, beautiful dream I had let myself touch for one breath too long.

She was wrecked. Guarded because she had to be, not because she wanted to be.

My throat tightened. “Luce.”

Her mouth trembled once before she controlled it. “I don’t know how to trust you not to break me again,” she whispered.

I could not answer. There was nothing I could say that would not ask her to believe me before I had earned it.

So I stayed still.

Her eyes filled, but no tears fell. She looked at me like she wanted the answer to be somewhere in my face, somewhere in the house, somewhere in the fire or the frozen lake or the old photograph on the mantel of a boy who had not known yet what he would lose.

Then she asked the question that took the whole room down to bone. “How do I ever trust you again?”

CHAPTER 26

BUZZ

THEN