Page 33 of Wraith

And maybe I want him to probe me.

Oh, fuck my goddamn brain.

I need to move. I need to put distance between us. I need to put clothes on and make coffee and get my shit together because my defenses are coming down and I can feel it happening and I cannot let it happen.

I stand up and walk to the fridge.

Like a responsible adult, I pull out another bottle of Chardonnay, twist off the cap and I drink. Not a sip. A long pull.

“Are you going to share?” Wraith says, behind me.

I lower the bottle and wipe my mouth with the back of my hand. “Get your own fucking bottle.”

There’s a pause. Then I hear him laugh. Not a big laugh. Just a short, surprised sound that makes something in my chest do a thing I refuse to name.

“I’m cuffed to a radiator.”

“Right.” I take another drink. “How‘s that working out for you?”

“It’s been better.” A pause. “Come on, June. One sip.”

I turn around. He’s watching me with an expression that’s half-amused, half-something-else, and I hate how much I like that expression. Hate how much I like it when he’s acting like a normal human being and not some manipulative asshole who wants to run my life with an iron fist.

I walk back over to him, the bottle in my hand, and I crouch down and hold it to his lips.

He drinks. His eyes don’t leave mine. The bottle tilts and wine runs down his chin, and I watch it drip onto his chest, and I think about licking it off and I immediately shut that thought down so hard it makes my skull hurt.

I pull the bottle back.

“Happy?”

“Getting there,” he says.

I sit down on the floor across from him. Not close. But not far either. Close enough that I can see the details — the way his chest rises and falls, the faint scar on his ribs that I remember giving him, the muscles in his forearms flexing slightly as he shifts position, the larger scar on him from that night I saved his life.

I take another drink. He watches me do it.

“You’re going to feel that later,” he says.

“I’ll feel everything later. Might as well add drunk to the list.”

“Fair.”

We sit there for a moment in silence. The morning light is getting stronger through the windows. Somewhere outside a dog barks. The apartment is full of some false sense of normalcy, like this is just a regular morning, like I’m just sitting on the floor of my studio apartment having wine at nine in the morning with a mostly naked man who used to terrify me and who now loves when I whip his ass and call him a naughty boy and make him bark like a dog.

I take another drink, and then I hold the bottle out to him.

He takes it and drinks, and when he lowers it there’s a small smile on his face that makes him look younger. Less hard. More like a person and less like a problem.

“This is good wine,” he says.

“The Devils have taste.”

“Apparently.”

I take the bottle back. Our fingers brush. Just for a second. Just the barest contact. But I feel it everywhere.

This is bad.