Control

On the word rude, his lips part. He looks startled, uncomfortable.

“Of course not!” he blurts out.

“Then why are you dressed again?”

He searches the room for inspiration, and I’m pretty sure I can actually see his mind working. Figuring out the ratio of immorality to sex. If he puts a hand on my tit, is hell just around the corner, or down the next street?

But it’s me who’s too immersed in hell thoughts, it seems, because when he does step to me, it’s so sudden that I start. He reaches out—almost wary, I think—and then strokes one hand down my arm. Just that. Nothing more.

Though it’s still entirely possible that I gasp. I feel as though I haven’t been touched in a decade, and if that wasn’t bad enough, it’s Gabe who’s doing the touching. Gabe, who often seems too terrified to make eye contact.

Even if he’s not too terrified to do this. He rubs his hand up and down, up and down—almost like a friendly reassurance, if it were not for my trembling response. I shudder as I watch him watching himself touching me, his too-dark and too-intense eyes following his own hand over the shivering sensitive inside of my arm. He follows it all the way up to my shoulder, where his fingers pinch and rub the material of my shirt in the most weirdly lewd way.

And then the lewdness flickers over to something else, as quickly as it had arrived. Something else worse, because I think he might actually be about to kiss me. He’s very tall, so it’s not hard to miss. He has to lean down, and come so close to me, and I think of all those cheesy movies with the hero going in finally, finally for a kiss. The heroine swooning, hardly able to believe it.

This wasn’t what I had in mind when I started this. And yet I find myself tilting my face up to his, as his parted lips get closer and closer, and all I can think of is the utter hilarity of an odd backwards movie kiss.

That doesn’t make me want to laugh. By God, I think I might actually be swooning—at the very least, I don’t think I’ve ever closed my eyes before on feeling someone’s mouth pressed to mine. And he’s so tender and so gentle that it makes me ache, in a hundred odd and completely unused places. Unfortunate, really, that I don’t have all day.

I want to touch his body and I want him to touch mine, and I want to be naked and writhing with him, immediately. So I worm one sly hand beneath the prison of his olive green tank top. And maybe I also curl my tongue around his earlobe.