Total pages in book: 78
Estimated words: 73233 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 366(@200wpm)___ 293(@250wpm)___ 244(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 73233 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 366(@200wpm)___ 293(@250wpm)___ 244(@300wpm)
He froze.
His hand stopped. His mouth stilled against her neck. She could feel him breathing, harsh and ragged, his chest heaving against hers, and his forehead dropped to her shoulder. He stood there, rigid, his hand still under her shirt, his body still hard against hers, and she could feel the war in him, every muscle locked in a fight against himself.
“Don’t stop. Please.” The words spilled past her lips in a whimper.
His fingers curled against her ribs. She felt his mouth open against her shoulder, felt him inhale her, and for a stretched, infinite moment he stayed there, his face buried in the curve of her neck, his hand on her skin, his body coiled tight. She wrapped her arms around his shoulders, fingers in his hair, keeping him against her like she could hold him there through force of will.
Then he pulled away.
Worse than the garden. He peeled himself off her one point of contact at a time. His hand from under her shirt, his mouth from her shoulder, his hips from hers. Each separation a separate loss. She read his face as he did it, read the hunger getting swallowed by composure, the exact moment the mask slid back into place.
But his eyes were still dark. And when he stepped back, he didn’t break the connection.
“This can’t happen,” he said hoarsely.
“It already is.”
“Katy.”
“It already is, Julian. You can walk away from me as many times as you want. It’s still happening.”
His gaze bore into hers. She held. She was leaning against a jacaranda tree with bark impressions on her shoulder blades and her polo rucked up where his hand had been and her mouth swollen and her hair half-fallen from its pins, and she should have felt exposed, embarrassed, small. She felt none of those things. She felt like the truest version of herself. The girl who ran toward things, the girl who didn’t let terror win.
“You don’t know me,” he gritted out. Almost a plea.
“Then let me.”
He closed his eyes. When he opened them, the mask was back, but it wasn’t solid anymore. She could see the fractures running through it, and the light pouring through from the other side.
He walked away. She let him.
JULIAN DIDN’T GO HOME. He drove to the coast and parked at a lookout he never visited and sat in his car absorbing the Pacific and tried to remember how to think about anything other than the sound she’d made when his hand touched her bare skin.
He couldn’t.
He dug the heels of his hands against his eyes. His hands still smelled like her. Clean cotton and something floral, the scent that had lodged itself in his brain weeks ago and never left. He could feel the phantom shape of her ribs under his palm, the ridge of bone under warm skin, and the involuntary arch of her back when his thumb had reached the edge of her bra, and the sound, that small broken cry that had come out of her like something torn free, and he’d frozen because if he hadn’t frozen he would not have stopped.
She was nineteen. She was a virgin. He knew this with the same certainty that he knew the color of her hair and the scar at her eyebrow and how she tucked her hair behind her left ear when she was nervous, never the right. He knew because her first kiss had been in the garden, and he’d felt her inexperience in the clumsy warmth of her mouth and the searching, uncertain placement of her hands, and the knowledge that he was the first person to touch her like this, to put his mouth on her throat and his hands on her skin, filled him with something so tangled he couldn’t separate the tenderness from the hunger from the self-loathing.
His phone buzzed. Dionne.
He let it ring. It went to voicemail. It buzzed again.
He picked up.
“Where were you today? I came by for lunch and you weren’t at your usual table.”
“I left early.”
“Everything okay?” A pause. “Is it the Katy thing?”
He said nothing. The Pacific was doing what the Pacific did, enormous and indifferent, and a pelican folded itself into a dive and vanished under the surface.
“Julian, I talked to her. Gently. I told her that she needed to be careful about how she talked about you at the club, that people were noticing, and she got defensive. Really defensive.” Dionne’s voice was reluctant. “She said you’d been meeting her privately. That you kissed her.”
His hand clenched on the phone.
“I told her that even if something happened, it was a one-time lapse and she shouldn’t read into it. She got upset. Said I was jealous.” Another pause. Perfectly calibrated. “Julian, I know she’s my sister. I love her. But she is building something dangerous, and I need you to hear me when I say that her mother did the same thing to our father. Amy saw an opportunity and she took it, and it cost everyone.”