Move the Stars (Something in the Way 3)

He’d wanted to fuck me. Badly.

He’d been locked up a year-and-a-half and seeing me had inspired some kind of carnal reaction in him. It was the fantasy, the one that got me off like no other. Imagining he’d put me over his shoulder and carried me right out of that house, past my dad, past Tiffany. He’d take me in the backseat of Tiffany’s car because he couldn’t make it longer than that. I’d masturbated over and over to that, and to the night I’d found him at his kitchen sink in nothing but his boxer-briefs. That rawness in his face, his terrifying grip on my wrists, the way he’d pinned me to the counter with his hips—it was the stuff my dark fantasies were made of.

My heart raced, lust and memories coursing through me. I moved into him a little, and his hand tightened around the fabric. A horn blared outside, and as if startled, Manning bent his head, coffee and toothpaste on his breath, and lessened the great height disparity between us.

There was so much unsaid. So much that needed to be said. Whatever was happening had to be stopped, but only heat existed between us at that moment, unleashed after years of being bridled.

Manning tossed his coat out of the way, scanning my face. When he touched the hem of my sweatshirt, I flinched. He lifted it slowly. Underneath was the little black dress I’d worn out to the bar the night before, bunched around my hips. He ran his hand up the cheap satin, stopping under my breasts. With that one touch, my nipples roused, my skin pebbled, my hairs stood on end.

I was putty in his hands, but I didn’t want to be. I didn’t know if I could have him, so I didn’t want to look at him, much less feel his hands on me. “Why are you here, Manning?”

“I never stopped thinking about you, not for a day. I needed to come here and see with my own eyes if you were better off without me.”

I shivered. And if I wasn’t better off? Then what? The answer scared me more than his thumb pressing into my rib, setting free a kaleidoscope of butterflies inside me.

“I’m here because you . . . this . . .” His voice lowered and scraped from his throat as he slipped his other hand under my sweatshirt to take my waist. “It keeps me up at night. It makes me insane. And some days I think I’d kill for it.”

With the word kill, my insides pulled deep. This was it, the carnal side of him I’d seen glimpses of. My focus wavered with his hands on me, but I only just remembered what a mess I was, wearing a dress I’d partied and slept in. I hadn’t shaved my legs in days. “Manning . . .”

His hands moved slowly, hidden by the sweatshirt as they explored me. “Want me to stop?” he asked.

Like that night on his kitchen counter, I still couldn’t believe Manning was just touching me. I wanted it, but I was older now. Smarter. I knew how dangerous his hands were. “I . . .”

“Just say the word. Say stop.”

I breathed hard. I quivered. I thought about the times I’d felt him hard against me and hadn’t been able to do anything about it.

I didn’t tell him to stop.

He cradled both sides of my ribcage, moving his hands upward until I was forced to raise my arms. When he pulled off my sweatshirt, one of my thin dress straps fell over my shoulder. He touched my hair, drawing the long strands through his loose fist and over his palm. He still hadn’t kissed me. It’d been over six years since the day we’d met, and he still hadn’t kissed me. What was he waiting for? He looked anywhere but into my eyes, clearing my hair from my neck, running a thumb along the hollow of my collarbone. He pulled down my other strap and wet his lips, undressing me the same torturous way he’d dismantled my heart, piece by piece, slow and painful. It felt simultaneously natural and unnatural. I’d spent years telling myself, being told, this wasn’t allowed. I gripped his dress shirt. “I hate this suit.”

“Why?”

Was Manning really here? It had to be him. The man in front of me bore a small scar on his upper lip and the faintest crook to his nose, evidence of his time in prison. But now he looked like he belonged on the front page of the Wall Street Journal. “It’s not you. It’s not the man I knew.”

“What if it’s who I am now?”

Maybe it’d be better that way. He was different, and so was I, and if anyone needed to be different people in order to continue down this path, it was us. I didn’t want polished Manning, though. I wanted his roughness, the man who’d been to hell and back, who had callused hands to match his hardened heart. “It’s not you, I know it isn’t, please, Manning . . . just—”