"Yeah?" he asked, giving me his full weight for a second as his arms shot up and snagged mine at the wrists. "Try using it."
Arms pinned over my head, his inviting body covering mine, his disarmingly open smile shining down on me... yeah I kind of forgot what the hell a remote control was. As such, it fell from my hand, utterly forgotten.
"That's what I thought," he said, smile turning into a smirk before his lips pressed down on mine. With my arms pinned, I had expected hard, rough, dominant. Instead, he gave me slow, sweet, explorative kisses, planting a row of little ones across my lips before pressing in hard, his tongue slipping forward to claim mine until every inch of my skin felt like it was buzzing, until my air got tight in my chest, until my legs went up to wrap around his back and my arms fought their imprisonment, wanting to wrap around his shoulders and hold him against me.
His grip slipped slightly until his hands pressed down on mine. And instead of pulling away at the intimacy of it like I had expected the second I felt the contact, his fingers slipped between mine and closed up tight.
And I swear, the second my bare hand touched his bare hand, my soul sang a song my heart understood. And I realized in a moment of blinding, Earth-shaking clarity, that I had never felt anything even akin to it before.
It was too soon. It was stupid. It was reckless. It was completely and insanely unlike me.
But I loved him.
I loved him in a way I wasn't familiar with: wild, unstoppable, nonsensical.
It wasn't something I had known before. Love had been something that grew from mutual interest, long conversations, shared meals, shared spaces, shared... everything. It came from knowing the ins and outs of your partner.
It came from, well, my head.
This wasn't that.
This was all heart.
And that was the scariest thing I had ever felt in my entire life.
But the fact of the matter was, I wasn't the woman I was, or more accurately, thought I was, when I first walked through Byron St. James' door. He had systematically ripped the false layers away, the guards, the masks. He had shown me what was underneath. I was so myself with him that it was painful. My whole body ached.
"What's the matter?" Byron's voice asked, jolting me out of my own thoughts to find him pressed upward, eyes on mine, seeming to see right through me.
"Nothing is the matter," I lied.
"Babe... I stopped kissing you like twenty seconds ago and you didn't even notice. So fuck off with that shit and tell me what's up."
"Not everything in my head is your business," I countered, my words a little harsh to cover up the swirling, all-consuming fear working its way through my system.
"If your head is in my bed, everything in it is my business."
I exhaled slowly, fighting against the hold he had of my hands. "Fine. Then let me up and I'll get out of your bed and then you don't have to worry about it."
"The fuck is up with you?" he asked, brows drawing together, but he released my wrists and pushed himself back until he sat on his ankles and looked down at me.
"I'm tired," I lied, wiggling out and away from him, moving off to the side of the bed and making a grab for my jeans and tee, standing and slipping into them as quickly as possible.
"You're not tired," he countered, moving to sit back against the headboard, watching me. "Don't lie to me, Prue. You know I see right through that shit so you're not accomplishing anything. You want to leave, go, there's the door. But don't lie to me."
"Then don't ask questions it's obvious I don't want to answer."
"Babe, you never want to answer any fucking questions. It's like pulling teeth to get anything real out of you."
"I never asked you to get to know me, Byron," I said, my voice a little hollow because I knew that, while I never asked it of him, everything in me was begging it of him.
"Alright," he said, shaking his head a little like he was confused. "Go get your space. But this isn't over."
"This what? This conversation?"
"That, yeah. But this," he said, gesturing between us, "too. Know you're going to go hole up in your room and convince yourself some bullshit about it being reckless and stupid and messy..."
"It is."
"Yeah, babe. But that's fucking life. It's reckless and stupid and messy. And you do shit sometimes just because it feels good or because it would be an interesting story one day or, for fuck's sake, even just for bragging rights. Not everything needs to be analyzed to death. Not everything has to be smart and well planned out."