His lips slid to the left in a lazy smile that reached through my rage and confusion to spark the lust that lay like kindling at the pit of my stomach whenever he was near.
“You won’t do that.”
“Are you trying to blackmail me?” I asked.
I didn’t think King would do something like that but he was from a criminal family and he’d been lying to me since the moment I’d met him, so what did I know?
“Shut your mouth before you say something you can’t take back and really piss me off.”
I emitted a strangled cry of rage. “Are you freaking kidding me right now? You lied to me, you led me on and you’ve humiliated me. I could lose my job for this, King. I have no money to my name. I need this job.”
Hysterical sobs bubbled up and rose into my lungs so that I had to pant to breathe through the pain. Spots danced in front of my eyes and I could feel my body sway but could do nothing to stop it. Rough, warm hands caught me, one at its spot on the back of my neck and the other over my hip.
“Take a deep breath, babe.”
On auto-pilot, lost to the psychedelic chaos of my panic attack, I obeyed.
“Another.”
I took another.
“Good girl,” he murmured into my hair as he pulled me into his body.
I breathed deep, dragging his intoxicating scent in over and over again. It calmed me, being held against his hard chest, cocooned in his strong arms, but it also made me want to cry. I’d been frightened before just knowing that he was the kind of man—boy—who could change my life, who had already changed my life just by being. I’d only just come to terms with the gamble, accepted the odds even though, historically, they had never played out in my favor.
I’d accepted that fact that he was essentially a criminal.
I couldn’t accept the fact that he was my student because that would make me a criminal.
“This happen often?” he asked me.
His hand on the back of my neck pressed me firmly into his pecs, his thumb a pendulum swinging back and forth over my hairline. It was both bossy and tender, a contradiction that I’d already figured out was King’s modus operandi. I hated how much I loved it.
“Sometimes,” I answered.
I’d been having panic attacks on and off since the day my brother had left home for good. It was, without a doubt, the worst day of my life but also, depressingly, the day I’d felt most alive.
It was also ironic, given that I’d essentially helped to kill a man and now here I was, obsessing over the possibility that King was a criminal.
I pulled back from him so abruptly that he actually let go.
“You do not get to touch me or comfort me, especially when you are the one who caused the problem. Please, please, tell me you didn’t know I was your teacher?”
He finally had the decency to look mildly abashed. It was boyish and charming the way he tucked his hands in his pockets and rocked back on his heels. I reminded myself that I wasn’t in a position to be charmed by a boy.
“Saw you the first day of school, remembered you from that fuckin’ parking lot. Hottest day in September and there you stood, plastic bags melting all around you, just fuckin’ staring at me. At first, I thought, what kind of bitch just stares at a guy like that? But that was before I actually saw you. Told you once, I’ll tell you again. Took my goddamn breath away, babe. Never coulda known I’d feel that way about someone just lookin’ at ‘em but I did.”
He paused, and the only sound in the room was the shaky rattle of my breath through my lungs. It felt like my entire nervous system was shutting down.
“Didn’t seem fair the next time I saw you, you were my goddamn teacher. I knew if I just had a chance to get to you, you’d be mine. Knew it then and know it now even more. You’re mine, Cress.”
“I am not,” I snapped but I sounded like a child denying something the adults knew she wanted.
How was it that this eighteen-year-old boy could reduce me to the youngest parts of myself? He made me yearn like a teenager that had never rebelled, the child who wanted what she could not have.
“You are and you know it. You want this,” he said, stepping closer again. His voice was forceful but there was anxiety in his normally smiling eyes, tension in the hands that flexed at his side. I knew he wanted to go to me, to put his hand on its place at my neck.
I took another step away from him and spoke before I could succumb any further to his outrageous appeal.