No, asshole, I wished I was brave enough to say. I wanted you to touch me but my being beautiful was too fucking weird for you.
Better late than never, the anger I’d been waiting for welled up in me like a sail catching wind, and my tears and my humiliation and hurt feelings were flattened by my rage.
“That’s none of your fucking business, Sam! What were you doing coming down here and watching me?”
He stepped closer, the muscle in his jaw popping like he had rocks in it he was trying to crush. “Did. You. Want. Him. To. Touch. You?”
“Yep,” I lied. “I did. I fucking wanted Joe to touch me. What the hell do you care?”
“Is that why you wore the dress? Why you look like that? For him?” He stepped forward, crowding me into the desk at my back. I could feel the heat of his body on the bare skin of my chest, where I was holding the dress against my body.
I shoved at him with my elbow. “Stop crowding me.”
“Then answer,” he said. “You make yourself look like that for him?”
He said it like I’d rolled in dog shit. Like I’d put on a clown costume and embarrassed myself.
Like I was going to tell him. Like I was going to give him the knives to use against me. But he wasn’t budging. Standing there like he had the right. Like he was owed my answers.
So I punched him. The way he taught me when I was sixteen. The crack of it practically echoed and my hand burned and then went numb, and on his face was the bright red imprint of my hand. The violence of it was shocking. My blood pounded in my ears.
“Do it again,” he growled. Actually growled. I was pissed at him and hiding a disastrous amount of hurt that would have to be dealt with later, but I felt that growl between my legs, where it mattered. Where it rang me like a bell.
And that pissed me off, too. That I could still want him after tonight. After this fucking stunt.
So I did. I hauled off, closed fist, and punched that asshole right in the face, and it wasn’t as good as fucking him but it was something. Oh my God, it was me leaving a mark. Me making him see me.
And then, like the universe just couldn’t have that, couldn’t let this man actually see me for me—literally or figuratively—the lights went out. And the warehouse was plunged into darkness.
5
I jumped. Startled. And his hand came out of the darkness to touch mine. And I flinched away from him. My body wired with adrenaline.
“The power went out,” I said. Inane, but I could feel him close. “The snow.”
“It will come back on.”
He was closer. His hand squeezed my fist.
“You want to hit me again?” he asked.
“Maybe.”
And then, suddenly he wasn’t a foot away, he was on me. I couldn’t see him. But I felt him. Everywhere. His skin touching mine, and it was so much, too much, and not at all enough all at once.
He slipped his hand around my body. I gasped at the scrape of his calluses against the tender skin of my lower back. In the dark, not being able to see him, I could feel all of him.
He’s touching me. Fucking Sam Porter is touching me.
He picked me up, up off my high heels, and stepped forward so I was sitting on my desk. The jar of pens and my sticky notes, the calendar, he pushed everything to the floor. It all clattered in the dark.
“What are you doing?” I gasped.
“Giving you what you want.”
“You don’t know what I want, you—”
He kissed me. I mean, it took a second for it all to register, but he was kissing me. Consuming me. I’d been imagining our first kiss for years. I’d practiced it into the pillow on my teenage bed so many times that sometimes it felt like it had already happened. The careful clumsiness of it. The tenderness. I was sure our first kiss would be so sweet. The sweetest.
Yeah. This kiss wasn’t that. At all. This kiss was savage. His tongue in my mouth. His hand at my jaw, holding me still, holding me open. His other hand on my back, holding me like a steel girder so I couldn’t move away.
“Fuck,” he said into my mouth, and I didn’t know what was going on. I couldn’t process anything except Fucking Sam Porter was kissing me like he wanted to destroy me and save me all at once.
And the darkness made it somehow possible.
But there was something about this kiss, deep in its core, that didn’t feel right. Like he wouldn’t do this if the lights were on. Like if the lights were on, he’d embarrass me like he had earlier. Yeah. That. A guy who says that shit, he doesn’t get to kiss me five minutes later. I had some pride. I did. Somewhere.