His eyes darkened, a strangled sound in his throat. When he dragged me back to him this time the fervor was doubled. Frenzied. Fire.
But my throat filled with cotton.
“I’m not going to sleep with you when you love someone else,” I gasped through kisses on my neck. “While you’re practically with someone else. I won’t be that person.”
Don’t make me that person.
He raked his fingers down my thighs, leaving a bruising trail, and with his ragged exhale, he stopped kissing me.
He lifted himself onto his elbows. “That’s going to be a problem for me, Snitch.”
Our eyes locked. Pulsating.
“You’re starting to take up too much space inside me. I don’t think there’s any other way to get you out.”
When he kissed me again, it was slow, gentle, languorous. My heart bled from the tenderness and the words I’d always wanted to hear, yet fate had given me a catch-22. His confession was wrapped inside barbed wire. Maybe he was starting to feel what I felt…but to him it was a tumor that needed to be ripped out.
Brutal kisses and gentle words, or gentle kisses and brutal words—I was learning there was no other way with Grayson. He never gave you both.
“I don’t want this to end,” I said against his lips. “I don’t want to go back. I don’t want you to forget me.”
Use me to forget me. Why did they always do that? Why did I always let them?
Grayson froze and pulled back, lips red and swollen from kissing me. Eyes stone and impenetrable.
“Forgetting you would be…” He trailed off for so long, that same distant stony look in his eyes. I wished I could drag it back, the bleeding part of me.
“It would be impossible,” he said at last, locking eyes with me, tone harder than diamond.
My heart cracked in uncertainty. Words I wanted to hear, but he looked so, so unhappy.
Then below us, the door slammed against the wall.
“Grayson!” his mother called.
Twenty-Five
GRAY
* * *
My mother waited for me in my foyer, always dressed like she was about to host some luncheon for the queen, even at three in the morning.
“It’s the middle of the fucking night,” I whispered.
My mother smiled with glee—fucking glee. The last time I’d seen that look on her face we’d learned Gemma was betrothed to Horace.
At the ripe age of thirteen.
“This can’t wait.”
I tangled my blond hair in my fingers, nerves on edge. “What is it?”
She pressed her palms together. “Next Christmas.”
Fucking Mayday.
“…Is another bullshit Crowne family holiday party?” I said, knowing it wasn’t, knowing in my gut what she was about to tell me.