Page 66 of When The Rain Falls

"Are you going to have a glass?" Aimee asks, reaching over and taking the glass of wine from the table.

"I don't really drink."

"You don't? Like at all?"

"Not really. I kind of quit," I confess. This isn’t something I hide. But it’s not something I share, either. The fact that I don’t drink because it only intensifies the anger. Not even my family knows the extent of it. They just know that I had a drinking problem for a while. And then one day I didn’t. It wasn’t an addiction. Just a crutch.

For some reason I can’t explain, I’m telling her.

"Oh.” She suddenly looks embarrassed. “I don’t have to drink, either. I’m sorry, I don’t know the etiquette.”

"Nah.” I wave her off. “Enjoy your wine."

"Well, did you also quit sitting?” Now she’s smirking. That sinful, full-lipped smirk of hers.

When I raise an eyebrow in confusion, she waves her hand over my body. "You're not sitting."

"Oh. Right." I take a seat at the edge of the couch right as a woman on TV gets decapitated by a zombie wielding a giant chainsaw. Aimee jumps as she clutches her chest and screams. Then she laughs at herself and it reminds me how easily she laughs and how much I’ve come to love the sound.

She turns her gaze back to me. "You don't have to practically sit on the arm rest. I'm not going to?—”

"Bite?" I offer. She laughs again and I feel the corner of my mouth tug upwards. I rub my nose with the back of my hand to conceal the smile. When Aimee raises her eyebrow at me, I know I’m not fooling her.

She rests her wine glass in her lap. Her slender fingers twining around the stem. The movement causes the neck of her sweater to loosen and fall off her shoulder. I can see the thin strap of a black bra. Suddenly, I'm fifteen and want to snap it. I force my gaze back to the TV, trying to not wonder if she’s wearing those blue panties.

On the screen, a woman approaches a dark house and knocks. The front door swings open on creaky hinges. The soundtrack grows eerie and suspenseful as the woman on the screen walks down a long hallway and slowly descends dark basement stairs. Frankly, she should know better.

"Oh, come on." I gesture at the TV in frustration.

"Bear! Shhhhh." Aimee nudges me in the arm.

"Like you need to hear all the tantalizing dialogue." I throw an arm casually over the back of the couch and, almost instinctively, she fills the space where my arm used to be. The heat of her body is flicking faintly against mine. It’s a heat I haven’t known in a long time. A heat I thought I’d never know again. And I’m suddenly ravenous for more. Ravenous to run myfingers along the column of her neck. To slide my hand along her thigh. But I don’t.

Instead, I lower my face. Stealthily brush my lips against the fly away wisps of hair crowning her head. And I steal. Each and every faint touch that can be siphoned away without her noticing.

"I'm never watching a movie with you again," Aimee says, breaking the spell of lust consuming my brain.

"Please tell me that's a promise," I say, teasing the top of her hair with my breath. I suddenly want her to make other promises. Promises to let me taste her. Touch her. Spread her wide.

Then I’m bludgeoned by a club. By one sentiment pounding away at my brain.I like her. I want her.She is everything I’ve ever needed since Laurel’s death. And it’s a tragedy of cosmic proportions that I can’t do the things necessary to keep her. That if she knew the truth about me, she’d up and leave.

“Excuse me,” Aimee scolds, her tone is sass, with a hint of something potent. “Why on earth would you not want to watch movies with me?” I love the fire in her tone. The spike of fever in her eyes.

"For one,” I raise my eyebrows at her to suggest that the list could fill a book, “your hair smells like lavender. It’s distracting.”

Aimee scoffs at me and a cute wrinkle appears across her nose. "And?" she humors me.

"And you sit too close." I nudge her and my body screams to press closer. “Also distracting.”

I steal a glance over my shoulder to the girls chatting away behind us. As if I could will them to leave the room with the power of my mind. But they should stay. Things are safer if they stay.

“Too close?” Offended, she starts to scoot away from me, but I reach down and snake a finger in her belt loop. As herhips squirm and wiggle against my pull, something hot and feral explodes in my chest. I lower my face to hers.

“You’re not fucking going anywhere,” I whisper quietly as I tug her back into me. “I didn’t say that I didn’t enjoy it.” Aimee’s mouth falls open in shock. I have to clench my teeth to avoid the same fate. Because I don’t recognize the man speaking for me right now.

“And,” the sex-starved man occupying my body whispers, “you better close this pretty mouth before I’m tempted to fill it.”

No, Finn. Goddamnit.I’m just thinking with my cock now. And that bastard’s determined to destroy me.

---