Page 48 of Never Broken

“What? You mean that stuff isn’t sincere?” I asked, pretending to be shocked.

He shook his head. “Sadly, no. I hate to be the one to break it to you. Anyway, let me try to explain something. About what I said last night.” He took another deep breath. “Nobody does anything for me. Ever. If I want something done for me, I do it, or it doesn’t get done. That’s the way it’s been for a very long time. And I’m not sure I would know what to do if that ever changed.”

After a pause, I said softly, “It has changed.”

“I know,” he admitted, slumping back against the wall. “Fuck. I know.”

For some reason, my smile only grew.

“It’s just,” he continued, “I never thought the person who would do it would be someone who can get me thrown down a mine shaft just forthinkingabout …” He trailed off all politely as if there could be any possible chance I didn’t want to know exactly what it was.

“About what?” I didn’t think my heart could pound any faster than it had at the top of the stairs. I’d been wrong.

“Things a good slave should never even think about.”

“Sure, but I don’t know why that would ever concernyou.”

That made him laugh. He rested one shoulder against the cinderblock wall, like he wanted a better view of me, though he kept his eyes slightly averted. As he spoke, he trailed a finger slowly along the grout between the cinderblocks, and for some reason, I found it fascinating to watch. “And why not?”

“Well,” I said, “because if you were a good slave, we wouldn’t behere. And yet here we are.”

“Here we are.”

He met my eyes again suddenly and spectacularly, the weight of it nearly knocking me off-balance. Something had shifted. The energy around us hummed like a field of charged particles. He stood up straight, raised his hand for a second, dropped it, raised it again, killed me with how close he was to doing something, while I killedmyselfover how I shouldn’t be allowing him to do it. Not just for my own sake, but for his. Maybe evenmorefor his. My entire moral compass was breaking down in real time, realizing that I now cared so much that the only right thing to do was tostop caring.

“We—weshouldn’tbe here,” I said.No.Don’t listen to me. You know I’m an idiot. I’m failing chemistry, for fuck’s sake.“What if someone—what if you—and what about Maeve—and the mines, and the?—”

“Fuck, Louisa, what did I just say?” he cut off my desperate babbling. “Why would I have gone through with that whole fucking embarrassing speech just now if I didn’t want to be here? Can you just trust me enough to know what I want? Because I know whatyouwant.”

“What do I want?” I asked in a small voice.

“You want me to touch you.” His gaze lowered under those long lashes, like he was seeing my body for the first time, drinking it in,inhalingit, taking a slow voyage across every visible inch of my skin and using his imagination to fill in the rest. “Not by accident. Not for comfort. But just because you want it.”

Thatlook, so serious, the kind of seriousness he’d only worn up till now when trying to puzzle out a particularly thorny chemistry problem. In some ways, this wasn’t much different. In other ways, well, it was.

“You’re doing it already.”

It was true. One of his knuckles had brushed mine. Like an accident. I knew it wasn’t.

“Am I?”

He kept going, letting our fingers intertwine for a brief second, come apart, then intertwine again. His thumb traced along the top of mine, gentler than anything so roughened by hard labor had any right to be. His other hand traced a delicate pattern on the exposed skin between the bottom of my crop top and the waist of my corduroy miniskirt with the buttons down the front.

I must be flushed red from my head to my decolletage right down to my toes, and I hoped to God he was enjoying it. As for my insides, they had melted into a puddle of thick, viscous fluid, and I hoped he was enjoyingthat, too, because there was no way he couldn’t have sensed it somehow.

“Yes. You’re touching me.”

“Oh. So sorry, miss.”

One little deft flick of his wrist and I was somehow propelled forward against his chest, with one of his hands migrating to the small of my back.

“So I was right.” He could breathe the words into my ear now. “You, of all people, should know I’m always right.”

“About chemistry, maybe,” I breathed back.

“About so much more than that.”

A second later, somehow, a roughened thumb was tracing the line of my jaw, tilting it closer to his mouth.

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