Page 48 of Severance

“Do you want me to take you home?” Mikah asks.

I grab the clean t-shirt and slip it over my head. It definitely doesn’t belong to a girl, because it can fit two of me and smells like laundry detergent and tobacco-scented cologne.

“I don’t want to go home.” I run my palms over the fabric and press it flat against my stomach. Thankfully, my sweats and bra didn’t suffer from the liquor assault.

“Do you want me to take you to your friend’s house?” Mikah’s gaze shifts to my face.

“Can I go with you?” I ask, my voice barely above a whisper. Maybe, if I’m lucky, he didn’t hear me and we can forget this embarrassing moment.

“Look”—he shakes his head—“I’m not your babysitter.”

I blink through the mist gathering in my eyes. “Why don’t you like me?” My heart’s sick and restless when I realize I have nowhere to go.

“I never said that,” he mutters. His dark, tumultuous eyes stare into mine as if he’s trying to hypnotize me.

My brain carefully assesses each word. The strange things I’m thinking right now would have never gotten into my head if I were sober. Part of me understands that, but I still act on it. Moving forward, I reach out and touch Mikah’s cheek. His rough stubble grazes my fingertips as I run them down the line of his jaw. He feels a lot like Dakota and it terrifies me. It terrifies me because I don’t want him to.

“Alana,” Mikah rasps out my name. His palm covers my knuckles, but he doesn’t remove my hand from his chin. We stand like this for a few seconds, dumbfounded, staring at each other like we can’t figure out what to do or say next.

A little spark in my chest becomes a blazing fire under his endless gaze.

I inch forward and press my lips to his, my heart leaping.

There’s a long, excruciating pause, our bodies so still, you’d think we stopped breathing. My every cell revels in this small taste of him. He’s mint and Marlboros with a bit of salt, and my mouth burns raw against his.

I feel a soft, low gasp rumbling in his chest before his large hands cup my face and his tongue parts my lips.

Then we turn into a mess of moans and breaths. Our bodies clash together and he pushes me against the counter, roughly pressing his hard length against me. I don’t know how to respond to his force except with more force. Dakota never touched me like this. He never let his hands wander over my body without permission. He took his time and we did it slowly.

There’s no taking our time now. We’re as far from gentle as we can possibly be and everything I do is pure instinct, a hunch of how I should react to this madness. Our tongues are too busy exploring each other’s mouths, our hands too busy seizing and grasping, for me to think about it. Kissing Mikah is like being in the middle of a storm. It almost hurts physically.

He lifts me onto the counter without breaking the kiss. Then his palms grip my ass and he pulls me toward the edge, his trim, hard body sliding between my legs. He’s a little bigger than Dakota and my hands hungrily roam over him, studying the contours of his chest.

It’s a disturbing yet equally wonderful sensation to be so lost in another man. Suddenly, the dead parts of me have woken up and I feeleverything. Every heartbeat, every touch, every moan.

Mikah tears his mouth from mine, and his lips slip down to my neck and kiss it greedily, the tip of his tongue tracing over my pulsing vein. Our breathing is so loud that it drowns out the sound of the music booming on the opposite side of the door. The world doesn’t exist right now. It’s just me and him and this kiss, probably the dirtiest one in my entire life.

Every inch of my skin burns with strange desire as I melt against him, feeling like I can’t get enough. My fingers move behind his head to remove the band from his hair. But when I tangle my hands in its thickness the way I used to do with Dakota, my heart trips in my chest, the guilt hitting me hard.

“Mikah,” I murmur. “Mikah.”

His lips leave my neck and his eyes seek mine.

“I’m sorry.” I press my palm against his pec and apply pressure.

He steps back just enough to let me slide down from the counter. My head is spinning, and everything that just happened between us finally settles into my brain.

I cover my mouth with my hand and move to the door with no intention to leave. I just need space, and this is as far as I can get in a fifty-square-foot room.

There are no words, but there’s more guilt and there’s shame, and it all feels like a betrayal.

“Can you just take me home?” I ask quietly.

“Yeah.” His voice is low and rough, but no matter how much he tries to mask it with indifference, I can still sense all the emotions dripping from him.

* * *

It’s drizzling outside when Mikah and I leave his friend’s house. We don’t speak about what happened in the bathroom. Actually, we don’t speak at all. Not a single word is uttered after the moment he agrees to take me home.

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