Page 32 of On Thin Ice

His eyes were glassy, his lashes wet. His mouth was swollen, his lips pink and slick. A single tear carved a path down his cheek, catching the dim light from the bedside lamp.

He looked wrecked.

He looked so fucking beautiful.

I wanted to kiss him so badly that my chest ached with it, the desire a physical pain beneath my ribs.

But I didn’t.

I didn’t know if that was what he wanted, and until he told me exactly what he was thinking, I wasn’t going to assume anything.

I smoothed my thumb across his cheek, catching the moisture there. “Hey, you're okay. It’s okay.”

He blinked, slow and heavy-lidded, like the words were tugging him back from wherever he’d disappeared to. His face tipped instinctively into my palm, a sigh shuddering out of him before his expression changed. Awareness flooded his features—first confusion, then realization, then horror—all in the span of a single heartbeat.

He shrank away suddenly, careening backward and nearly falling on his ass. His hands and feet scrambled against the carpet as he launched himself as far away from me as possible. Pushing to his feet, his shoulder caught the edge of the desk, making the lamp wobble.

I started to reach for him, fingers outstretched in the empty air between us, but I froze when I saw the panic carved into his face. His eyes were wide, his nostrils flaring, his pulse jumping visibly in his throat.

“Ethan.”

I needed to fix it, fix whatever it was I’d just broken. He shook his head, his eyes as wild as a cornered animal’s, and held up his hand in the universal sign forstop.

“Fuck,” he gritted out. “Fuck,” he repeated, his voice rising to a snarl that echoed off the walls.

He spun away, pacing a jagged line at the foot of his bed. His hands flexed at his sides like he didn’t know what to do with them, his chest rising and falling in ragged heaves. Each breath seemed to catch in his throat, too shallow, too fast.

I stayed where I was, every muscle in my body screaming at me to go to him.

But I didn’t.

Because I knew that look. Knew that kind of panic.

After a minute that seemed to last an hour, he tunneled his hands through his hair until it stood on end. Then he sank onto his bed like a marionette whose strings had been cut, his elbows resting on his thighs and his face buried in his hands.

I itched to speak—to say something to make things right—but I didn’t have the words. How did you tell someone who was so far in the closet he got mail in Narnia that he’d just given you the most epic orgasms of your life? How did you tell a man who was panicking over what he’d just done that you wanted to do it again and again and again? That you wanted to drop to your knees in front of him and return the favor?

“I didn’t plan for this,” he said finally, his voice broken. Raw.

I swallowed hard, my Adam’s apple bobbing in my throat. “Yeah. Me either.”

It was true. I hadn’t planned for this, but I’dwantedit.

Fuck, how I’d wanted it.

Ethan’s hands dragged down his face again. He didn’t look at me, just stared at the carpet like it might offer him the answer to all his most pressing questions.

“This was a mistake.”

His words sliced clean through me, but I didn’t let it show.

Couldn’tlet it show.

This wasn’t about me right now. This was about a man I’d come to care for, and he was struggling.

Because of me.

Because of what he’d done to me.

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