Page 141 of Cruel When He Smiles
He grins at that. “Make me.”
I shove my plate to the edge of the table just as the waitress comes with the check. Liam gets there first, sliding his card into the folder without even looking at me. He doesn’t hesitate. It’s not even about the money—it’s the way he does it, like paying for me is a given.
After breakfast, we wander. Liam drags me into shops I wouldn’t set foot in on my own, picking up random items just to hand them to me and see what I’ll say. At one point, he buys me a stupid panther keychain. It’s small and cheap, but how he looks at me when he passes it over makes my chest feel too tight. I clip it to my backpack without comment, and he smirks like I just confirmed something for him.
The rest of the day is his. He drives us along the coast, stopping wherever the hell he wants. Sometimes it’s for coffee, sometimes it’s to pull me against him in the middle of a sidewalk and kiss me like he doesn’t care who’s watching. His hands slide under my shirt, and he doesn’t care who sees that either.
And I let him.
For all the ways Liam fucks with my head, for all his calculated cruelty, he still wants me. Not just to control, not just to break down, butme. The part that scares me the most is that I want him too… but I don’t know how to have this. I don’t know how to just be happy, even though I want to. I want to let myself sink into it and believe it’s real, but I’ve been alive long enough to know better.
Something always ruins it. The moment I start to think I can keep this, something takes it away.
Which is why my stomach drops the second my phone rings.
Liam, still in the middle of commenting about a couple walking past us, notices instantly. The smirk vanishes, and he watches me closely.
“Who is it?” His voice is too calm, the kind of calm that hides knives.
I can’t answer. I don’t need to look at the name to know; she always finds a way past my blocked list. There’s only one person who can make my hands shake like this just from seeing a call come in.
The phone keeps ringing, loud and insistent, and my fingers lock harder around the stupid device. I can’t answer it without swallowing glass, but I also can’t ignore it without feeling the old, familiar guilt rise like a tide that knows exactly where all my cracks live and how to fill them.
Liam reaches out and plucks the phone from my hand before I can say a damn thing.
“Liam—”
“Relax, Pup,” he says lightly, but his voice has an edge that makes my pulse trip. His jaw sets hard enough that I can see the muscle jump when he breathes, his hazel eyes dark and flat in a way that reads more protective than cruel.
I should take it back. I should tell him to leave it alone. But a part of me wants to see what happens when Liam Callahan decides to involve himself in the one part of my life I’ve kept walled off.
He kills the call. One brush of his thumb and the sound cuts clean. The sudden quiet is so complete that I sway a little. My pulse is still crashing around in the cage of my chest, my thoughts bunched and tangled and loud as hell because the ringing might have stopped, but the echo always takes longer to fade.
“Breathe, baby,” he says, and it lands square in my chest in that way he’s perfected—soft without being gentle, firm without being harsh.
It’s not just words, not just a sound. It’s a push and a pull at the same time, and before I even think about it, my body listens. Air shoves into my lungs without permission, which pisses me off for half a second, but then I realize it’s also what stops my freefall. My inhale comes in high and shaky, my hands hovering uselessly at my sides because they’ve lost their job now that the chaos has quieted.
“Hands on me,” he says, closing the space like he knows I’d stall. He makes it easy in that way only he can, which makes every muscle in me loosen and bristle at the same time. “Now.”
I move before thought catches up, palms catching on the fabric of his shirt at his sides, fingers curling in like there’s a rope hidden in there that will pull me out of my head if I just hang on hard enough. He makes this low, almost subconscious sound, and it runs straight down my spine like it’s rewiring me from the inside. His hands come around my waist—not tight enough to cage me, just steady enough to keep me here, a quiet possession that holds instead of traps.
“Good,” he says, and it cuts through me in a way nothing else can. The word’s warm but edged, hitting me in a place I didn’t permit him to touch but can’t bring myself to guard. His hands slide up my back with steady pressure, mapping muscle, pressing into the spots where I hold tension, reminding me—physically—that I’m here right now, and not wherever my brain tried to drag me. “Now breathe with me.”
I try. I really do. But the breath sticks halfway, like my ribs don’t want to play along.
“Again,” he says, not impatient or overly gentle. “In through your nose, out through your mouth. Match me.”
I pull air in with him, hold it for the same beat he holds his, and let it out when he does. The second time is easier than the first. The third is easier than the second. By the fourth, my lungs stop fighting me, and my shoulders finally drop back to where they belong instead of trying to fuse with my ears.
“That’s it, Pup,” he murmurs, his voice curling low enough to settle in my bones. “You’re right here with me. Nowhere else. With no one else.”
My eyes fall shut for a second, and I drop my forehead into that space where his shoulder meets his collarbone. I breathe in his cologne that I love so much, and underneath it, the cleanscent that’s just him when hours have worn away the polish. I count the rise and fall against me until I’m doing it without realizing.
“Talk to me,” he says into my hair, voice low enough that nothing outside of us gets a say. “Give me three things you see.”
“Liam—” I start, ready to argue out of habit, but he cuts me off with just my name.
“Pup.”
