Page 16 of The Fall
My muscles still scream in protest, but they are malleable, willing to fold and bend and stretch as Blair guides me through each movement.
He moves closer. I close my eyes, dizziness washing over me as he presses gently on my bruised hip.
“Hurt?” His voice vibrates through me.
“No.” The word escapes before I can stop it. I open my eyes, meet his gaze. He’s watching me.
Blair adjusts the angle of my pelvis. My breath catches, and I push back against his touch. This is… He’s touched me like this before. Clearly, in this context, but?—
His hands have been on my hips like this in the darkness, with nothing at all between us.
“Good,” Blair murmurs. “Just like that.”
Inhale. Exhale. Twist. I feel the stretch through my obliques. I hold the pose, close my eyes. My breathing is deep and even, and I lean in without conscious thought.
Blair’s lips brush my temple, sweet and brief.
Everything hitches—my breath, my heart, my pose. My exhale stutters. I snap my eyes open, find his.
Blair’s gaze is steady. He trails his hand down my arm, brushing his thumb over my knuckles and sliding his fingers between my own. He tangles our hands together, cradling my fingers in his.
Shadows paint his jaw, his cheekbones, his lips. God, his lips. I don’tremember, but there are things that are instinct, known all the way down in my bones. He hums when he’s happy. He can make me come undone with his slightest hold. His touch is sweet and soft in places no man has ever been on me. This body I inhabit but don’t recognize responds like it was made for him.
He’s so close. A burn starts on my lips, as if from a ghost’s kiss.
Blair slips his fingers from mine. I squeeze my eyes shut.
“Breathe.” His voice is a whisper, close to my ear. “Tell me if you need to stop.”
He digs two fingers into the taut tendons at the base of my skull. “You’re doing great. Keep grounding yourself until you feel the release.”
I am grounded.
Except for the way my heart stumbles when his eyes meet mine.
Except for the way his touch melts me.
Except for the truth.
“Torey...” he breathes.
The sound of my name undoes something inside me. There’s a question buried in it, a plea or a promise, all things I can’t decode because the key to understanding Blair lives somewhere in the locked rooms of my mind. How many times has he said my name like this?
“I’m okay,” I tell him.
What else can I say? What would the Torey he knows—the one who remembers their first kiss, their first fight, the first time they decided this was worth the risk—say right now?
His touch is so gentle.
The way my body responds to him, the way my heart recognizes what my mind cannot; this is dangerous. My thoughts slip and tangle, wanting, fearing, needing all at once. Would I have always felt this, or is it only because everything else has been stripped away?
Right now, this second, I want Blair to kiss me. I want to fill my lungs with his breath and to stay in this room with him until eternity whisks us away.
Iwant. Icrave. How can I want something I can’t remember ever having?
I’ve never kissed a man before. I don’t know what lies beyond that. I don’t know what lies within me.
Blair cups my cheek, stroking his thumb along my jawline. “We’re going to get through this.”
