Page 13 of Confession
“Don’t,” I gasp when his fingers brush my skin. God, it’s torture when he touches me, when he fixates me. I hate it. I love it.
His body is inches from mine. I can’t think when he’s this close. I can’t think with his fingers on my stomach. My heart is pounding. My dick is throbbing.
“Quinn.” I feel the puff of his breath as he speaks my name.
He’s too close. I can’t think. His breath feathers over my lips.
I don’t feel like I move, but somehow I drift closer, toward his breath, toward his lips—until mine meet his.
For one second, it’s euphoria. Vitali’s sensual lips against mine. Everything I want, right there.
But I can’t go further. I freeze.
Then panic explodes inside me.
I shove him so hard that he goes stumbling back, barely keeping his feet.
I freeze again. In horror. In terror. He’s frozen too. Then I hear his breathing start, harsh and short.
He doesn’t say anything. Neither do I. I should. I have to. It’s on me to speak. But I can’t—because I can’t give voice to what I’ve done, and I can’t bear to hear his response.
When Vitali starts walking, part of me wants to just stay where I am, maybe forever, but I won’t let him go to the pick-up location alone. So I follow, hating myself, hating this night, because I know, I fuckingknow, that after two years of being so goddamn careful, in one stupid, thoughtless moment, I’ve destroyed everything.
There’s no going back from kissing a straight man.
SIX
Quinn
“You gonna tell me what the hell happened last night?”
I look up from the gun I’m cleaning. Sasha is standing in the doorway of the security room in her black fatigues and a tight white tank top. Her dark braid hangs over one shoulder. She’s eating a muffin.
I’m sitting on the couch, plaid sleeves rolled to my elbows, with four guns in pieces on the towel-covered coffee table. At Sasha’s question, I shrug and ram the brush into a barrel. “It was a setup.”
“That’s not what I’m talking about.”
“I don’t know what you’re fishing for,” I say, even though of course I do. And Sasha knows that I know, so she saunters in and drops into the computer chair, manspreading.
The monitors behind her show views of the house’s exterior and perimeter, all of it quiet in the bright afternoon light. The house has no interior cameras, so I don’t know where Vitali is.
“You’re hiding down here,” Sasha accuses as she peels down the muffin’s paper wrapper.
“I’m working. Someone needs to.”
She doesn’t take the bait. She works her ass off and everyone knows it. “Good muffin. I like the sliced almonds with the lemon. You make these?”
“Lucas did. I don’t bake.”
“Too gay for you?”
“You’re an asshole, Natasha.”
Sasha hates her full name and can often be distracted by it, but not today it seems. She watches me like a cat watching a mouse as I set the barrel on the towel between its slide and recoil spring.
She pounces with, “Am I supposed to pretend it wasn’t tense as shit in the car last night?”
I wince. The scene is painfully alive in my memory, almost as bad as the disaster in the alley. Sasha driving, Vitali in the passenger seat, me in the back—and the silence thick as shit between us. I had to put most of my focus on controlling my breathing so it wouldn’t be loud. My stomach was roiling, my hands were shaking, and I was sweating like it was 120 degrees in the car.
