Page 61 of Merry Me
And then I noticed I’d closed my eyes, like I was bracing myself for a blow. Like I’d rather not see his face when he laughed and told me I was being ridiculous.
But the laugh never came.
Instead, there was silence. And more silence. Thick, tense, electric.
I opened my eyes.
And promptly forgot how to breathe.
Easton was staring at me. Really staring. His gaze pinned me like a butterfly beneath glass—open, raw, stripped of all the glossy charm I’d come to expect from him. There was no smirk. No smug grin. Just heat. And something else that terrified me more than all of it.
He reached up and gently tapped under my chin, nudging it closed. I hadn’t even realized my mouth had fallen open.
“I’m not joking,” he said, his voice rough…his words rasping against the quiet like sandpaper.
Time slowed.
No. Timestopped.
A thousand things crashed through me at once. Shock, obviously. But also disbelief, panic, confusion…and underneath all of that, a dangerous swell of longing that made my chest feel tight.
He meant it.
He hadn’t been with anyone else. Not since me.
My mouth went dry. My stomach twisted, and suddenly the room felt too small, like the walls were inching closer with every heartbeat.
I wanted to laugh, to toss out something biting and sarcastic, to pretend like none of this mattered. But I couldn’t find my voice. Because beneath all the heat still simmering in my body, beneath the walls I’d rebuilt over and over, something fragile cracked open.
Why would he do that? Why would he wait—hold on to this…whateverthiswas—forme?
I swallowed, hard, and a hitched gasp came out of me because evidently I’d been holding my breath for this entire fucking time. “Easton…” I said finally, my voice barely above a whisper. “Why?”
He exhaled, slow and steady, but there was no calm in it. “Do you really want to hear the answer to that?”
And that did it.
Panic flared so violently in my chest it nearly knocked the breath from my lungs. It was like someone had lit a match right under all the carefully stacked reasons I’d built to protect myself from this very moment.
I could feel it rising, tight and furious and uncontainable. I didn’twantthe answer. Not really. Because I already knew. I’d known it from the moment he’d kissed me in that alley like I wasair and he’d been drowning for years. I’d known it from the moment he touched me like no one else had ever touched me, from the way he said my name like it was sacred.
I didn’t want the answer because it wasn’t casual. It wasn’t temporary.
It wasn’t nothing.
And that terrified me.
Because if this was something…if this waseverything…
Then what the hell did that make me, for walking away once?
My breath hitched as I hurriedly righted my clothes, mourning the loss of my panties. I looked at him—at the boy who’d once held my hand under the stars and whispered promises into my hair like he meant every single one of them—and I bolted.
No words. No clever quip to soften the blow. Just me, running.
Again.
This was coming awfully close to becoming a habit…this whole running thing.
