Page 41 of Make Them Cry
“Thumb outside,” he murmurs.
“Always?” My voice isn’t steady. It’s not meant to be.
“Always.”
He removes the glove. In the dream he does that—peels it off like a promise—revealing a hand that could be anyone’s and somehow feels like mine has always known it. When his bare fingers curl around my pulse, my breath catches. He feels it. Of course he does.
“Too fast,” he says, almost smiling against the mask. “Breathe.”
“I am.”
His thumb strokes the inside of my wrist, lazy, and the “lesson” skews sideways into something that isn’t a lesson. He guides my hand to his shoulder, the knit of his hoodie warm and solid under my palm. Heat unspools everywhere.
“Why do you care?” I ask, dream-brave. “You could let me fall.”
He leans closer, kneeling onto the mattress, crowding my space until his knee brushes my hip and my thoughts go to static. He’s all cedar and night air, dominance and restraint.
“Because I would rather break the world than watch it break you.”
I don’t know what to do with that, so I reach. I hook two fingers in the edge of his hood and tug, testing. He catches my wrist again, not hard—just there.Control like a caress.
“Rule one,” he reminds me, voice gone low and wicked. “Obey me.”
“What if I want to disobey?” I breathe.
“Then I’ll teach you the difference,” he says, and tips his forehead to mine. The mask is cool rubber while the man beneath it is heat. He doesn’t kiss me. He waits. It’s worse than a kiss, better than one—permission turned into foreplay.
“Say yes,” he whispers.
“Yes,” I whisper back, because I’m helpless and hungry and I want everything I shouldn’t.
He breaks. He doesn’t just kiss me; hetakesthe moment and rewrites it. The mask is gone, but still his face is distorted. It’s messy and sweet and sinful, the kind of kiss that teaches you your own name in a new language. My hands end up in his hood, in his hair—God, there’s hair—short and soft and familiar enough that lightning forks straight down my spine.
He drags his mouth to my jaw, my throat, mapping my pulse with slow, proprietary passes. “Here,” he says, and I arch like the word is a hand on my back. “And here.” He tastes the corner ofmy mouth. “And here.” He stops just to hear the sound I make when he does.
I make it.
“Good girl,” he says, and I nearly combust.
“Mask,” I breathe out loud, and then—without meaning to, without permission—another name slips into my mind.
Gage.
The dream stutters.
For a heartbeat, I’m awake in the dark hearing my own traitorous mouth say it into cotton and air. My chest is heaving. My skin burns.
Oh God.
I squeeze my eyes shut like I can shove it back into the dream and claim it never happened. It doesn’t work. Heat swallows me whole. Want, thick and dizzy, curls my toes. I can’t tell if I’m mortified or more turned on than I have ever been in my life.
My phone buzzes on the nightstand.
I flinch, heartbeat ricocheting. The screen’s too bright in the dark. One new message on the encrypted thread.
MASK:Don’t dream of me. I’m not safe.
Every nerve I own lights up.
