Page 74 of Make Them Cry
“Hi,” I answer, and that’s all I’ve got.
She steps back to let me in. The safe house is warm and dim. The lavender plant on the counter is thriving. Of course it is. Everything survives here by sheer stubbornness.
“I shouldn’t be here,” I manage. “It’s late.”
“Why are you here?” she asks, shutting the door.
“I forget why.”
We stand there, two idiots in a room we built for danger, pretending we’re here for something as ordinary as conversation. Her eyes flick to my mouth and back up before she can stop them. It lands like a match.
“Did you need something?” she asks, voice all careful edges.
“Yeah.” I swallow. “To see you.”
Silence stretches between us. It’s heavy and thick with a tension I feel in my bones.
I cross the room before I can talk myself out of it. I stop close enough to feel the heat rolling off her skin. “Tell me to go,” I say, because I promised myself I’d always give her the exit first. “If you want me to.”
River doesn’t step back. She tips her chin up, and in that small motion I hear all the ways she’s refused to break.
“Stay.”
It’s a gravity switch. I fall.
I kiss her like I’ve been saving oxygen for this moment. She meets me with that fierce little sound I’ve only ever heard from her—want threaded with relief. My hands find her face—jaw, cheek, the wayward strand of hair that’s escaped her knot—and angle her mouth to mine like I’ve been planning this for years.
Because I have.
Her fingers fist in my hoodie and pull, dragging me into her until there’s not enough space for anything except heat. The kiss goes from soft to hungry in a clean snap. She opens for me and every line I’ve drawn burns away. She tastes like mint and something sweet—honey, maybe, or just the way her name feels when I say it into a pillow no one else will ever see.
I try to slow down. I try to be better than my own want. It lasts half a breath.
“Gage,” she murmurs against my mouth, and I break on the sound. I lift her, hands under her thighs, and her legs come around my hips like it’s muscle memory we share. The couch catches me in the back of the knee and I sit, dragging her into my lap. The lamp turns her hair to light blue, her throat to a line I want to memorize with my mouth.
“I just can’t stay away from you,” I rasp.
“Then don’t,” she says, and then she’s kissing me like this is the only good decision we’ve ever made.
We find a rhythm that’s half kiss, half conversation—her mouth asking, mine answering, both of us sayingyesin a thousand different ways. I slide a palm under the hem of her T-shirt, pause at her warm skin. She moans my name. I learn the slope of herwaist, the curve of her ribs, the way her breath catches when my thumb makes idle circles low at her side. She threads her fingers into my hair and tugs, just enough to make me swear and forget my own name.
“River,” I say, because it’s a prayer that works.
“Say it again,” she whispers.
“River.”
She smiles against my mouth like I just gave her something worth keeping. The world narrows to just us. To this moment. This need.
I drag my mouth down her jaw, along the tendon of her neck, to the hollow where her pulse beats quick and brave. I breathe her in—wine from the girls’ night, lavender from the plant, her from everywhere—and I think if I ever believed in luck, it was for this. She tilts her head back and I taste skin, a shiver racing through her into me. My fingers tighten on her hip. Her hips answer. The sound that leaves me is not polite.
“Slow,” she says, but she’s smiling, and I can feel how hard it is for her to say it. “Stay here with me.”
I pull back just enough to see her—the flush on her cheekbones, the determined set of her mouth, the softness she hides from everyone else. I cradle the back of her head. “I’m not going anywhere.”
Her eyes flick like she’s saving the words for later. She kisses me once, slow this time, like we’re learning a different language of the same truth.
My heart is a drum in my throat. Her breath warms my mouth. We rest forehead to forehead, grinning, breathing each other’s air.
