Page 72 of Infamous
My breath catches. My thoughts spin. Every rational part of me screams that I should tell him to go. That I should lock the door, bolt it shut, and never let him in again.
But that’s not what I want.
I want this - the tension, the danger, the strange, magnetic pull that keeps dragging me toward him even when I know I shouldn’t.
I swallow hard. “No,” I say, my voice low, barely a whisper. “No, I don’t want you to leave.”
Something flickers in his eyes then - something almost human. He nods once, slow, deliberate.
“Then I won’t.”
And just like that, the air shifts again.
It’s heavier now.
And I realize, too late, that I didn’t just invite him to stay in my apartment.
I invited him into my life.
And maybe, into the parts of me I’ve spent years pretending were dead and buried.
44
LUCIAN
Guilty men have manners, too. Sometimes.
Don’t ever let anyone tell you otherwise.
I came here with good intentions - if such a thing still exists in the hollowed-out mess that used to be my soul. I just wanted to make sure Nadia was okay after her bastard ex shoved her around. That was it. A simple check-in. A decent act. A man trying to right a wrong.
But good intentions are a funny thing. The path they pave always seems to lead straight to hell.
I thought she wouldn’t open the door. I half-hoped she wouldn’t. But when the lock clicked and her face appeared - soft, wary, beautiful in the dim light - it was over for me. Game. Set. Match.
I stepped inside -invited- and that’s the worst part. You can’t blame a monster for entering if you ask him in, can you?
Now I’m sitting on her sofa, too close to her, not close enough, my palms pressed hard against my thighs just to keep them occupied. My hands have memory. They remember the weight of her body, the warmth of her skin, the taste of herbreath against my mouth. I can’t let them remember too much. Not now.
So I sit there, silent, fists unclenching and clenching against my jeans, pretending to be something I’m not - a man with restraint.
I tell myself I’ll leave soon. I’ll say something polite. Make sure she’s fine. Walk out the door. But I know I’m lying. Because the truth is, I don’t want to leave.
There’s a kind of madness that comes with proximity.
That slow, electric pull between two bodies that remember each other before the mind dares to catch up.
She’s talking about something, but her voice fades under the drumbeat in my chest. Every movement she makes is a distraction: the way she tucks her hair behind her ear, the way her lip is split but she doesn’t seem to notice it, the way the pulse in her throat trembles when she catches me looking.
She rises without a word. I watch her do it - those few steps that close the impossible distance between us - and I know I should stop her. I should saydon’t.I should stand, make some excuse, walk out that damn door before this goes where I know it will.
But I don’t.
She sits beside me.
And for a heartbeat, everything in me stills.
The sofa is small. She’s small. I am not. There’s barely a whisper of air between us, and I can feel the warmth of her body through the fabric of my jeans. My thighs tense instinctively, a slow surge of heat building low in my stomach.
