Page 84 of Santa Daddy
“What if I don’t want to?” I asked.
His control cracked.
Not a lot. Not visible to people who didn’t know him. But I knew enough now to see it: the way his jaw clenched, how his fingers twitched like he didn’t know what to do with them if they weren’t holding a weapon or a steering wheel or me.
“Then we’re both fucked,” he said.
We already were.
We’d been fucked—metaphorically and literally—since that night in the tree lot. Since his shower. Since every time I’d said yes with my body and no with my mouth and then failed to follow through.
I reached out slowly, like I was trying not to spook a wild animal. Dragged one fingertip along a thin white scar that cut across his ribs.
His breath hitched, audible in the quiet.
He didn’t move away. Didn’t grab my wrist. Didn’t shut it down.
He let me map the damage with my fingers. A nick here, a long slice there. Stories I didn’t know, written on his skin.
“Who did this?” I asked, tracing another line.
“Someone who thought they owned me,” he said, voice rough. “Someone who was wrong.”
Like you think you own me, I thought.
Except that wasn’t the whole truth anymore. Ownership was too small a word for this.
His hand came up and covered mine, pinning my palm flat against his chest. Heat radiated through my skin. His heart thudded against my hand, hard and fast.
Human.
“I can’t promise you anything,” he said, voice cracking on the last word. “I can’t promise you’ll survive loving me.”
Loving.
“I can’t promise I’ll survive not trying,” I whispered back. “You don’t have to be a monster all the time.”
“What if that’s all I am?” he asked, so dark it made goosebumps race over my arms.
I shook my head, throat tight, and turned like I was going back to bed, because if I didn’t I was going to say something that dragged this into territory neither of us knew how to navigate.
He didn’t let me get very far.
His fingers wrapped gently but firmly around my wrists, drawing me back to him.
“Tell me no,” he said, whiskey and winter in his breath. “And I’ll stop.”
“Maybe I don’t want you to stop,” I said.
There it was. The moment everything tipped from “we shouldn’t” to “we’ve already gone too far to pretend we can reverse.”
He kissed me.
Not like he had in the shower, not like he had at the altar or against the door. This wasn’t conquest or claiming. This was surrender.
His mouth was soft against mine, almost cautious. Desperate in a way that had nothing to do with sex and everything to do with begging me not to crush the last fragile piece of him he hadn’t handed to anyone else.
This wasn’t the killer from the tree lot.
