“I’m sorry, it was . . .” I clear my throat. “I wasn’t thinking.” Which is always my problem when it comes to Kellan.
Even though just our fingers are touching, and really, just a few, I can feel him everywhere in me when he asks, “Why did you?”
I whisper, “Honestly?”
He nods, and Caleb yells at me to stop talking immediately, but it feels right all of a sudden to share all this with Kellan after he’s shared so much with me tonight. “Because . . . I was jealous, and —I mean, I knew you dated. I thought I was okay with it. I guess I was, pre-her. And then she told me she lo—how she felt, that you’ve been dating for awhile. I’d always been told that you never stick with anyone, so I just . . .”
His fingers slide between mine and we drift even closer, which seems impossible. He lifts our joined hands up and very, very gently kisses my fingers. A buzz takes over my trembling body.
“I know,” I continue, my voice cracking, “that I really have no place to say these things—”
“Yes you do,” he says softly.
“I . . . I. . .” Hate that you were with her, I want to say, but Caleb’s warning me if I do, I’ll be crossing a line I might not be able to come back from. So I switch to, “If . . . if she makes you happy . . .”
He shakes his head.
But I keep going. “If you . . .” I try not to gag. “Enjoy dating her, then—”
He leans down and murmurs in my ear, “Is it wrong of me to feel so pleased with your jealousy?”
Yes. No. “I do want you happy.”
“I know,” he says. “I want you to be happy, too.”
“I think I need to go back into my little bubble where I don’t know that you connect to other women—”
He chuckles quietly. “You’re not listening to me. I haven’t connected with her. I’m only Connected to you.”
“You know what I mean.”
“She’s nobody to me. It sounds horrible to say it like that, but it’s the truth. And . . . you don’t have to worry. I won’t be seeing her again.”
“If you like her,” I say, trying for the selfless thing once more, even though it goes against everything in me, “you should—”
He squeezes my hand. “I’m probably the biggest masochist in all the worlds to admit this, but this,”—his free hand traces a line between us—“whatever it is we have, are to each other, is . . .” He takes a deep breath, exhales a rueful laugh. “I will always take it over anything else with anyone else.”
I don’t know if I’m even breathing anymore.
He lets go of my hand; the heels of his palms press against his eyes for a long moment. When his hands lower, there’s a vulnerability in his eyes I haven’t seen in a long time, not since the cave. “Gods, I’m such an asshole to even contemplate telling you this. But here’s the truth—you are my everything, Chloe. Sophie is . . . irrelevant. So are any of the other girls I know. There’s only you. You’re the only one I’ll ever see. The only one I’ll ever want.”
I don’t let myself think about Jonah, because it will only bring me to my knees. I don’t think about Sophie and how her heart is about to be obliterated thanks to me. I don’t think about how I’ll probably be hurting Kellan, too, in the long run.
Because what I’m thinking about is how part of my heart is his and always will be, no matter what. No matter how much we pretend differently.
I don’t know whose lips touch whose first, but we’re suddenly kissing in the middle of my kitchen. It doesn’t matter who started it, though, because the moment we do, everything else fades away.
There is nothing, no one else.
Eventually, we stumble into the living room. I honestly can’t figure out how we find the couch, because we never stop kissing, never let go of each other. I fall back against the couch first, pulling him with me, and then I’m tugging his sweatshirt off and he slides my robe off, and while we’re nowhere close to being naked with my tank top and his t-shirt, it still feels so much better to have skin to touch.
We continue kissing, the passion between us incinerating my insides to the point I can literally feel nothing else but him. Not the couch below me, not the cashmere against my skin, not his shirt, nothing, nothing at all but pleasure. And then, his t-shirt is even too much, so I tug that off, too, and my mind just goes blank with how wonderful he feels against me. At how many places there are to kiss and discover. Of the feeling of his hand, under my shirt, on my bare breasts.
He whispers against my ear, “Oh, gods, Chloe,” and we just cannot find ourselves close enough. Every part of my body seems to be up against his, but it doesn’t feel like he’s close enough, not even remotely so.