“You will never…” she started to repeat herself, voice low, steady, but then I licked my bottom lip, turning my fingers over her cheek to hold her face still. One touch and her body shook, arms, shoulders trembling as I took a cautious step closer, eating up the space between us. That fury that kept her raging against me receded and that low, surprised gasp told me Aly, despite her anger, remembered, too. Remembered how it has been between us before life and my own stupidity drove us apart. Now all I had to do was convince her we could have that again.
I slipped my hands down to her waist and the shivering quickened, eyes fluttering closed as I kissed her forehead. Inches between us and the air thick and hot again, weighted as she stood there, letting me touch her, move my hands down her back, my lips over her face. “Don’t tell me you stopped loving me.” She opened her eyes, frowning when I held her face between my fingers.
“It’s the truth.” She pulled away from my mouth, stretching her neck to keep my lips from her skin.
“No,” I said, voice soft. “It’s not.”
She stopped attempting to extract herself from my hold until I inhaled so deeply I smelled the sweet whiff of sweat mixing with that familiar vanilla fragrance. I wanted to taste a bit of her myself. God, it had been too damn long. “You can tell yourself all the lies in the world about how easy it was to walk away from me, how you’ll never let yourself really love me again, but it’s not that easy with us.” She turned her back to me then, arms curled around her middle, pretending as though she couldn’t hear me, despite how she tilted her head, profile in front of me as though she couldn’t help but listen.
“We’re visceral. We’re inside each other.” Gaze right at me, Aly kept as she stared. There was nothing but the space between us and words that got caught in our throats. But I wasn’t completely speechless. I was reckless and desperate and knew there was something inside her that wanted free. I wanted to bust it loose.
She turned toward me when I approached, holding one palm flat against my chest with no real strength in that touch, as though she wanted me to stop, but wouldn’t hold me back completely. “No one will ever make you laugh and cry and feel like I can. No one but me will have you clamoring for release, for the freedom inside my touch. No one else can give you all that you crave and push you even further. We’re it. We’re always.”
She exhaled then, a small pulse that heated her skin before she closed her eyes, and then she pushed me with a force I did not know she possessed. She’d been holding back. No matter how angry I’d made her in the past, she’d never pushed me as hard as she did just then—a shove that had me staggering back as she marched right by me and out of the foyer. The front door bounced against the wall when she threw it open, cracking the lower pane of glass.
She didn’t look back. Aly didn’t bother to even slow her steps as she headed for her car. I could have watched her walk away all day—I would have, imagining scenarios in my head of what she thought as she peeled away down the street or how many times she’d shower just to be rid of the smell of me. But the patio door on the other side of the room slid open and there came a low, amused chuckle behind me, taking me from any thoughts I might have of my ex and where her temper would bring her to.
“Man, I gotta say, that shit was fun to watch.”
“Who the hell are you?”
The stranger pushed off from his lean against the patio doorway and jerked his chin in way of a greeting. I immediately caught the scent of cigarettes wafting off of him. “Keira said you headed out before she could tell you I was here.”
“Still doesn’t tell me who you are.”
The man was fit, but no taller than 5’10. He wore tight blue Wranglers and leather shit kickers that hadn’t seen a shine in a long while. In his hand he held a straw cowboy hat rolled severely at the sides, cupped so that the ends almost touched the crown. Girls probably went a little stupid for him because he was a pretty boy with high cheekbones, a long, straight nose and eyes that were somewhat slanted and crystal blue. He could have been an actor, I supposed, but for the scar that ran the length of his temple to the curve of his left cheek, like someone had gone at him and left their mark behind for him to remember every time he caught his reflection in a mirror.
He came further into the room with his hand outstretched and when I only looked at those calloused fingers, lifting my eyebrows in a challenge I didn’t really mean, that scar on his cheek dented deep with his smile. “Cass Colson.” He kept that hand outstretched and nodded, encouraging me to shake it. “I’m working with your mom on a recording contract.”
“So I hear.” I shook the man’s hand, just to get him to lower it, but still kept my distance, arms folded as I watched him shrug, passing off my rudeness like it didn’t bother him. “You come here a lot? When no one’s home?”
“No, not really, but Keira said Mack had practice for a school…”
“Makana. Her name is Makana.”