I reach back and undo the clasp at my neck, let the front of my dress fall to my waist.
He groans, lightly cupping my breasts, lowering his mouth to lick me, then take me between his lips.
I gasp, grip the back of his neck, my body arching into his.
“What are we doing?” he murmurs against my skin.
“What do you want to do?” I ask.
A slow, testing thrust of his hips, the friction dividing my thoughts into fractals.
His mouth drags back up my throat, his breath hot. “I want,” he says raggedly, “to undress you. And taste you. I want to hear you come again, and feel it too.”
The fractals become fireworks, a kaleidoscope of sensations and needs.
Miles’s silky dark hair between my fingers.
His rough hands up under my dress, finding the lace of my underwear.
The pressure of his warm mouth on my chest, and the cool air kissing every other inch of exposed skin as the need and pleasure build together.
“Miles,” I gasp, moving myself against him.
His eyes slant up, his mouth still on me, his eyes nearly black. It’s an unbearably sexy image. “Tell me to stop,” he says.
“I don’t want you to stop,” I pant out. “I want to undress you. I want to taste you. I want to feel you come.”
“Fuck, Daphne.” He presses his forehead against my shoulder, his heart slamming into me, his hands braced lightly against my ribs, holding himself back from me. His low groan turns into a pained laugh.
He straightens up, redoes the clasp behind my neck, and lets his hands slide down to my thighs. “I’m not good at this,” he says roughly.
“Good at what?” I ask.
“When things get complicated,” he scratches out, “I panic and shut down, and I don’t want to do that right now. I can’t.”
My stomach sinks. “It doesn’t have to be complicated.”
“It already is,” he says.
“Because of Petra?” I ask.
“No,” he says, tenderly tucking a strand of hair behind my ear. “Not just that.”
I slide out of his lap, blushing furiously.
“Hey.” He reaches out, takes my hand.
“It’s okay,” I say quietly. “You don’t owe me any kind of explanation.”
“Daphne,” he says, his voice heartbreakingly soft.
I look up and meet his eyes, all dark now, without any kind of glimmer.
“There’s a lot of shit I don’t like to talk about.” His voice splinters. “The thing is, I have a bad habit of letting down the people I care about. I don’t always think things through, and my feelings aren’t something I can trust.”
“What is there to trust?” I shake my head. “You feel however you feel.”
He looks down at our hands, folds his fingers into mine. After several seconds, he clears his throat, but his face stays torqued, his eyes hyperfocused on our hands.
“Growing up . . .” He hesitates for a long moment, visibly weighing his next words. “Our feelings—mine, Julia’s, my dad’s—those didn’t matter much.”
His jaw muscles flex as he swallows. His pulse speeds against my palm. “All that mattered was how it affected our mom,” he says. “If we made her look good, then she loved us. And if we didn’t, then we were ‘out to get her.’ Once I had a stomach bug, and she was so mad at me for throwing up in the night. Said I was faking to get out of school, and if I kept pretending, I’d be grounded for a month, so I just went to class the next day, and every time I went to the bathroom, I threw up as quietly as I could. So the school wouldn’t make her come get me. Whenever I did anything that she thought made her look bad, it turned into this huge thing about how I must hate her, to try to hurt her like that. If I was upset, or anxious, or hungry, or even sick, she acted like it was something I was doing to her, and I believed it.”
“Holy shit, Miles.” I pull his hand into my lap, cup it between both of mine.
He drags his eyes up to mine. “It’s okay.”
“It’s not,” I say.
“That’s the thing, though,” he scratches out. “I need it to be okay. Because I need to be okay. As a kid, I just felt so fucking scared and powerless, all the time, and now I just need to be okay.” He shakes his head. “I honestly think that’s partly why Petra and I worked together. I’ve never met someone who was so . . . ‘in the moment,’ and that’s where I have to be, because if I think too much about the past or the future, I come apart. So I mostly just keep all of that stuff where I don’t have to think about it.”
I drop my eyes. “I’m sorry. I’m not trying to pry.”
His eyes come back to mine, his voice a scrape. “You’re not,” he says. “I want you to know. I just . . .”
“What?”
He looks over my shoulder. “I don’t want you to look at me like I’m broken.”
