Old wounds throbbed and moaned in the bare space that separated us.
My mouth found the cap of her shoulder and ran the length to the back of her neck. A kiss that really didn’t exist.
Chills flashed across her skin as I slowly dragged her zipper down.
It sparked like shocks in the night.
The fabric slipped off her shoulders, and I let it go so the dress pooled at her feet.
Aster was frozen, like she was terrified to move, though her entire body was vibrating so violently I was afraid with one wrong brush, she would burst into flames.
She stood facing away in her underwear, the fire illuminating her curves, her perfect shape, the piece of my heart that had gone missing. An outline that had crusted over with that unrelenting pain.
“I want to hate you,” I murmured at the nape of her neck. “I want to hate you, Aster. But I remember it…it didn’t matter what you said, I read what was in your eyes.”
Coming around to her front, I let my eyes roam her body.
Her small, round breasts.
Her flat, quivering belly.
The contour of her full hips.
The fear I’d felt when she’d fallen slammed me anew when I saw the huge welt on her upper thigh, red and abraded with the promise of turning black and blue. Blood oozed from the abrasion in the middle of it, and a tiny rivulet had run down and was smeared near the top of her knee on the outer edge.
“I’m sorry I caused you to fall. This was my fault.”
My fault for being a dick.
“Wait right there.”
I moved into the bathroom, grabbed a bandage, and dampened a cloth under hot water. I snagged a T-shirt from the closet before I strode back into the sorrow-addled room that fizzed with something else.
The girl the gravity in the space.
An orbit.
An obligation.
A destination never meant to be.
I climbed down onto my knees in front of her.
An illogical offering.
I pressed the cloth to the wounded flesh.
She whimpered, then swallowed and held onto my shoulders as I wrapped my left hand around the back of her leg so I could properly clean it.
“I’m sorry.” The grunt of an apology scraped my throat like dull razors.
I glanced up to catch Aster staring down at me.
In confusion.
In regret.
In that old, magical awe that had once made me believe that I could be the type of man who could deserve the kind of girl I’d once believed her to be.