The Billionaire Who Never Knew Intimacy

The Space Between Our Lips

CHAPTER THREE

I didn’t touch her. That was the cruelty of it. She was so close, I could feel her breath in my ear, warm enough to feel the air heavy between us, disturbed, alive, even brutal in the way it bound around my chest and wouldn’t let go of the knot in its chain for me. The softest motion I had made on behalf of us felt loud, a c***k under pressure. And yet I clung to my sides, hands balled, palms squeezed. As if I wondered what they would have done if they had been offered some shred of freedom. For the simple and dreadful truth was: If I touched her, I wouldn’t stop. I trained myself to become soft for years. I was told how to be cold when everybody else was foolish. Silence when others c***k under the burden of their own emotions. I had been groomed to be untouchable: a man shaped by power, shaped by the weight of control, fortified by loneliness. And Elena… Elena made it seem like a really constructed lie. We walked around the city's streets and found out the world was all wrong. Or dangerously right. I couldn’t tell which of the two truths scared me more. Every shadow felt sharper. Every sound is too close. Even the buzz of the city seemed to listen. She moved leisurely, but her eyes were clear. Her eyes lit up to me and back, like she was straddling the line between wanting to be seen and fearing the cost of being seen. She had a sense of tension in her that I noticed at first glance. That hesitation. That fear of withdrawing even as we approached. I was this way because I had carried it in my bones. “You shouldn’t look at people like that,” I said quietly. Not accusing or teasing, just telling the truth. She didn’t conceal how misunderstood I was. She never did. “Like what?” she asked. “Like you’re not afraid.” A low smirk crossed her lips. It was brief. Fragile. It never reached her eyes. “I am afraid,” she admitted. “I’m just worse at lying about it.” A writhing sensation caught in my chest, the muscle inside abruptly pressed against itself, no longer in movement. No, we didn’t want to stop walking. It just… happened. The streets still swallowed traffic noise, swallowed life, until all that remained was breath and heartbeats or the horrible truth lurking between us. So the city slipped away; there, in stillness, we were abandoned. She was very near at hand. In proximity to the smell of her hair, my head shook. Close enough that my whole mind blurred amid the heat of her body. Close enough for me to hear the sound of my own pulse race through my ears as if I had just been cautioned to turn my head and blank out her voice. “Why me?” I said, before I could stutter. The light in her eyes came up slowly now. No lightheartedness. No teasing. No deflection. Only something open. Something dangerously real. “I don’t know,” she said. “That’s the terrifying part.” It shattered me in a way nobody else had. Before I had a moment to think about it, I stepped nearer. A single inch vanished. One breath narrowed. One heart crashed with another. I felt my fingers flex, betraying me, reaching toward her without permission. “Say the word,” I whispered, a rough, chafed-sounding part of my voice creeping into it more than I would have liked. “Tell me to step back.” She didn’t. She lifted a little chin, as if she wasn’t backing away from the fire, as if she was deciding to step directly into it. The streetlight above us was a faint, silver light against her cheekbone, and I got to see everything that hadn’t been there: trembling eyelashes, the lips parting slightly, breath drawn as if having forgotten what to do with it. For someone like me, that was dangerous. For a woman like her, it was ruin. Her hand moved first. Not by accident. Not by instinct. By choice. Her fingers touched the front of my coat so light it was minuscule, and it detonated my whole being. It was not, nor was it soothing or comfort-generating. It was a test. A soft probe to find the fracture. And I felt everything c***k. Before I could talk myself out of it, I did, and then my hand did. My fingers were barely inches off hers, freezing for a moment on the border that felt like agony. “Tell me to stop,” I murmured. She didn’t answer. She leaned in instead. I didn’t kiss her. That was the cruelty of it. Because if our lips had come to rest in the moment, something permanent would have been created, something savage, something uncontrollable, something neither of us would have had a clue how to carry in the aftermath. Instead, our foreheads brushed lightly against each other, skin to skin, breath to breath. Too close, the tension between our mouths felt like a tight wire, thrumming with all the stuff we wouldn’t let go. Her voice was soft and honest as she breathed, “You’re shaking.” “I don’t shake,” I told her. Her whisper hit right at my soul. “You are now.” I clutched my fists at my sides, nails digging into my skin, since I wanted to shape her face. What I was doing was trying to lay claim to something I had no right to claim. I wanted to go down to her and touch her as though that shattered us both. Not yet. Not when I did not know what she was really cooking up here. Not when I did not understand why she was looking at me as if to admit something cracked and buried in me. Not in that I managed to articulate the perilous certainty I had known her before in some other lifetime, in some other sky, when I had been a man who could feel. Slowly. Painfully. Agonizingly. I stepped back. Something in her face shifted. Not relief. Not disappointment. Something far more dangerous. Understanding. She noticed that I was choosing restraint over rejection. She saw it. And yet that realization impossibly brought the air between us further to a boil. We began walking again, though closer. Our shoulders brushed. I hardly touched hers with my arm. It was a promise that we never told or spoke of. Every accidental touch reminded us of what we were denying ourselves, that we were refusing to let ourselves. I just wanted to understand what she didn’t let herself know. I had no idea what she was hiding in her heart from me. I just wanted to tell her that I had grown weary of being alone in rooms of power and silence. I hoped to pull her into the nearest shadow, where I could forget both the world and the law, history scuttled in my bones. But I said what I could get myself to say. “If you get closer,” I whispered, “I won’t be able to fake it once more.” She didn't move away from me. She moved nearer. This time, her shoulder purposefully grazed my arm. No playing nice. No accidents. And for the first time in a very long time, I didn't know how it would feel to lose control of oneself, because of someone who wasn't trying to destroy you. And at the turnabout corner she found herself away from, she hung suspended. So did I. I saw into her eyes, and I had never had that same look at someone else for longer than I’d like to describe. Trust. “I’m not here to hurt you,” she said quietly. “Even if you think I am.” Her words lingered long after she pivoted and walked away. They enveloped me in my thoughts and stubbornly refused to let go of me. I stayed under the streetlight long after she was gone, long past the sight of her, the light leaving black shadows in long, jagged shards on the pavement. And for the first time in a decade … I didn’t feel invulnerable. I felt seen. And that scared me more than ever.