The Billionaire Who Never Knew Intimacy

I Let Him Get Too Close

"CHAPTER FOUR

I dreamed of him, and it showed a weakness I didn’t want to admit. Not a man. Not even a name. But a feeling that cocooned my flesh like warm breath in cold air. Hands that never came close to me but were near enough to burn. Never reachable lips; they hung out for that moment, never quite ended. Eyes that followed me like I was already a lost object, something he’d been seeking long before he even knew my name. I woke to a taste of him in the back of my throat. Pathetic. That was the word I offered myself when, as I took a shower, the water flowed down my body too slowly, too warm, slid down my skin, and left nothing behind. I stood there too long; I was in the gap for a blurb of the water, the void it filled in my mind that no reasonable mind could have filled. I lived the night with one more wound that would not heal. His breath was halting when he tried to speak. The way he retreated was at the same time as every element of him screamed to move forward. The way restraint seemed like a holy thing in him, like devotion disguised as discipline. Men like Adrian Voss never saw what they had unleashed. He’d made me ache. And that was the kind of threat that was not visible from the outside. I dressed slowly, deliberately. A black blouse that pressed too tightly against my skin. Hair, untidy and unmanageable, coarse, tattered. No armor. No disguise. No strategy. It was reckless, but it felt honest in a way I had been ill-prepared for. I wasn’t even really going to see him. But fate planned its own plans. The bookstore was silent, bathed in the sort of silence that is sacred to me. Dust motes swirled lazily between faint bands of light: the scent of old paper and polished wood blanketed me in familiar safety. Then he walked in. Before I observed him, I felt him. The air was distinctly different. The room tasted different. The silence thickened the sense of being alive. The feeling grew thick. Instead of receiving my attention, the storm squeezed itself into an environment where barely even a tiny particle made it there. I hadn’t looked up fast. I didn’t want him to see my body’s betrayal, how my pulse quickened, how the material in my fingers faded. All parts inside me snap wide awake at once. “Good morning, Elena.” His voice wrapped around my name in a kind of stroke I never allowed him to do. It sounded darker than before. Lower. Strained. Less controlled. I lifted my gaze slowly. He wasn’t wearing a suit. That troubled me more than I would ever admit. His hair wasn’t perfect. His jaw wasn’t calm. He was a man who didn’t sleep. As if he’d fought against a terrible tide of war in silence and lost. He appeared on some level unspooled. “I didn’t think I would see you here,” I said tentatively, as if language could recreate obstacles. “You said you don’t let people into your life,” he said, then proceeded to talk to me one step at a time. “You didn’t say you vanished.” The accusation wasn’t loud. It wasn’t cruel. It was honest. And to tell the truth was a much more treacherous thing. I swallowed, feeling it burn. “You shouldn’t be here.” “I know.” He didn’t ask permission. He didn’t feign hesitation. He moved closer. Too close. We should not have just looked through that. An empty bookstore, an hour at that, too much air, too much space for the feeling already vibrating beneath our skin. What he looked at was not even civil. It wasn't even friendly. It wasn’t casual. It was restrained hunger. “You just walked away and left like nothing was really in the moment, and I was right there, like a fool who just remembered how to feel.” What I did not anticipate was how hard that word hit me in the gut. “Don’t know me,” I whispered. He raised his hand slowly and organically in a pause. He’d maintained a boundary I hadn’t expressed. He had the tools he needed to control himself before I ever had to ask for them. “I know,” he said. “But I want to.” The honesty hurt. That was the worst part. I turned to face him and pulled myself away from the entirety of his gaze. I shouldn't have done that. It only brought him closer. His presence was too warm, real, and familiar enough for that ancient feeling. “You shouldn’t want me.” I was surprised by the hitch in his breathing. “You shouldn’t look at me like that,” he said. Silence fell. Not empty silence. Not peaceful silence. That bright, electric silence, the moment before the lightning hit. He stepped into it. Our bodies brushed. Not a touch intended to feel neglected. Electric. So what I felt was everywhere, the ground underneath my skin, at my shoulders and wrists, and through the hollow of my throat. The one thing he smelled like was rain and something darker underneath. Something dangerous. Something that threatened to have made me walk through something I was not supposed to get into, literally. “I had a bad nightmare,” he said softly. That stopped time. Adrian Voss didn’t disclose anything like nightmares. “What about?” I asked, lifting my eyes. He hesitated. Only for a second. “About losing you.” The room shifted. We weren’t touching. But everything was trembling. “You don’t even have me,” I whispered, fighting to hold my breath. “Not yet.” He did not say it as a promise. He was saying it as if it were something that already existed. He caressed the counter next to mine, moving close enough to feel the heat on him. Close enough, I would have hardly even tried to close the distance between us. “You give me the motivation to break down walls,” he said softly. “And I built them for a reason.” I laughed at him slowly, but no humor appeared. The only sound you heard was the cracking of something. “I came to this city to forget somebody like you,” I said. “And I’ve become a person nobody is allowed to need,” he said over the years. We froze there, two people sculpted by injury, hungry for something we were not made to hold. Two wounds trying to pretend we weren’t bleeding. He leaned down. Not to kiss me. To speak against my skin. He said, If you let me get any closer, ‘I will forget the kind of man I’m supposed to be.’ I shook hands on the counter. I did not step back. I c****d my head towards him, just another inch higher. And it was enough. He froze. Not from lack of desire. But out of restraint, it was buckling under its own weight. His forehead brushed against my temple. Not a kiss. A confession. We’re standing there breathing the same air and shaking in silence as though it were betraying us. Outside the window, some people walked in from the outside; footsteps brushed by us. Cars passed. Real life continued. We stayed lost. It was he who pushed back first this time. Not because he wanted to. Because he had to. He looked down at my gaze as if it were memorizing every fault, every broken bone, every secret I had once believed was buried. “I don’t think it’s safe,” I said. He nodded. “I don’t think I care.” And that’s also when I figured out how dire this was. And I still wanted it.