His arms went around me, holding me tightly to him as my body shook gently with aftershocks.

“Shit,” he murmured, exhaling hard. “I should have asked before…”

“You did,” I reminded him.

“I don’t do this,” he said, face nuzzling into my neck.

I didn’t either.

Ever.

If there was anything I was protective of, it was my future. Which meant I made sure that even though I was on birth control, I used condoms. Because no guy was going to leave me a little present that I would have to deal with. Whether that required antibiotics or an eighteen-year commitment.

Aside from that, it always seemed a little too, I don’t know, intimate.

Yet, somehow, with Soren, that felt right.

Except, of course, it couldn’t be right.

Not with him.

“And there she goes,” he said, tone defeated, as he slowly slid away from me.

Some part of me wanted to say that no, I wasn’t running. Even though I knew that was exactly what I needed to do.

Back to my own apartment. Back to the life I fought tooth and nail for.

Back to a life that could not, under any circumstances, include him.

While he went to the bathroom to clean up, I slipped into my clothes—minus my bra that I couldn’t find again—grabbed my phone and key, and fled.

It was for the best I told myself as I sat back on the seat in the subway.

But if it was for the best, why the hell did it feel like someone had cracked open my chest and carved out my heart?

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Soren

I was her dirty little secret.

I was the apartment she slipped into after dark.

The hands she sought when no one else could see.

The post-climax clarity that had her stiffening in my arms, then scrambling to dress and get out of my apartment before she could allow herself to see what was already so glaringly obvious to me.

That this wasn’t some random hookup, some casual affair.

There was something between us.

And it wasn’t just our similar traumas, our similarly shaped scars from being unloved, from being hurt and hungry, and desperate to prove ourselves.

There was just a sense of comfort around her that I’d never once felt before. It was almost the feeling of home that I’d never known.

I comforted myself with her complete and utter lack of control.

The first time she’d stayed away a whole week.

The next time, just three days before she was bursting into my bathroom unannounced, eyes on me as she stripped out of her clothes, then climbed into the shower niche with me.

The time after that, it was only two nights.

And the next time?