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1 Michael
They come as a pack of aliens in suits, and Michael finds himself staring at their shoes. Shined leather that gleams black as the back of a beetle.
Lincoln would say that’s typical Michael, fixating on a detail that’ll distract him from what he can’t stand.
That he failed.
Except Lincoln doesn’t say anything. He kneels, like the rest of them, his thumbs locked behind his head. Blood trickles down his chin, and Michael can tell from the potato-shaped lump where his nose should be that it’s broken again.
But blood smears on Kellerman’s cuff as he wipes his lip with his shirt sleeve. Maybe it’s worth it.
“That makes you feel better, Burrows?” he says.
Michael senses the dormant irritation there. A memory boils to the surface. The roll of metal against metal beneath his feet, as the train raced them to Chicago. Lincoln holding Sara back, and the look on her face, such a startling shock of animal rage.
You get one of those. One, Kellerman said.
It’s the same tone, now, as he addresses Lincoln. Condescension and an icing of cool and pragmatism. But boy, it’s one disgusting-ass cake underneath that sugar coating.
It fleets across Michael’s mind that Kellerman has a temper, just like Lincoln. Only, he’s better at hiding it.
Sara’s face again, as she fought against the cage of Linc’s arms, trying to get another shot to strangle Kellerman with a shoelace.
Maybe everyone has a temper. Buried, deep beneath the surface.
Everyone excepts for me.
Those men in black may have burst into their warehouse in the middle of the night, but Michael is still the alien. Is always the alien.
He doesn’t feel angry, even as Kellerman walks up to him with a smirk God must have intended when he designed the last circle of hell.
“So,” Kellerman says.
Kneeling, with guns aimed at his head, Michael has to crane his neck to meet Kellerman’s eyes, which is detestable. But seeing as it’s that or looking at his crotch—
“You don’t change, Scofield, do you? Think you’re smarter than everyone. Smart enough to take on the government, huh?”
Michael knows his calm will only make matters worse. That’s what tends to happen. Somehow, his absence of anger aggravates the situation.
He manages, “You don’t look to me like you’ve changed either, Paul.”
Kellerman laughs. He’s in a position to laugh, it’s true. Then he looks behind Michael’s shoulder, looks left and right. It’s so performative, Michael can’t help but take in the change. A glint in the man’s eyes. A show of casualness.
“Looks to me like you’re one member short.”
Michael can’t think of what to answer. His tone will betray him, or his body. Sweat will break at his temple or his eyes will dart where they shouldn’t.
Because that’s what love does. It betrays you.
If Kellerman and his men could only take them away, now, without searching the warehouse—
Of course they’ll search it. They’d be idiots not to.
Yet Michael needs to believe they won’t.
Kellerman tilts his head to the side. “Come on, Michael. Where is she?”
Michael clenches his jaw.
Wonders if he was that casual, with Sara, before the torture started. Just tell me what I want to know. What did your father give you. Where are Michael and Lincoln.
A friendly neighbor tone.
A we’re-both-civilized-people tone.
An I-don’t-have-a-temper tone.
Michael keeps his teeth ground and his eyes on Kellerman.
“All right,” the man sighs. Michael is so sure this was what he looked like, just before he started drowning Sara, that his next sentence takes him by surprise. “I’ll just have to be a big boy and play hide and seek. Won’t I?”
2 Kellerman
Kellerman isn’t surprised to find Sara sleeps like the dead.
If any woman does, it’s fitting it should be her.
There was this moment in Gila when—
No.
Kellerman slaps himself away from thoughts of New Mexico, thoughts that rub a little too hard against the itch he won’t scratch.
What itch?
Kellerman is an expert at pretending he isn’t having certain thoughts.
Just like in New Mexico. Would you guess that he had to stifle a laugh?
Elbow-deep into torturing a woman, a woman he liked, and he had to stop himself from laughing. It was her fault, really. She lapsed into unconsciousness—think you can escape me, do you?—and when he shook her awake, she gave him such an annoyed groan.
It was so banal and charming.
Like he was a clock, and if her hands weren’t tied to a chair, she would have smashed him with her fist.
For heaven’s sake will you let a woman sleep?
So, Kellerman isn’t all that surprised that she slept through a squad of government agents bursting through a warehouse, where she, her husband, and their silly gang of outlaws ‘fight the good fight’, resist tortures, and maybe jack off to Les Misérables songs, or whatever it is they get up to.
It’s not like he was expecting anything, after the exoneration. He left a couple of messages. Knowing she wouldn’t call back, but thinking she might. After all, he isn’t such a bad catch. When he got elected to the Senate some tabloid ranked him number three in their ‘Bachelors of the Year’ list.
If he’s going to be honest with himself, yes. Part of him was hoping that when the thrill of running for their lives had wrapped up, she wouldn’t stick with Scofield. Except Paul never is. Honest with himself.
He makes his way around the warehouse, silent. The gun safe in his holster. He’s not going to need it. When he spots the boat, floating in midair, a smile smears onto his face.
Scofield didn’t steal you away to Panama. But he got you a warehouse packed full of ex-cons in California. Hey. It’s the intention that counts.
He climbs up the ladder. Feels just a little bit like the honey-swallowing, flour-dipping wolf. There’s no door, just an arched opening into the cabin, and before he can brace himself or feel guilty, there she is.
The saliva in his mouth morphs into sand.
He expected her, expected this, but didn’t brace himself for intimacy. The lighting is dim but he can make out the room after only a few blinks. He taught himself to see in the dark in the army—or tried to, really. It’s not as easy as growing abs.
But he takes in the room and absently thinks he’s doing all right.
The first thing to draw his eyes is the bed. You can’t really look at anything else.
The room—sorry, the cabin—is small enough that there’s little more than a bed to look at. Sheets cover her, sort of. It’s a hot night. She’s got one leg out, and the sight of her bare thigh seers into him, melts through his retina like looking at the sun through a magnifying glass.
Seconds go by—minutes? There’s no way to measure this. Kellerman can make out more details, now. Auburn hair splashed over a bare stretch of mattress. No pillows. The sharpness of bones jutting out, as her shoulder blades roll free from the bedcover. About a third of face that isn’t buried, cheek pressed against the mattress.
He thought—
Just what did he think?
That he’d show up here and she’d be all ready for some face off? Quip remarks to go with his own?
Hello, Sara. It’s been a while.
Not long enough.
Something like that, anyway. Maybe it was just the look on Michael’s face, earlier, that ushered him here. He was going to sneak in and surprise her, wake her, just so her boyfriend could agonize over it? So he could snatch a few moments of vulnerability and store them for later, add them to his pile of victories, like they’re two players at a poker table wide as the universe? She isn’t counting the scores, he knows. But he is. And the game never ends.
Kellerman sighs.
Now he feels like shit.
His foot tangles in a shirt that lies inside out on the floor as he steps forward. Who would have thought she was a slob?
Color flashes to his face before he can help himself.
He pictures her tossing that shirt over her head, worming into the sheets. Was there some understanding before she went to bed? A wink, a word in Michael’s ear? Don’t stay up too late. Is her nudity an invitation, a message? Or is it just hot as hell in here?
Let’s get this over with.
In the matter of two strides, Kellerman has reached the bed. Soooo. How does he go about ‘this’, exactly? Pull his gun out? That’d be a good opening for some nice banter.
We have got to stop meeting like this, Sara.
But it feels unnecessary, with an unarmed woman, not to mention naked as the day she was born beneath those sheets—probably.
It wouldn’t feel unnecessary if you remembered what she did to you with a shoelace, Paul.
He leans, one hand on his holster, but the footboard slat is closer than he expected. There’s no time to catch himself before he comes tumbling in.
One hand sinks wrist-deep into a mattress that crumbles like cake.
Sara rolls under him.
Under him.
That’s when it hits, really, where he’s landed, what he’s doing. It registers just before his body can react to the heat of her beneath the sheets. He feels her through his shirt, his jeans. A smell buried by a fortress of willpower and bricks of denial fills his sinuses. Coconut shampoo and just a twinge of sweat.
Something inside him melts.
And he wants to die, just a little, when he remembers making those phone calls, a couple of years ago.
Hi, Sara. You probably wonder why I’m calling. I just thought with everything going on I didn’t get to make a proper apology. If you want to catch up sometime over coffee just let me—
Hey. I heard you’re still in L.A. I’m gonna happen to be there in a few weeks in case you want to—
Pathetic.
The word enters his mind, for the first time, as he lies planted here, propped on his elbows atop her, in a way that awakens the ghost of way-too-far-away pushups and exercise.
How did I get in this situation?
Because you don’t happen to fall on top of a naked woman one hot summer night unless there has been a massive buildup.
Blunders like this happen in the movies. Freak accidents. Meet cutes of sorts.
But buried at the back of his mind, there’s a lucid acknowledgement that he didn’t get in this situation. He created it.
She speaks, “Michael.”
The blood in his veins runs lava-hot.
Before he can think to say something, to stop this, stop her, she wraps her arms around his neck. Hairs bristle in the back of his head. Her touch is smooth like ripped pillows.
He shifts—maybe to move away. To disentangle from her before something irreparable happens. But it’s too late. The mattress crumbles under his knees and when she opens her legs, he senses, deep in his stomach, that he’s not going to do the right thing.
The heat of her soaks into him. With a blind hand, she fights off the sheets that pool around her naked body, and he takes her in. What he makes out in the darkness is the sort of sight that drives artists mad. It occurs to Paul, somewhere in the back of his mind, that Sara is just that—a woman you want to paint, or sculpt, or write poetry about. A woman you want to capture, somehow. Honestly, he never got what the big deal was about. Fine-shaped bodies are great and all that, but nothing to trigger insomnia or half-crazed bouts of inspiration, if you ask Kellerman.
Yet his mouth goes dry as her flat stomach and bare breasts burn into his eyes. Her legs are still wrapped in the sheets. Heat creeps into his face at the small patch of pubic hair he makes out.
“Kiss me,” she says.
Paul can’t believe how close he comes to doing just that. An invisible hand grabs him by the neck and forces him down on her. He leans in, comes close enough to lick the sweat off her cheeks.
A thought stops him, just in time. It blares bright red against the dim dance of desire that has awakened inside his mind.
If I kiss her, she’ll know.
It’s only a matter of time before she comes out of her haze.
How long before she realizes his weight on her is unfamiliar, before his smell hits her nostrils and connects through to her brain?
Even after all these years, she can’t have forgotten what he smells like. Not when he stood behind her for hours on end in Gila, alternating between drowning her and squeezing the water out of her hair that dripped down the tile.
“Michael, kiss me.”
Instead he touches one hand to her stomach, feather-light.
An alarm goes off in his head, and he pays no mind.
Something shifting, in his moral compass.
He’s not just not doing the right thing anymore.
He’s doing the wrong thing.
This is assault.
But he can’t bring himself to care just now.
Her eyes flutter, still closed—let her keep her eyes closed—as his fingers trail up to her breasts. He circles his thumb against her nipple, taut, harder than can be accounted for by the weather.
She lets out a moan that he knows will still tingle his nerves with desire if he lives to be a hundred years old.
Maybe there’ll be room for guilt, after tonight. He’s not sure. Part of him can’t help but think the woman really just should have answered his phone calls.
With his other hand, he reaches under the sheets and shudders at the softness of her inner thigh. She shudders, too. He parts her open and guides himself between her legs.
3 Sara
It seems to Sara there’s never enough moments like this. Moments when she and Michael are naked, in bed, and the sun is down, and there’s no emergency, no work that keeps them both too occupied to care about things like—
Pleasure.
She gasps.
His hand cups her, hard, and it’s so unusual she’s tempted to laugh. But then his mouth comes down on her nipple and she can’t remember what was funny.
“Michael.”
He doesn’t say anything.
Come to think of it—not that she’s in the mood to think—all of this is unusual. Not that Michael doesn’t curl against her in bed at night and make love to her, fresh from sleep, even after a long day’s work. It’s just not how he likes to start. First, he’ll brush his thumb against her cheek, wait till she’s out. When she opens her eyes he’ll be smiling at her, such a soft smile, and his eyes will gleam when he says something cheesy like, ‘How did I get so lucky?’
Now, he’s—
Her breath hitches as his erection presses into her crotch. He’s still dressed. Why did he get to bed wearing his clothes? His pants will be wet from her tomorrow.
Wait.
Pants? The fabric is soft as it rubs against her, not hard, the way jeans would feel. She could have sworn he was wearing jeans when she went to bed. Did he change? But all his clothes are here. How—
“Oh.”
His hand slides down between them, and she gets a stupid idea—that he’s trying to distract her. He starts stroking her. She feels her body respond, before she can think, or really tear from the fog of slumber. Now, this is like Michael. And unlike Michael.
It’s like him to touch her before he does anything else to her.
Heat boils down her stomach, fueled by the kisses he plants down her jaw, her bare throat. The threads of saliva he left on her breasts have already dried.
Yet something’s different. Different.
What?
It’s hard to concentrate, or really, to give a damn. He’s working her with the same confidence as usual, but he uses the flat of his palm, not his fingertips, and the stubble of his face against her feels rough—
Too rough.
He shaved just this morning.
She can feel herself building toward climax, hear her breath ripping out in shreds and he’s so damn silent.
Michael talks to her.
Things that shouldn’t turn her on but that do. Come for me, Sara. You’re so beautiful.
She grips at the sheet as orgasm ripples through her, from the roots of her hair down to her toes. She doesn’t cry, or moan, or swear. She never does. The walls are thin, and she’s not interested in getting looks in the morning when they get down to work.
Sweat breaks down her entire body and she takes a moment to gather her breath, waits for Michael to drop at her side and hold her. He once confessed that was one of his favorite moments. After she comes, and he’s waiting for her high to abate, stroking her hair or kissing her shoulder—
But he doesn’t stop. He sucks at her nipple and she feels raw from his hand. He went rough on her. Michael is never rough.
Sara is sobered from the thought, which finally pierces through the wall of tiredness and pleasure and denial. Sobered, too, from the climax that leaves her oversensitive and alert.
“Stop,” she says. “Stop.”
A pause.
Dread bites into her heart as she holds her breath.
Something is wrong.
She knows this, has known since it started, but there was no time to think, only pleasure and chaos. His face is stone-still against her breasts. Awareness creeps in and she feels his exhale on her skin, feels the bulk of his hips into her thighs and the length of his hard-on against her pubic bone.
“Michael?” she says. This time, it’s a question.
Part of her can’t bear to admit it, to peel off the shroud of denial. He’ll look up at her and she’ll laugh, say he has got to stop waking her like this.
Of course, it’s Michael. He’s only trying out something new. This is his way of ‘keeping the flame alive’, though that’s ridiculous. In the three years they’ve been together, it hasn’t had time to peter out. What other explanation is there?
She doesn’t want to know. Finds she doesn’t want to reach for the switch behind her and flood the boat cabin with light.
“Michael.”
Asserting his identity, now. Like she can will it to be so.
Michael, obviously Michael. What else does she think happened? She’s being ridiculous.
She tells herself this, although she can see well enough in the darkness now to know his hair is too long, the breadth of his hips between her legs too large.
Stiffness spreads down her spine and she can’t move, even as he lets out a sigh.
That voice.
An icepick stabs into her heart, slow and long and hard.
No.
She knows before he speaks. Before he straightens up and the sight of his face breaks her skin into gooseflesh, like someone just broke an egg full of spiders against her scalp.
“This really isn’t what it looks like, Sara.”
Though she can’t see him, can’t stand the thought of the reality pressing against her lungs, she fumbles for the light switch behind her pillow. Not even aware of her arm moving. It’s a desperate act. All her mind can think is the man lying on top of her right now is no realer than a vampire, and he’ll dissipate at the glow of electric light.
Instead, Kellerman winces at the sudden irruption of brightness, and lead freezes Sara where she lies.
“Jesus,” he says.
He straightens to a more decent position, straddling her lap. It hits her that his weight would spear her down, even if she tried to move, and she wants to die.
His palms go up in the air to placate her. “This is a misunderstanding.”
“Get off me.”
He doesn’t. Still, his face is that of a businessman, bleeding authority, until she feels like a hysterical woman. “I’m here to arrest you, not hurt you.”
Arrest her? Like he’s a policeman, and she’s the criminal—is he seriously playing that card right now?
Part of her is so shocked he gets to look innocent, when he sits atop her naked body. She can still feel his erection pressing into her stomach. But she gets a sense that if he decided the earth was flat, she’d feel like a crazy person for calling him out on it.
Her teeth grind.
The light was a bad idea.
Her bare breasts pointing at him, the nipples still wet from his saliva.
“Get off me,” she repeats.
“Look, Sara—”
“Get the fuck off me.”
“I’d love to do that,” he says.
He sounds just as mundane as when he left her those pathetic voicemails, which she wanted to laugh at. But in the end, she could never put enough distance between her and the memory of Kellerman’s hand on her neck, forcing her head into the water, to see the humor in his schoolboy crush.
His hands are still up. At his belt, the bulk of a holster catches her eye.
He sees her watching and smiles. “But I get a feeling if I moved off you, you’d be all teeth and claws. I don’t want you to go wild on me—well,” he amends. “It’s a little late for that. Let’s not allow things to escalate. I mean, more than they already have.”
She tries to sit up, to wriggle from under him. His strength snatches the breath out of her as he tosses her back against the mattress. There was no time to slither even one inch—or maybe it was the strength she lacked. It feels like a mountain is sitting on top of her.
Sara blinks through her dizziness as her head bounces on the bed. Remembers the gun she and Michael hide under the mattress. But how will she get to that?
“I just want to set the records straight,” Kellerman says. “Like I said, I came here to arrest you. My team already has your husband and his brother in handcuffs downstairs. I was going to wake you up and get you with the others but I tripped. Okay?”
She cannot believe he has the gall to look her in the eye when he says this.
Cannot believe how honest he sounds.
“Are you fucking serious?” she lets out.
Backtrack, a voice warns. This is useless. What are you going to achieve, when he’s pinning you down beneath him?
“I know it sounds stupid,” he admits, in his calm baritone. You’re just a child, voice. Let the adults talk. “But that’s what happened. Then you—look, I get this is embarrassing. But you pulled me on top of you and kissed me.”
Fire starts in the pit of her stomach. She can feel it shooting all the way to her eyes.
Right.
Kellerman tilts his head, like he’s trying to be a gentleman, but she’s making it super hard. “You did. I don’t know if that’s something that usually happens while you’re asleep—but if anything, you assaulted me. All right?”
“You were kissing my breasts.”
“No.” He shakes his head, adamant. “No, you must have dreamt that part.”
“Like I dreamt your hand between my thighs, Paul?”
His jaw hardens.
Backtrack. Backtrack, backtrack, backtrack.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he says. Sighs, collects himself. “I mean, obviously I noticed your, er—” coyness wriggles onto his face, fits like a charm. “Your eagerness. I guess you were having a nice dream. It’s all an absurd accident, all right? I tried to move away from you, and with the friction I suppose you must have—”
“Oh shut up. Shut up.”
She can’t hold the words back. Rage brims out of her like hot wax.
The nerves. The nerves on this guy.
Maybe this is how the Virgin Mary felt, how this story as old as time really went down. She pictures Joseph, with his hands up, looking like Kellerman is looking now. Hey, babe, I don’t know what kind of dream you were having but I think it might have gotten you pregnant. Didn’t touch you. Scout’s honor. I think this angel was here, though, you’re never going to believe what he had to say.
She pushes against Kellerman’s upper body but does not so much as get him to move one inch.
“Am I dreaming your spit on my chest, you jerk? Am I dreaming your fucking hard-on against my—”
“Shhh.”
His hand shoots out between them and locks around her throat.
Sara goes dead still.
Kellerman still looks like a regular businessman, like he’s trying to be reasonable.
“It’s all right, Sara,” he whispers, on a tone that says this is all a bad dream, it’ll be gone in the morning. “Just calm down. Take deep breaths. You’re having a panic attack.”
She is not having a panic attack.
But there is nothing she can do, with his weight on her, his hand wrapped around her larynx.
Only wait for her throbbing pulse to wear itself out against Kellerman’s palm, while he lets out hushes and yoga-coach phrases.
Only pretend she can’t feel his erection against her stomach.
“It’s okay,” he says. “You’re okay.”
After a while, he takes his hand off her throat. She doesn’t dare gasp, or say anything.
“Better?”
He laughs at her silence. Makes it sound like she’s over-reacting.
“Jesus, Sara, I’m not going to rape you.”
She wishes she could find that as funny as he does.
Except his laughter does not reach higher than his cheekbones. His eyes on her are dead serious, and hot as coals.
“Fine,” she says. “You tripped. I sex-slept you. You were at the wrong place at the wrong time. It’s all a crazy accident. Can you get off me now?”
He contemplates her a while. “Sure.”
But he doesn’t move.
She can’t find a way to ask again without actually begging him.
He glances down, and she feels his stare on her breasts, hot as microwaved honey. “You know, I didn’t expect you slept naked. Or I would have sent a female officer up here.”
She doesn’t call him out on his bullshit, doesn’t pretend he’s the sorriest excuse for a man she’s ever seen.
Hypocrisy, meet Miserable Creep.
She says, “Right.” As free from sarcasm as she can muster.
In a corner of her brain, there is an alternate reality where Kellerman is not looking at her breasts, and she can’t measure the length of his cock stiff as a piece of metal.
“You know, I wonder why you thought I was Michael.”
“Mmm,” she manages.
“I mean, that you even thought it for a second. Does he wake you up like this?”
Sara swallows. It does nothing to dislodge the lump building inside her throat. “You mean, tripping on the bed and landing on top of me by accident?”
This is when he doubles down on his ludicrous story. Except he doesn’t. Hardly seems to hear her. His eyes drool down her upper body and she tries to think of all the advice she’s ever heard about how not to get raped. What not to wear, where not to go, what time to be off the streets. None of it seems to apply to lying in your own bed, completely naked.
She’s heard of women who learn to make themselves throw up in such situations. But Sara can’t even find her gag reflex when she’s down with the flu.
He says something, beneath his breath. It’s too low for her to make out the words.
“Paul, I think—I think we should join the others.”
“I said,” he repeats, like he hasn’t heard her. “You never returned my calls.”
His eyes meet hers, finally. Again, he looks conversational, sweeping away the boiling minutes he spent eyeing her nude body.
“I—I didn’t.”
“Why not?”
She clenches her jaw so hard, pain ripples through her back molars. Because you’re a jerk, and I never want to hear from you again in my life.
Sara is in no position to negotiate. “I guess I couldn’t think of what to say to you.”
“Huh.”
She licks her lips. “I really think we—”
“Maybe I unsettle you,” he says. “Maybe you’re not sure what you feel around me.”
He locks eyes with her.
The words are out before she can weigh them. “I know exactly what I feel around you.”
“Oh?”
She tries one more push, but he locks his thighs around her hips. He’s too strong. She starts to writhe, meaning to wriggle out from under him. Her pelvis grinds against his cock and she stiffens like a snake bit her. Goes absolutely still.
A look flashes across his face.
She doesn’t like this. “Paul, we—”
“You always come so fast, Sara?”
Her mouth fills up with chalk.
He still sounds like a patient policeman who caught her taking a baseball bat to a Confederate statue.
“Or, just when you’re with me,” he resumes.
For a long time, she doesn’t believe she’ll be able to get the words out. Any word. Can’t decide what the smart move is here. Does she answer or not? Yell at him or placate him? Struggle or plead?
She needs to think, to screw her head back on her shoulders. She can’t accept that there are no more smart moves, not for her. None that will get her out of this.
Kellerman shakes his head.
She’s sure he’ll laugh, reveal he’s only poking fun at her, and Jesus, does she have to be so serious?
“I’m an idiot,” he says.
On this, they’re agreed.
“You knew it was me. Right? The whole time. You knew it was me.”
Her heartrate picks up. She gulps, tries to gather the spit to talk, but her throat has narrowed to the size of a pebble. “Please, get off of me.”
“You’re familiar with French philosophy, Sara?”
Oh, for crying out loud.
“Ever heard of what Sartre called ‘la mauvaise foi’?”
She has. And she knows where he’s going with this.
The wheels of her mind whirl at full speed. Is he serious? Does she make him listen to reason? Does she cry? Does she scream?
“Paul,” she articulates, ignores the shiver that runs down his frame as she speaks his name. “There is nothing to read into this. You tripped. I did things in my sleep. Nothing happened. It was my fault. Okay?”
He’s still shaking his head. “Bad faith,” he repeats. “It’s when people do things, without accepting responsibility. Like, flirting with a guy, letting him flirt with you, and pretending you didn’t know it was flirting when he tries something. So you enjoy his attention but don’t get blame for leading him on.”
Sara tries to pretend he’s taking a random example. “I know what bad faith means, Paul.”
“Oh, okay. So, when you asked me to kiss you earlier—”
“Michael. I thought you were Michael.”
Her heart is a wild bird inside her rib cage. With a tilt of his head, he shows he finds this dubious. The thought occurs to her, horrible, that he’s really convinced himself she did this on purpose.
“Paul,” she says. Hears how desperate she sounds. “Get off me. Please.” She tries a different approach. “You’re crushing me. I can’t breathe.”
“Maybe you want this, Sara. But you won’t admit it to yourself. Maybe you want the thrill and the pleasure, but you don’t want to shoulder the consequences. Cheating on Michael, letting a man like me touch you. A man who killed people. A man who tortured you. Maybe you want it, but you can’t want it. Want it to be beyond your control. Have your cake and eat it, too.”
She could laugh at how absurd he sounds.
But his thighs are locked tight around her hips, pinning her down. His pupils dilated.
He’s serious. He’s actually serious.
Her mouth opens.
It hits her.
Anything she says, any way she tries to deny this—it’s just going to fuel his theory, of her pretending she doesn’t want him.
I can’t win.
Adrenaline spikes through her body.
“What about you?” she says. One last appeal to reason. “You come here, put your hands on me, and you convince yourself that I want it? No matter how many times I tell you to stop? That no means yes? Come on, Paul. How’s that for bad faith?”
Doubt shoots across his face.
She watches it happen. Heart pounding.
Please, God, let him fall on his own blade. Let him believe me.
Kellerman sucks in his bottom lip.
Sweat pearls down his forehead and plumets to his shirt collar. He seems not to notice.
In a breath, words escape from his mouth. She can’t make them out. But her heart clenches at the thought it might be the three words she’s worried he’d wind up saying to her, eventually. The silent mantra he repeats to himself when he thinks about her, leaves her humiliating voicemails.
He rolls off her and kneels on the mattress. His bodyweight shifts from her lap and she can move, finally, slide on the mattress where a pool of sweat has gathered.
Thank God.
She springs from the bed as if it were made of cockroaches. One hand gripped around a fistful of sheets, which she drags up along her chest. She never breaks eye-contact. Heat rides down her body in waves. Though he wasn’t crushing her, really, oxygen gulps into her lungs so fast her head spins.
Silence weighs between them.
She debates thanking him.
But it’s better to make light of this, pretend nothing inappropriate happened.
Her foot glides down the bed. She’s careful not to reveal more of herself than he’s already seen.
Ice spreads down her veins as his hand locks around her forearm. She looks at him again. Finds, horrified, that his eyes are abyss-black. His face grave.
“Paul—”
He pushes her back onto the bed. The sheet comes off, baring her to the too-strong glow of light and Kellerman’s gaze.
There’s no time to protest before he covers her body with his, yanks her wrists above her head. One massive thigh wedges between her legs.
A cold finger rakes down the back of her neck as his breath hits her ear. Its warmth prickles as he repeats the three words he spoke before he let her go. The words she couldn’t hear.
Not I love you.
But, “You want this.”