Chapter 19: : Chapter 19

and quiet and feels like the inside of my chest. Empty.

Hawke and Cole are clearly still on the boat, probably making love under the moonlight while I drove around for an hour feeling like I’ve got a hole in my heart from being kicked in the chest.

Why does she make it so hard for anyone to love her?

I get the pain; I get the need to hide from what hurts most, but if she’d only let me in, she’d see how much we can help each other. We are two lost souls that can bring one another back to life, aren’t we?

But I can’t be mad at her. I pushed, and I pushed. It’s not like she didn’t tell me this in all honesty. She said she’d break my heart. Cole even warned me against her, and now I realize it wasn’t for Han’s sake, it was for mine. Hawke told me she floats through life like a feather in the wind, never sticking around for anyone, not even her own sister. What made me think I could get her to fall from the sky for me?

I kick off my shoes by the door to my room, sighing out my frustrations before falling backwards onto the bed. I fall back and I bump into a warm leg.

Out of the corner of my eye, I see a shadowy figure lying along the bed beside me. My instant reaction is to murder.

I quickly flip over, straddling the body while pulling out the switchblade in my pocket, flipping the six-inch blade with my thumb and holding it to the neck beneath me.

Green reptilian eyes, illuminated by the moonlight seeping in through the large window, make my mouth drop open in shock.

“Han?! What the fuck are you doing here?!” I swallow, breathing heavily, my steady hand still with the blade to her throat.

She’s panting beneath me with her hands held up, clearly terrified by my instant reaction to kill.

“I—she swallows, holding her chin up—I’m sorry.” Her words come out breathy as her chest continues to rise and fall between us.

“Jesus Christ,” I breathe out, folding the knife up with one hand and chucking it across the room, still facing her.

“I’m sorry,” she says again quickly, shaking her head, on the verge of tears.

I take in her terrified eyes and instantly feel awful for putting her in fear.

“I’m so sorry,” she repeats herself, the panic in her eyes not because I had a knife millimeters from killing her, but because her emotions are showing. “I’m sorry I left you. I shouldn’t have.”

I stare at her, inches away from her lips, feeling like the piece of that hole in my chest is lying beneath me here in my room.

She’s shaking. Physically shaking, almost hyperventilating, and I know it has nothing to do with the fact that she came face to face with a knife. Nah, that doesn’t scare her. It’s her insides spilling out of her that have her on the edge of falling apart.

“Shh…baby, calm down,” I whisper softly, cupping her face gently between my palms.

“I’m sorry,” she chokes out. “I…I…”

My brows knit together as I study her, her breathing almost causing her to faint. I wait for her to push through the last remaining barrier to get to me.

“I shouldn’t have left the only person who makes me want to stay.”

Her cracked tone and her broken words make my head feel heavy, my body weak, my heart aching with a longing for hers.

“I’m sorry I hurt you.” Her words are hoarse, her tone uneasy as her eyes graze over my face, between my eyes, then falling upon my lips. “At least, I think I hurt you?”

She’s so timid and unlike the confident Han I know. This is Jo, the woman that’s feeling things she doesn’t know how to control. The woman who’s finally breaking through to me, melting away the exterior to the only one who knows how to hold her together, cupped in my hands as she becomes a puddle of emotion before me.

“You did.” I reply honestly.

Her tongue skates across her bottom lip as a sorrowful look overtakes her eyes.

“Han, tell me something real,” I demand.

She came here. She’s sorry. But what’s next? I can’t go back to her ghosting me again. If I learned anything after today, it’s that maybe I need to protect this little heart I seem to have grown.

“I don’t want to hurt you again,” she says in a whisper, the admission causing her eyes to squint closed painfully tight.

I run my hand along her face, my thumb caressing gently along her cheekbone.

“Then don’t,” I whisper, gazing from her eyes to her lips, to her beautiful gold septum ring and back, until she finally seems able to breathe.

“But I might,” she responds, her eyes darting wildly back and forth between mine.

“Well, a little hurt won’t kill me.” My lip pulls in the corner, prompting her to relax a little.

She’s trying. Will she fuck this up? Possibly. But I can’t let her get away now, not when she’s finally opening up. We’ll ease into this, whatever this is. I won’t let her go. I can’t. She’s the only one who’s ever made me want to be something, anything other than what I seem to fall back on.

Before any more words can be spoken, I slowly inch my lips closer to hers. Our eyes gaze at each other for a moment, expressing everything we can’t seem to with our words alone. She blinks quickly, then takes a deep breath, our closeness finally seeming to calm her. My lips move closer, waiting for her to give me the okay. She tilts her chin in a light nod before I capture her mouth in mine.

Like a bucket of gasoline to a fire, we ignite once finally together. With me still straddling her, I pull her into my lips as she grasps my shirt by the hem, clutching it tightly in her hands, pulling me into her. Our tongues run the length of each other’s in a quick, needy, deprived sort of way. She moans into my mouth as one of my hands runs up the back of her neck, fingers sliding along her scalp, clutching her hair in my hold as our kiss continues.

Electrical shocks wave through me like no drug could ever match. I’ve never wanted one person to the extent I want her. I want her in my blood, my bones. She controls me now. Her touch, the only way to revive the last bit of dead I’ve held inside my guarded heart. I might overdo this, I might fuck around and tell her I’m off my face obsessed with her. Everything about her wet, beautiful lips against mine, her wicked tongue carving her need, her soft skin sending goosebumps over mine, feels too good to be true.

I pull her head back slightly, breaking our used lips apart so I can absorb the fact that she’s really here beneath me. Acknowledge that this isn’t a dream or some sort of hallucination. She’s really here.

“You came for me,” I whisper, sounding like she did when I visited her place on her birthday, a day of insurmountable pain for her.

“I couldn’t not,” she whispers in return, her lip curling a bit as her hand reaches up and runs over my brow line, easing the tension I didn’t know was there.

Her words are mine, so I change the meaning behind hers.

“I love that you couldn’t not.”

I don’t hate it like she previously said. I love it. I love that I pushed and pushed, even though it made her uncomfortable, even though I chanced it. I knew she was under there, waiting with that hand held out, needing someone who understands and cares. Someone to ease that pain, even if it doesn’t mean taking it away forever. I’m just happy she realized it before it was too late.

Our lips crash together again, but this time she flips me on my back, straddling my lap. Her hands find my hair, pulling at the roots as she lifts my head. Lips find my neck, sucking along the inked skin before her tongue trails along the dip of my throat, slowly dragging along the skin until finding my ear. Her sweet, soft lips wrap around the lobe, causing my hands to grip into the flesh of her hips, my hips flexing up, pushing my rock of dick into her.

She does crazy things to my insides. I feel this sickening sense of holding onto something so fragile that I could easily break into pieces in my hands, yet all I want to do is squeeze the fuck out of it. I’m the kid who gets a pet hamster and smothers it to death with love and forced affection.

“Chill?” she asks suddenly.

“Ah, no I just meant—”

She hops off of me, sitting back on her heels on the edge of the bed, her wide eyes unsure of what I’m doing, of what she’s doing.

I sigh, trying to calm the mind of the man who has thoughts floating endlessly through his skull like a game show contestant in one of those cages, attempting to catch the dollar bills floating in a tornado around them.

Grabbing her hand, I pull her back down on the bed so she’s lying beside me now, our chests together, our eyes level.

“I don’t want to smother the hamster,” I state, cocking a brow in confusion at how the words sounded out loud.

She tilts her head. “Is this a dick reference?”

“If I ever refer to my dick as a hamster, we have real problems.”

She chuckles lightly.

“No, I just mean, I don’t want to…I’m afraid I’ll…” I pinch the bridge of my nose, trying to find the words. “What I mean to say is I’m kind of…”

“A handful?” She answers for me.

I nod with wide eyes. “I’m a lot to handle. When I find what I want, I fucking drown in it, taking everyone with me in my wake. Addictive personality problems.” I shrug.

She eyes me silently; the moonlight leaving me in the spotlight, exposed, her expression entirely in the dark.

“I think you’re a passionate person. Someone who gets their addictions confused with a true need to feel things. That energy, that passion, it’s yours to own, not the substances around you.”

I let her words marinate for a moment. Maybe she’s right. I always just accept the fact that my addictions are out of my control, but maybe it’s always been just a choice for me, or could be. My personality could take me in new directions, lead me to open new doors that Hawke generously helps me find. When I find something I like, I definitely dive in. Maybe she’s right. This energy is mine to own. What I do with that is up to me. Could I change that?

“Fuck, Han.” I run a hand down my face, quickly reevaluating my life in the blink of an eye.

The depth of the conversations we tend to have never get old. This connection between us is so much deeper than any other bullshit hookup I’ve had. We see each other with illuminating eyes that expose, mirror, and force the truth out of one another, even when it’s hard to face.

“And your thoughts, you want to find ways to calm them but can’t,” she continues.

I hold my hand out and away from my face, my wide eyes finding hers.

“Am I fucking see through?! Jesus, woman!”

She giggles. “I’ve just been studying you, I guess. I see them floating through your head and watch as you try to pick the right one.”

“Wow. Well, you’ve completely figured me out,” I smirk, shaking my head in disbelief. “But it’s you I’m still trying to make sense of.”

“Yeah?” she asks softly, almost sadly, like it hurts her that she’s been forced to be so withdrawn. “I don’t know. It seems like you understand me better than I do.”

I bring her hand to my mouth, rubbing her knuckles against my lips methodically as I gaze at the outline of her beautiful face.

“You’re still a mystery to me, Han. I don’t know much, but I do know what I feel. It’s something that can’t be expressed verbally, can’t be seen.”

She swallows at that, her lips parting slightly as a breath escapes her. There’s a slight pause in conversation, and I wonder if the hamster is getting choked out.

“Come with me,” she says suddenly, a hint of breathlessness about her.

My eyes dart around the room as I stiffen, then find her eyes again.

“Like sexually?” I nod aggressively.

“Wrong thought grab, Kai.”

I break into a laugh. She’s not wrong.

“Where? Where are we going, Han?” I ask with a shit-eating grin. “I’ll follow you anywhere.”

“Next time I feel the need to leave,” she whispers, looking down, her lashes fluttering until she finally looks up at me again. “Come with me.”

This is big. This is heavy. This doesn’t happen to just anyone. Han doesn’t let people into her private world. I feel her nervousness, her anxiety over letting someone in, but I’ve never been more ready for it.

“I’m already there,” I reply, kissing the back of her hand before leaning forward and closing the space between us, sealing my lips to hers.

I can only hope the need to leave again never comes.