Soft Limits by Brianna Hale

Author:Brianna Hale
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harlequin
Published: 2017-11-03T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eleven

Frederic

Evie holds up her wrists for me so I can cut through the rope. She doesn’t say anything, but she smiles. It’s a tired smile. A happy smile that speaks hundreds of unspoken words, like piano notes, and I hear every one. I called her a brave girl, and she is. I never meant to push her so far this first time but the way her body responded to my hands and the leather was too lovely, too enticing. I know her better now and she knows herself better, too. She was ready to be pushed a little, and then pushed a little more.

“Lie down, minette,” I urge her in a whisper, and once I’ve divested myself of the priest’s costume I lie down with her. It doesn’t take much to coax her into my arms and she buries herself against my chest and wriggles as close to me as possible. Conscious of the red marks on her back I stroke her hair and listen to her breathe.

“Do you feel good?” I ask her, because she’s being so quiet and I can’t see her face, and in answer she nods, the tip of her nose rubbing against my chest. “Don’t feel like talking?” And she shakes her head. “That’s all right, minette. You don’t need to talk.”

I love these moments after a really good, intense bout of sex, just lying together, sometimes talking, sometimes not. I wonder if she’s always quiet like this after, but then I remember she’d be locked in the bathroom sobbing about now if I were her ex. My arms tighten around her protectively. That’s not going to happen with me. She’s clinging to me, and it’s a good sort of clinging. An I need you clinging. A don’t go anywhere clinging.

I’m not, mon ange. I’m here.

But I won’t be here for long, will I? Neither of us will be. Evie was right yesterday when she said we didn’t have much time together. Our five months will go quickly, especially once the summer is over. Evie has told me she will have to be in Oxford for a few days every week to study and run tutorials, and I’ll have rehearsals most days and, after that, performances most nights. And then—

But I don’t want to think beyond January. I try to imagine what would have happened between us if I didn’t have this death sentence hanging over my career but everything else was the same: that she fell in the road and looked up at me, shocked and flustered; that she turned so beautifully pink when she realized her sister had sent me her smutty stories; that she glared at me, teased me, cried her hurt out in my arms. I know what I’m like, and what I like. We’d likely have wound up exactly where we are now, and we’d still only have until the end of January, because our lives are in very different places.

But there are little things that puzzle me, that I find I can’t explain away so easily.

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