Page 73 of Infamous

My hands - traitorous things - move before I can stop them. I run my palms down the length of my thighs, a useless attempt to release the static buzzing through me. Then they still. Every muscle in my body locks tight. I can’t move, can’t speak, can’t even breathe properly.

She’s close enough that I can smell her shampoo - something faintly floral, clean, heartbreakingly familiar. It’s justher, and it’s intoxicating. It takes everything in me not to tilt my head and bury my face against her neck, to inhale the years I’ve lost.

Her hand slides onto mine.

It’s such a small, human gesture - soft, innocent - but it detonates through me like a bullet to the spine.

Her fingers are smaller than I remember. Or maybe mine just feel larger, heavier, wrong from all the guilt I carry. But the moment her skin touches mine, the world narrows to a single point.

Every memory I buried claws its way up through the dark.

The cell walls. The dark. The feeling of forever and despair in the same sentence.

And her. Always the memory of her.

I shouldn’t let her do this. I shouldn’t let her touch me. But my body won’t obey me anymore.

I look at her hand resting over mine and a strange calm settles over me, deep and terrifying. It feels too familiar. Too right.

This isn’t the first time we’ve done this.

I’ve sat beside her before - in another lifetime, another body - and we’ve had this same moment. The same pull. The same quiet, aching gravity.

The thought is insane. But so am I.

She’s staring at our hands, not looking at me. Her brows furrow slightly, as if she’s trying to make sense of something impossible. I can almost hear her thoughts chasing themselves into circles.

And when she finally looks up, her eyes are full of that same confusion - hope and disbelief tangled together. It’s too much.

“I don’t want you to leave,” she says quietly.

My breath catches. She doesn’t know what she’s asking for.

The irony is cruel - she thinks she’s inviting a man to stay, when I’m no civilised man. I’m darker, crueler, mayhem and chaos, and I probably never should have been resurrected.

“You don’t know what you want,” I manage, voice low, careful. I have to make sure she knows what she’s asking.

“Usually,” she says, the corner of her mouth twitching faintly. “But right now, I don’t want you to go.”

She doesn’t realize the weight her words carry.

“You want me to stay,” I say, needing to confirm it, to make sure I’m not imagining this, not conjuring it out of some fever dream I’ve been living in since the day I met her.

“I want you to stay,” she whispers, steady this time.

“Can you tell me why?”

“I can’t. It just is.”

And that’s when she leans toward me.

Slowly. Softly. Like she’s moving through water.

I can feel the hesitation trembling through her, but I can also feel her resolve - the quiet kind that doesn’t come from impulse, but from inevitability.

My every instinct screams to move, to get up, to flee before I do something I can’t undo. But I’m frozen, caught in her orbit.

She’s the one who closes the distance between us, not me. Her face inches closer, her breath mingling with mine, warm and uneven. My pulse kicks hard against my ribs.