Page 151 of Meet Me In The Dark

It’s then I taste the salt in his kiss. It’s not from the sea air. This is the metallic tang of grief I taste with every stroke.

Something is breaking wide open in his chest.

Something he hasn’t said.

Something he’s not ready to say.

So I don’t ask.

I just give him my body. If that’s what he needs tonight, he can have it.

My fingers curl into his shirt and tug because I need his skin on mine.

He breaks the kiss only long enough to strip it off, then he’s back, lips moving down my throat, hands roaming like he’s trying to memorize every inch of me.

I lead him to bed, but no matter how gentle I try tobe with this man’s heart tonight, he won’t accept it. His kiss bruises while his hands worship. Every touch is a contradiction: every pull of my hair soothed by gentle kisses down my neck, every sting of his palm chased by the slow push of his cock.

He’s everywhere at once, holding me down and holding me together, driven by a need that’s not really about sex. It’s about craving to feel something without pain. It’s about pouring whatever’s tearing at him into me, knowing I’ll take it because I’m using him right back.

I meet him thrust for thrust until the urgency bleeds into something slower. Eventually, the fight in his body softens into a plea he can’t voice.

When we both reach our limit and he groans into my mouth, I swear I taste the bittersweet whisper of goodbye in his kiss.

And in the quiet that follows, with his body still heavy over mine, I feel it settle into my bones.

Forty-Eight

Julian is gone.

Not the kind of gone where he’s buried in meetings or lost to whatever empire-building keeps him busy. This is different. This is absence. Silence. A break in the rhythm we’ve fallen into.

It’s been two weeks since the night he showed up on my doorstep looking devastated, kissed me like I was oxygen, and fucked me like he couldn’t decide if he wanted to worship me or tear me apart. Two weeks since he kissed me with tears in his eyes and left me wondering what the hell happened.

The days that followed felt strange in ways I couldn’t explain. Mornings were the worst. I’d lace up my shoes for our run, open the door expecting to see him, and instead find only the empty street and the sound of my own footsteps echoing. Every time my phone buzzed, my heart leapt before reality dragged it back down.

Worry settled in my bones, tightening around me until I showed up at Mateo’s like some lovesick idiot,only to find Julian hadn’t been there either. I stood awkwardly in the spot where he usually trained me, with Mateo staring back at me with sympathy.

“I can train you today, if you want?” he said.

I swallowed my disappointment and smiled weakly, accepting the offer in hopes it would distract me from the heavy dread building in my chest.

Even his assistant, Avery, had nothing for me but clipped professionalism and some vague, useless line about Julian being “away on business.”

Away on business?

Fuck him.

By midday Thursday, worry morphed into a fury so intense it nearly blinded me. My fingers hovered over his contact, sending texts that remained cruelly marked as read but unanswered. Calls rang into mocking silence.

Was this his plan all along? To disappear and act like nothing happened, leaving me to figure it out on my own?

But I knew better. I witnessed the gentleness beneath his possessive touches and the vulnerability that flashed behind his guarded eyes. Julian was falling just as deeply as I was.

I was sure of it.

Fueled by that thought, I stormed out of the elevator onto his office floor last Friday afternoon.

Avery was at my side before I had time to blink.