Page 33 of Best Man Speaking

His hands slip around my back, pulling me more firmly against him, and suddenly, he lifts me off the ground. Instinctively, I wrap my legs around his waist as he walks us backward to the couch, taking a seat with me still astride him. At no point have our lips parted, and I can’t help but be thoroughly impressed.

Tugging at the hem of his shirt, I slip my hands beneath the fabric, dragging my nails across the firm muscles of his stomach. Awash in sensation, I lift my hips, dragging them over his thighs,his sweats leaving little to the imagination. The movement sends a pulse of pleasure through our perfectly aligned bodies.

Marcus’s groan is guttural.

“Fuck. Hallie,” he gasps out against my now-swollen lips before moving to kiss along the sensitive skin of my neck.

His pace slows while the tenderness of the action draws us into territory that’s infinitely more than any simple kiss.

My hips continue to roll of their own accord, my arms wrapping firmly around him, my lips pressing gently to his cheek.

The innocently affectionate gesture catches me, holding me in silence knowing that I’m unable to escape. A moment of vulnerability I’m unable to ignore.

Marcus stills beneath me before pulling away from my neck.

The change in him from one moment to the next is almost clinical.

As soon as I’m able to, as soon as I’ve taken all that I can bear to accept, I move my body and stand.

For once, I’m without the words I’ve come to rely on to keep me safe.

I’ve had the fight fucked out of meis the single thought trickling through my pacified brain, and the fact it wasn’t even fucking has me all the more on edge.

Marcus straightens against the back of his couch. There’s no way my silence has gone unnoticed, and I hope he realizes whatever he says next will be what moves us forward.

“Hal, if I had known you’d be quiet for this long, I would’ve suggested this sooner.” Marcus is all cocky grin, and my stomach drops.

Whatever warmth had been between us only moments ago has faded.

I feel unsteady and, to an extent, hurt. I’d thought the need for touch and the desperate want had been mutual. This,however, doesn’t feel that way. It feels like I wanted it more, and that—that’s terrifying.

I turn quickly, hoping my emotions don’t show as I pick up my discarded phone. I pray for my brain to not let me down.

I need words to bite. I need them to do harm.

They don’t come.

So I keep moving and leave without pause. He doesn’t deserve my words anyway.

As I make my way back to the pool house, I force myself to think about the last time I’d seen Marcus. The high I’d been floating on when I’d believed I was his everything, when I’d assumed the two of us would be together. And the intense devastation of the fall when I realized it hadn’t been the case.

Crushed. I had been crushed. Not just by his betrayal but by the weight and depth of my own emotion.

Years of being friends—years. Through thick and thin, we’d kept in contact, kept a strange and magnetic connection alive. He’d chased me, kept me around until I was ready, ready to be with him, to give him everything, and then he’d gotten what he’d wanted, and he’d been done. He hadn’t actually wanted to date me or be with me. He hadn’t loved me, not like I did him. All the late-night conversations about what we would do together, the countries we would visit, the life we would live.

It had all been words.

Words spoken through the night into the early hours of the morning.

Words whispered and promised but were, at the end of the day, just words.

Strings of letters put together that didn’t mean a single thing.

We’d been young, and I’d been the definition of too stupid to live when he promised he’d be my family. And that stupid proposal.

I had believed it.

I had believed in him.

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