Page 78 of Tell Me Softly
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Kami
I felt a thousand things when his lips touched mine. So intense that our mouths uniting was like a drug. It was dangerous, but I knew I would need it again. It was a sad kiss at first, full of bitterness and blame, anguish and grief, but it was necessary, vital, for both of us. Both of us had wanted that moment for far too long. Both of us had buried that longing in a place we didn’t know how to access.
How different this was from that innocent peck when we were kids—before the thing happened that would ruin our lives, take over our dreams, steal our childhood away from us. His kiss now was desperate but also insistent. He was telling me I was his. He was letting me know with his tongue that he wanted every part of me and that he would make every part of me his.
“Come here,” he said, unbuckling first my seat belt, then his, and pushing the seat back. I slid over, mounted him, and let him kiss me all over, caressing me, invading me.
His hands gripped my back, slid down to my ass, squeezed me tight as he panted, “You don’t know how long I’ve been wanting to do this, Kamila.”
I grabbed his neck and pulled him close, leaning back into thesteering wheel, needing him. I needed him physically, mentally, spiritually. “Thiago…” I moaned as I felt his hands leave my buttocks and squeeze my breasts inside my sports bra, kissing my neck, making my hair stand on end. But it wasn’t enough… I needed more…
My hands slid under his wet shirt and clutched his chest. His body was pure, hard muscle, an athlete’s… I guess that was the one thing that had kept him going through the years. Eight years he’d tried to live without so much that he loved, his sister, his father––because I don’t think he ever saw him again––his mother, who was never the same after her depression… Even I could see the change in her a few weeks back when I went over to their house. That hadn’t been the Katia Di Bianco I grew up with. Of course Thiago had struggled. He’d tried to save his family and had ended up losing himself.
I cried, and he sucked away my tears, begging me not to, stroking my hair. But his gentleness broke me inside.
“Don’t ever leave me,” I heard myself telling him. “Don’t leave again. Don’t separate from me, please.” I felt that same abandonment I’d first known when his family left Carsville without saying goodbye. That pain I’d hidden behind a million locked doors.
He brought my face close to his and told me, “You’ve always been mine, since that kiss way back when we were kids.”
My stomach knotted. Was it excitement, fear, agitation… How did he make me feel so much? How could just one caress from him turn my whole body into gelatin? How could he make me melt with his voice and nothing more? That deep, masculine voice that reminded me so much of his brother…
I stopped. Or I tried to.
“What is it?” he asked, and his hand froze on my leg, just inches away from where I needed to feel him. I closed my eyes for a moment.
“Taylor…” I whispered. And the bubble around us burst.
I looked at him, but I couldn’t tell what lay behind that stare of his. Rage, maybe? Disappointment? Defeat…
“My brother,” he said, carefully enunciating each syllable, “he was always crazy about you. He may not have always known it, but I could tell. And it made me angry. We came back here and saw you again, and a part of me couldn’t stand the thought of him having you. I wanted you for myself, and subconsciously I think I was always trying to cut him off at the knees. I mean, I want the best for my brother, but dammit, Kam…”
I didn’t know what to say.
Taylor. I loved him. Of course I did. He was attentive, funny. Good. My Taylor, always up for a good time. My friend. But was that all? I’d never had the kinds of feelings I had for him with any other friend. But I’d also never had a friend like him.
Thiago wiped off the water droplets that had dripped down onto his forehead.
“We can’t have anything anyway, can we, Kam?” The way his hands were gripping my thighs told me something else, but he continued: “I want you. God knows I do. I could do it to you right now, make you moan with pleasure…but you and me…it’s impossible.”
It was. I knew it was. For a million reasons that had nothing to do with Taylor. Thiago worked at the school, he was a coach, it was totally against the rules… And if my mother found out, she’d kill me. She was already making my life impossible because she thought I had something going on with Taylor. If she knew I was with Thiago, there’d be hell to pay. And Thiago and I were just different. Like oil and water. Even as kids, we used to fight, yell at each other. He was always giving me a hard time…
“Let’s treat this as an olive branch,” he said. “Make peace, you know? The way we should have a long time ago.” Gripping my waist, he helped me back into the passenger seat. His body wasso warm. And mine was so, so cold. I missed him already.
“Have you really forgiven me?” I asked, looking at his profile: his stubble, his square jaw, his long eyelashes, thick and slightly curved…
Thiago put both hands on the wheel and sucked in a lungful of air.
“I’m going to try,” he admitted. “I promise I will. But you need to understand how hard this is for me. I know it wasn’t all your fault, Kam, I swear I do. But I need to work on myself and try to figure out how to stop blaming all the people who were involved in my sister’s death…”
It wasn’t all your fault.
Those words echoed in my mind, tearing open again the wound that had started to heal just a moment ago.
“My parents were talking about getting a divorce,” I admitted then in a whisper. “My mother was threatening to take me away from my father; she told him she’d never let him see me again. I started searching on the internet—I read a bunch of stuff I never should have read, I didn’t understand, and I got scared. I thought that if Dad knew about what Mom was doing, he could stop it. I needed my dad. That’s why I said something.”
Thiago had listened attentively. I reflected aloud, “It’s funny how life goes sometimes, right? One woman only deserves the best, and she loses her husband, her daughter, and life as she knows it…and the woman who deserved to lose everything got a wonderful son and a husband who managed to forgive her.”
