Page 68 of The Viper
The possessiveness should have scraped. It smoothed. Maybe because it didn’t come from entitlement. It came from the part of him that scanned windows and counted exits and heard engines that hadn’t arrived yet. The part that, if turned the other direction, would hold you there and dare the world to try.
We talked. Not the kind of talk you save for interviews or studio lunches, but the talk that unspools like a ribbon when you finally believe the person across from you won’t strangle you with it later. I told him about the first time a director told me to be “less,” and how I spent a year being less until I forgot what more felt like. I told him about the tennis player and the parlor trick of dating someone whose arms looked like safety in photographs. I told him how fame is a house of windows where you paint the glass from the inside and hope no one notices when the brushstrokes get sloppy.
He told me about the Montana ranch that leaned and a mother who never did. About a father made of smoke and lessons. About the crack a grizzly put in his brother’s arm and how it welded the rest of them together. About a barracksChristmas where someone hung a single strand of lights and it felt like a cathedral.
“You’re good at this,” I said softly.
“At what?”
“Letting me see the part you don’t show anyone.”
His eyes didn’t move from my mouth. “That part keeps trying to show itself to you, whether I like it or not.”
“Lucky me.”
“Lucky me,” he countered.
There were more kisses—of course, there were—first across the table, then in a seat that didn’t seem designed for two until we made it so. Not frantic. Not polite. That middle ground where your hands learn a new language and your body says fluent. He could be careful and he could be ruinous; both looked good on him. Somewhere over Virginia, I laughed into his shoulder for no reason except that the engine noise and the press of him and the dumb hope threading through my bones made me feel seventeen and dangerous.
The flight attendant knocked once when the seatbelt sign dinged for turbulence, and Lucas sat back like a man who could recover altitude with his bare hands. I smoothed my hair and tried not to look like someone who had just been kissed enough to forget her last name.
“Back to Earth,” I murmured.
“Not yet,” he said.
We ate something small we didn’t need. He showed me a scar on his forearm I hadn’t noticed—the pale half-moon of a life lived at full speed. I traced it with a fingertip, and he caught that hand and kissed the inside of my wrist slow, like the pulse there was a story he planned to memorize.
“Does it feel different?” I asked, glancing around the cabin—the quiet luxury, the weightless ease.
“Some of it,” he said. “Most of it feels like borrowed clothes. But the part where I can take you somewhere no one can follow?” That smile I kept falling into. “That fits.”
“Lucas, I have millions,” I said, not coy. “I know what money buys.”
His gaze sharpened. “So, do I. I also know what it can’t.”
“What can’t it?”
“It can’t make me want you less.” His thumb stroked the hollow at the base of my throat, a gesture so simple I had to swallow against it. He held my gaze. “And it can’t protect you from people who think you’re theirs because they once watched you in a theater.”
The last line slid under my skin and nested there. “Then what protects me?”
He didn’t hesitate. “Me.”
If anyone else had said it, I would have smiled and said something clever about knights and armor and modern women. With him, it made something inside me stand up and breathe.
Clouds parted, and the world below organized itself into a geometry of lights. The pilot’s voice broke in—calm, crisp—announcing our descent. Lucas buckled my belt himself, his knuckles brushing the inside of my knee like a promise he fully intended to keep later. The city spread out in a sprawl of gold and white, the rivers black scythes through it, bridges jeweled like bracelets tossed carelessly across a table.
New York. My old kingdom. The one that had turned me into a story.
“You ever get tired of this view?” I asked, watching the island of glass and ambition rise to meet us.
He looked at me instead. “Ask me again in an hour.”
“Because in an hour …?”
“In an hour, you’ll be sitting across from me in a dress I won’t let anyone else look at for too long.”
“Possessive,” I said, pretending to scold.
