Page 71 of Taken Off Camera
“You were a teenager,” I murmur. “Teenagers make mistakes.”
“My mistake left scars on both of us.” His jaw tightens. “And I swore I’d never let impulse override judgment again.”
“Until my Heat,” I finish for him.
“Until your Heat.” He stares at me with pain-filled regret. “I thought I could handle it without losing myself. But I took your choice away. I didn’t prepare you enough, and I hurt you. I Marked you without permission. I did the one thing I swore I’d never do. I let my Alpha instincts override your safety.”
“Sebastian—”
“No.” He cuts me off with a sharp gesture. “Youneed to understand. When I woke up and realized what I’d done, I hated myself. I couldn’t bear to see fear or disgust when you looked at me. I attacked you.”
His pain hits me with physical force. All this time, I’d interpreted his absence as rejection, as him discarding me after getting what he wanted. But the truth is so much worse. He ran not because he doubted me, but because he feared becoming the out-of-control monster he believed himself to be.
“I never felt attacked,” I whisper. “Not once.”
Sebastian meets my eyes, hope and disbelief warring in his face. “How could you not? I pounced on you without any consideration for your comfort.”
“I never said no. In fact, I remember being enthusiastic.” The three days blur together in a fevered haze, but I remember that much. “And if I’d been coherent enough, I would have asked for your Mark.”
“You can’t know for sure. You were in Heat.”
“I invited you to my Heat,” I remind him again, since he keeps forgetting that fact. “I gave you a key to my apartment. I registered you on my Heat app.”
Sebastian goes still. “You what?”
Heat climbs my neck at the admission.
Inviting someone to share your calendar andactually logging them as your mate are two completely separate things, and I may have been getting a little ahead of myself. But I was so excited, and in my head, it was a done deal. If anything happened to me, I wanted the authorities to know who to contact in an emergency.
I swallow hard. “I added you as my Alpha.”
“I never saw the notification.”
I pull at a loose thread on my cuff. “Because I didn’t share it.”
Confusion furrows his brow. “Then why?—”
“It was my way of committing. Of choosing you.” The confession leaves me stripped bare. “Even if you never knew.”
The blue light from the monitors catches in his eyes, turning them almost luminous as understanding dawns. “You wanted to be mine.”
“Yes.” The single word hangs between us.
Sebastian’s hands tremble. “I’ve spent five days hating myself for taking what I thought you never meant to give.”
“And I spent those same five days wondering why you didn’t want what I freely offered.” The irony pulls a sad laugh from my chest.
The layers of miscommunication unravel between us, each of us hurting from opposite sides of the samefear. His worry that he’d trapped me, and my fear that I wasn’t enough to keep him.
“What a mess we’ve made,” Sebastian murmurs.
“Yeah.” I take a tentative step toward him, then another, until I stand before his chair. “For a security expert and a hacker, we’re not great at communication.”
A ghost of a smile touches his lips. “We’re really not.”
My hand lifts to hover next to Sebastian’s face. “Can I touch you?”
The question mirrors the one from our first night together, when the blindfold came off, and he revealed himself to me.
