CHAPTER 2 - ONE NIGHT STAND WITH A HOT STRANGER

He didn't sit down. He'd slid the drink in front of me and stayed standing, one elbow on the bar, angled toward me like I had to earn him staying. Up close he was worse – worse meaning better meaning dangerous. The bruise on his cheekbone was fresh, turning purple at the edges. The scar through his eyebrow was older – thin, pale, deliberate-looking. Tattoos crept up the side of his neck, disappearing into his collar – dark ink, intricate, the kind you got one at a time over years, not all at once in a parlor on spring break. His knuckles on the bar top were split and swollen. Everything about him looked like a warning label that someone had ripped off and eaten. "I'm fine," I said, pushing the drink back. "I have one." He glanced at my vodka cranberry. "You're drinking a juice box with a splash of regret. That's not a drink. That's a cry for help." "Do you approach all women like this or am I just lucky?" "Just the ones sitting alone on Valentine's Day with mascara down their face." I touched my cheek. Fingers came back black. Great. He still hadn't smiled. He wasn't being kind – this wasn't some nice guy swooping in to comfort the crying girl. He was bored. The bar was dead. I was the most interesting thing in the room. "Bad night?" Not gently. "What gave it away?" "The shoes. Nobody wears shoes like that unless they were trying to impress someone. Which means someone wasn't impressed. Which means someone is an idiot." I laughed. Not because it was funny – because it was blunt and rude and I was so sick of people being careful with me. Caleb was careful. Caleb patted me on the shoulder and called me Nomes and was so careful with my feelings that he humiliated me in front of forty people while wearing the expression of a man returning a library book. This guy wasn't careful. He looked like he'd never been careful a day in his life. "I told my best friend I loved him tonight," I said. No idea why. I had nothing left to protect. "Made him a scrapbook. Four years of everything. He opened it in front of his entire hockey team and said this is a lot." "A lot," the stranger repeated. Flat. "Then I sat outside and heard them reading my letter out loud. Laughing. And he–" My voice held steady. Barely. "He said I was suffocating. Too soft for real life. His teammate said something about my body and he said he'd break me." His expression didn't change. But something behind it did – a shift in those grey eyes, a hardening that had nothing to do with me and everything to do with what I'd just described. "Then he doesn't deserve to breathe the same air as you." No softness. No warmth. Just fact. "You don't even know me," I said. "Don't need to. Any man who calls that a lot has the emotional intelligence of a parking meter. And any woman who walks into a bar alone in those shoes instead of crying in her car has more spine than he deserves." He set the whiskey directly in front of my hand. "Drink." I drank. It burned. My eyes watered. "Oh my God." "You'll survive." He finally sat down. One stool away. Close enough that I could see the tattoos on his forearms properly now – a date inked in delicate script on the inside of his wrist, a constellation I didn't recognize on his inner forearm, something that looked like a woman's handwriting curling up toward his elbow. Stories written on skin. I wanted to read every single one. We kept talking – I don't know how long. He was abrasive in a way that should have been off-putting and wasn't. When I told him about the pressed flower and the silver pen, he said, "You built a cathedral for a man who lives in a shed." When I mentioned Jade, he said, "Your cousin sounds like a bad person who's good at eyeliner." When I said I felt stupid, he said, "You're not stupid. You were loyal to someone who didn't earn it. That's different." Nobody had ever framed it that way. "What about you?" I asked, two whiskeys in. "Why are you alone on Valentine's Day?" "I don't have anyone to disappoint." Just fact. "Played a game tonight. Came here because my face hurts and whiskey's cheaper than Advil." "Is that how you got the–" I gestured at his cheekbone. "Guy had an opinion about my stick handling. I had an opinion about his face." I laughed. He watched me like he was filing the sound away. "You should stop looking at me like that," he said. "Like what?" "Like you're about to make a decision you can't take back." "What if I want to?" "Then finish your drink. And follow me." *** We didn't make it to a bedroom. We barely made it down the hallway. His mouth found my neck before the bathroom door was even locked – teeth grazing, then biting, then sucking hard enough that I gasped and grabbed fistfuls of his shirt just to stay upright. The door slammed behind us and he pressed me against it, one hand already fisted in my hair, pulling my head back to expose my throat. Dim light. Cheap hand soap and bleach. I didn't care. I didn't care about anything except the heat of his mouth and the bruising grip of his fingers and the fact that for the first time in hours – maybe months, maybe years – I was violently, scorchingly alive. He kissed the way he talked. Direct. Zero hesitation. No asking permission because he'd already read the answer on my body – in the way my hips pressed forward, the way my breath hitched when his thigh pushed between mine, the way my fingers were already pulling his shirt untucked because I needed skin. My hands hit his stomach and I felt ink under my fingertips – more tattoos, trailing down his ribs, disappearing below his waistband. I traced one blindly and he made a sound against my throat that vibrated through my entire body. "Tell me to stop," he said. Not because he thought I wanted him to. Because he wanted to hear me say I didn't. "Don't you dare." His hand slid down. Under my dress. Up the inside of my thigh. His fingers found the edge of my underwear and he didn't tease, didn't hesitate – pushed the fabric aside and touched me like he already knew the map. My head hit the door. "Oh my God–" "Not God." His thumb circled slow, devastating, while two fingers slid inside me. "Just me. Eyes open." I forced my eyes open. Those grey eyes locked on mine – watching, studying, cataloguing every twitch and gasp like my body was a language he was already fluent in. He curled his fingers and I choked on a moan. "There it is," he murmured. "Good girl." My spine arched off the door. He noticed. Filed it away. Used it – pressing deeper, harder, his thumb working a rhythm that made my vision blur while his mouth dropped to my collarbone and bit down. Hard enough to mark. Hard enough that I'd find it tomorrow and press my fingers into it like proof. "Still with me?" "Yes – f**k – yes–" "Good. Stay." He kept his fingers inside me while his other hand reached into his back pocket. Foil packet between his teeth. He held my gaze while he freed himself – and I looked down, because I couldn't not. Thick and hard and straining, and I wanted him so badly my thighs were shaking. He rolled the condom on one-handed, fingers still buried in me, still moving, still drawing sounds out of me I didn't recognize. Then he pulled his hand away and I whimpered at the loss – actually whimpered, a sound I'd never made in my life – and he lifted me. Like I weighed nothing. My legs wrapped around his waist and my back pressed flat against the door and he pushed into me in one long, slow, devastating stroke that forced every molecule of air from my lungs. "Fuck." His forehead dropped to mine. His jaw was clenched. His arms were shaking – and I could feel the tattoos under my fingers where I gripped his biceps, could feel the ink like braille telling me secrets about a man whose name I didn't know. "You feel – Christ." He pulled back. Drove in again. Harder. The door rattled in its frame. "Hold on to me," he said, and I did – arms around his neck, fingers in his hair, holding on like he was the only solid thing in a world that had gone liquid. He f****d me against that bathroom door like he was trying to burn something out of both of us. Every thrust pushed me up the wood, my dress bunched around my waist, his hands gripping my thighs hard enough to leave fingerprints I'd find tomorrow and trace in the mirror. He talked the entire time. A filthy, continuous stream that should have embarrassed me and instead turned my spine to honey. "So f*****g tight. You have any idea what you look like right now?" I couldn't answer. Could barely breathe. He shifted the angle – tilted my hips, drove deeper – and hit something that turned every nerve ending in my body incandescent. "There." He watched my face like it was giving him everything he needed. "That's the spot, isn't it? I can feel you squeezing me." "Don't stop – please, please don't–" "Wasn't planning on it." His thumb found my c**t again, pressing in tight circles while he f****d me at a pace that was just the right side of brutal. "Look at me when you come. I want to see it." I forced my eyes to his. Grey and molten and wrecked – the first sign that the control was costing him, that he was unravelling too. It wasn't too much. It was exactly enough. It was everything I didn't know I was starving for – to be pinned and filled and taken by someone whose grip left bruises and whose voice in my ear made me forget my own name. To come apart in the hands of someone who didn't treat me like I was fragile. Who f****d me like I could take it. I could take it. When I broke, I broke hard. The orgasm ripped through me – not a wave, a detonation. My whole body seized around him, clenching, pulsing, and I buried my face in his neck and bit down to keep from screaming because we were in a bar bathroom and there were people thirty feet away and I didn't care, I didn't care. Wave after wave until I was shaking and boneless and clinging to his shoulders like they were the last solid thing in the universe. He kept moving. Slower now, deeper, letting me ride it out while my body clenched and fluttered around him. Then his rhythm broke – hips stuttering, fingers tightening on my thighs – and he came with one sharp exhale and a whispered f**k that sounded more like a prayer than a curse. Stillness. Breathing hard. My back against the door, legs still wrapped around him. He reached up. Pushed the hair off my face. Gentle – the first gentle thing he'd done all night, and it almost wrecked me worse than everything before it. "Better than crying?" he murmured. "Infinitely." Something flickered in his expression. Gone before I could name it. I left first. Fixed my dress in the mirror. Didn't look at him while I did it – couldn't. If I looked at him, I'd stay, and I had just enough survival instinct left to know that staying was dangerous in a way that had nothing to do with the bathroom and everything to do with the way he'd said good girl like he meant it. I didn't ask his name. Didn't offer mine. Walked out of the bathroom, down the hall, through the bar. The cold hit me like a slap and I welcomed it. At the door, I turned back. He was at the bar again. Leaning on one elbow. Drink in hand. Watching me go. His expression was unreadable. Not smug. Not satisfied. Something quieter and more dangerous than either of those things. Like he was looking at something he'd already decided to see again. I turned away. Pushed through the door into the February cold. I didn't know his name. Didn't know where he was from or what team he played for or why his knuckles were always split. I knew the sound he made when he came and the way his hands felt on my skin and the exact shade of grey his eyes turned when he was focused on nothing but me. I knew there were tattoos I hadn't finished reading – a date, a constellation, a woman's handwriting – and that his mouth on my collarbone had left a mark I could already feel throbbing under my dress. My phone buzzed in my clutch. Then again. And again. Fourteen texts from Caleb. I stood on the sidewalk in heels that were killing me, in February, with bite marks on my collarbone and a stranger's fingerprints still burning on my thighs. I opened my phone. Looked at Caleb's name fourteen times in a row. Deleted them all.