Page 157

For fifteen months, I had refused to say the name even when nobody was around to hear it.

I loved to fuck. That hadn’t changed because Charm broke my heart. It had taken time before I felt drawn toward those baser instincts again, but once I did, I wasn’t stumbling through beds trying to numb myself or pretending another body could replace hers. If I wanted a woman, I wanted her for however long we agreed to have each other. I had spent enough of high school and college mastering the art of pleasing women to know exactly how to separate sex from everything people insisted on attaching to it. Desire didn’t need a future to be real, and fucking didn’t require me to hand somebody my heart before I put my hands on her.

The difference was I hadn’t been fucking Charm.

I had been in love with her every time I fucked her.

That gave everything between us purpose I had never needed from anyone else. I didn’t only want her to come. I wanted to know every sound she made, every place her body softened beneath mine, every expression she tried to hide before pleasure took it from her. I wanted her afterward. I wanted her laughing in my bed, stealing my shirts, arguing about books with her bare ass pressed against my thigh while I tried to convince her she had misunderstood something she absolutely had not.

I wanted the entire fucking woman.

Mi hada, me encanta follarte… My fairy, I love fucking you.

Even thinking it tightened something beneath my ribs because the words contained more than sex ever should have been able to hold.

Women after Charm had still been mami, mamacita, chica. Words that came naturally when I was flirting, teasing, or fucking. They belonged to attraction without pretending attraction was anything else, and I had sought exactly that because uncomplicated was the only thing I wanted near me.

Mi hada wasn’t uncomplicated.

Neither was mi princesa or mi preciosa.

Those names had never belonged to Spanish in general. They belonged to her. Somewhere along the way, I had taken words I had known most of my life and filled them with Charm until using them for another woman would have felt like calling her by the wrong fucking name.

Then Charm came back into my hands, took every filthy thing I gave her like she had spent fifteen months waiting for the unfiltered version of me, and mi hada slipped out before I could stop it.

She heard me.

I knew she did because her eyes changed, but she didn’t stop, demand an explanation, or use the name to turn sex into reconciliation. She followed my body instead of interrogating the mistake, giving me room to recover without pretending it hadn’t happened.

That somehow made it worse because she still knew me too fucking well.

I dragged the shirt over my head before that thought could develop into anything useful.

The powder blue settled over the plain white T-shirt I had already put on because pastel had no business touching my skin without protection. I pulled on faded jeans, stepped into my classic white Adidas with the black stripes, then grabbed the white-on-white Inferno hat from the dresser and turned the brim backward.

The mirror finally gave me somebody I recognized.

Milwaukee paid me more money than the kid who grew up in East Harlem ever imagined making. It hadn’t turned me into a man who wore loafers to a barbecue. I was still the same street-raised, tattooed, literature-obsessed asshole underneath whatever professional image the Inferno occasionally attempted to build around me.

Lance hated everything about that man.

Good.

He could choke on him tonight.

I adjusted the brim of my hat and grabbed my phone.

Charm wanted one weekend to show me what we could still be. I wanted one weekend to find out what we should have been before the lies, fear, and hiding destroyed it. Those were not the same goal, no matter how often her body made me forget the distinction.

By Sunday, I would have my answer and I could leave with it and bury it where all my pain goes.

Bliss caught me before I reached the ballroom.

Her eyes moved from the powder-blue shirt to my jeans, down to my Adidas, then back to the backward hat. Horror slowly transformed her face.

“No.”

I spread my arms. “I’m wearing the shirt.”