Chapter 9: The Thin Door Between Us
The pizza sat like a stone in her stomach. Dinner was a blurred montage of cardboard laughter, her mother’s cheerful interrogation about Jake’s classes, Mark’s proud clap on his son’s shoulder. Emily answered when spoken to, pushed pepperoni around her plate, and felt the phantom sting on her neck burn hotter with every glance Jake avoided sending her way. He was the picture of cool detachment, laughing at his dad’s jokes, calling Carol “ma’am” with a politeness that felt like a mockery.
He didn’t look at her once.
That was worse, somehow. It made the afternoon feel like a hallucination.
Now, the house was a vault of silence. The kind of deep, midnight quiet that has weight and texture. Emily lay rigid in her canopy bed, the sheer curtains drawn back, staring at the ceiling. Every sense felt sharpened, hyper-alert. The lavender walls were gray in the dark. The scent of paint was gone, replaced only by the clean linen smell of her sheets and, faintly, the waxy perfume of a candle she’d lit and then extinguished an hour ago.
She heard the muffled sigh of her mother’s bedroom door closing hours ago. The creak of the floorboards as Mark went to the kitchen for water. The final, decisive click of the master bedroom lock.
Then, nothing.
Just the frantic drum of her own heart in her ears.
Twenty steps.
The thought was unwelcome, intrusive. It played on a loop. She imagined him lying in his bed, in the room down the hall she hadn’t even seen yet. Was he awake? Was he thinking about the gasp she’d made when his teeth touched her skin?
As if summoned by the thought, the sound came.
A soft, metallic groan. A door hinge.
Her breath ceased entirely. She became a statue beneath the sheets.
Bare footsteps on the hallway hardwood. Not a storm, not a march. A slow, deliberate compression of wood. Pad. Pause. Pad.
They stopped.
Right outside her door.
Time dissolved. She was just a pulse point in the dark, a pair of wide, unblinking eyes fixed on the slice of darker black that was her bedroom door. The handle was a faint bronze glint in the moonlight filtering through her blinds.
It turned.
The sound was obscenely loud in the silence—a slow, oiled click, followed by the whisper of wood sliding over carpet. The door opened, just a crack. Then wider.
He filled the space.
Silhouetted by the weak moonlight from the hallway window, he was all broad shoulders and tapered waist, his hair sleep-mussed. He wore only a pair of low-slung sweatpants. The intricate tattoos on his arms and chest were invisible in the dark, just shadows on shadows.
He stepped inside and closed the door behind him with a soft, final snick. The room suddenly felt airless, too small to contain the energy he brought with him.
“You’re awake,” he said. His voice was a low rasp, unused for hours.
She couldn’t speak. She managed a shallow, shaky inhale.
He moved then, a silent glide across the floor until he stood at the foot of her bed. He looked down at her, his face in shadow, his expression unreadable. The moonlight caught the hard line of his jaw, the curve of his bottom lip.
“Told you twenty steps was nothing,” he murmured.
He said it without smugness. It was just a fact. A confirmation of a law of physics they had established between them.
Emily found her voice, a thin thread of sound. “What are you doing?”
“What does it look like I’m doing?” He placed one knee on the foot of the bed, the mattress dipping under his weight. The movement was terrifyingly casual. “I’m here.”
He crawled up the length of the bed, not over her, but beside her, moving with a predator's grace until he was leaning over her, one arm braced by her head. He was so close she could feel the heat coming off his skin, see the faint scar through his eyebrow. The wild, rain-on-pavement scent of him enveloped her, drowning out the lavender.
His free hand came up. She flinched, a tiny involuntary jerk. He paused, his fingers hovering near her cheek. Then, with a slowness that was its own kind of torture, he brushed the pad of his thumb over the place on her neck he had marked earlier.
“It’s red,” he observed, his gaze fixed on the spot.
“You bit me.” The accusation was breathless.
“I did.” He didn’t deny it. His thumb continued its gentle, maddening stroke. “You jumped. Like a rabbit.”
“I’m not a rabbit.”
“Aren’t you?” He finally looked at her eyes. In the dark, they were bottomless pools. “You’re shaking again.”
She was. A fine, constant tremor she couldn’t control. “That’s because you… you just come in here. In the middle of the night.”
“When else was I supposed to come?” The question was genuine. “You want me to knock at three in the afternoon? With Carol making lemonade downstairs?” He leaned down, his lips a hairsbreadth from her ear. “You want this to be a family discussion?”
“No,” she whispered, humiliation and desire twisting together in her gut.
“Did you think that was it?” he continued, his voice a dark ribbon of sound. “A one-time thing? A little scare to welcome you to the new house?”
She had. She’d hoped. She’d dreaded.
“This,” he said, his hand slipping from her neck to cup the side of her face, forcing her to look at him. “This doesn’t end because the moving van drove away. It just got started.”
His mouth was on hers before she could process the words.
This wasn't like the frantic, clumsy kiss in her dorm room. This was deliberate. Conclusive. His lips were soft but insistent, moving against hers with a confidence that stole the last of her breath. He tasted like water and mint and something uniquely, dangerously Jake. A soft sound escaped her, a moan trapped in her throat, and he swallowed it.
His kiss was a question and an answer all at once. It asked for everything, and promised nothing. It was everything she’d been terrified of, and everything she’d replayed in her mind a hundred times since that first time.
Her hands came up, flattening against the hard plane of his chest. To push him away. But her fingers curled into the warm skin, holding on. His heart thudded a fierce, rapid rhythm under her palm.
He deepened the kiss, his tongue tracing the seam of her lips. She opened for him, a surrender that felt less like losing and more like stepping off a cliff. The world condensed to this: the slick heat of his mouth, the rough texture of his hands now sliding into her hair, the heavy weight of his body settling beside her, half over her.
He broke the kiss, both of them gasping. He rested his forehead against hers, his breathing ragged.
“Tell me to leave,” he whispered, the words rough, almost pained.
She could feel the tension in him, a coiled spring. He was giving her an out. A shred of chivalry in the dark.
She knew what the good girl would say. The good girl would say “leave.” The good girl would remember the man sleeping down the hall was now her stepfather. The good girl would think of her mother, one thin door away.
But the good girl had been bitten. The good girl had been marked.
Emily turned her head just slightly, her lips brushing his as she spoke.
“No.”
It was one word. A tiny, defiant spark in the dark.
He went very still. Then a shudder ran through him, a dam breaking. His mouth found hers again, hotter, hungrier. His hand left her hair, skimming down her side, over the thin cotton of her tank top, coming to rest on the curve of her waist. His thumb slipped under the hem, touching bare skin.
The contact was electric. She jerked against him, a bolt of pure sensation shooting straight to her core.
“Okay?” he breathed against her lips. It wasn’t gentle. It was a ragged check-in, a plea for permission to ruin them both.
She nodded, incapable of speech.
His hand moved, slipping fully under her shirt, palm flattening against her ribcage, just below the swell of her breast. His skin was calloused, warm. Real. This was really happening. He was in her bed, touching her, and their parents were asleep down the hall.
The thought should have frozen her. Instead, it poured gasoline on the fire. The forbiddenness of it, the sheer audacity, unlocked something she didn’t know she had.
She arched into his touch, a silent plea for more.
He understood. With a groan, he lowered his head, trailing open-mouthed kisses down her jaw, her throat, to the collar of her tank top. His hand slid up, slowly, so slowly, until his thumb brushed the lower curve of her breast.
She cried out, a short, sharp sound she muffled by biting her own lip.
Jake froze. They both listened, ears straining against the silent house. No creak. No stir.
He looked up at her, his eyes blazing in the dark. A wild, almost manic grin touched his lips—the first real, unguarded expression she’d ever seen on him.
“Quiet, rabbit,” he whispered, the words full of dark amusement.
Then he lowered his mouth to the fabric covering her breast, his breath searing through the cotton, and the world fractured into light and shadow, and all that mattered was his hands, his mouth, and the terrifying, exhilarating truth that there was no going back.