The angle of his head moved, unbalanced by a comment correspondingly off center. If Gray had insulted her past their ability to reconcile, the woman he knew still wouldn't have played games or dismissed knowing him.
Again, she turned his suspicion on its head. A lapsed Catholic blackened by decades of blasphemous conduct, he thought of Saint Jude corrupting herself by touching a sinner when her mouth found his. Her lips were rose flesh and her mouth sweet as peach tea: her kiss inflicted a tender pain keener than a bee sting. The sound she pressed from him matched a man's grimacing attempt to pretend that slamming his toe into a table leg didn't hurt like torture in the ninth circle of hell, played back at the lowest volume.
James had clawed and scratched and beaten himself into the shape of a friend for her, although he'd wanted something else.
She'd told him to fuck off in Vice in their first meeting, and he'd been impressed. She let him into her apartment, laid in her living room for half a day while drugs contorted the ceiling tiles and bold, uncensored truths spoken between them seemed to take physical form, and he'd been fascinated. She fed from the chest cavity of a vagrant with him as friends might dig into a Super Bowl snack bowl, chowing on a heart with a disposable plastic knife and fork like a proper lady, and he'd been enraptured. She laughed like a hyena in the cramped back seat of a Venezuelan's busted yellow cab, changing for the Summer Solstice Ball in a tangle of long limbs, wicked smiles and dirty jokes, and he'd felt claws sinking in. Tipped in his arms with the stars reflected in her eyes, those hooks had become something else by the end of the night. During the week he'd spent sleeping on her bedroom floor after she'd returned from the hospital, with her hand hanging off the mattress to keep contact so that she'd have an anchor when she woke again and again in fits of fear, fierce protectiveness had set its teeth. Then, when she didn't think he could hear, she'd reigned in her salt and sarcasm and had spoken to his mother with such kindness, that what he felt grew into a beast new and foreign to him. He'd do anything for her - anything but be a toy.
"What are you doing?" His brow creased, a low, deep rumble made him sound more exhausted than a man his age had any right to be. The hand which had swept at her hair flattened at over the fine boning at the base of her neck. Gently, he pushed her back half a foot. With working eyes, she'd have seen a spark of confusion, frustration, and a whit of sadness. He'd trusted her never to play with him. The possibility that she was not came as an afterthought, he'd so completely conditioned himself. He sucked his teeth, considering options, and loosened the chili-gobbler-sinew in the process. That he'd just found it didn't bother him. Cricket was as much a predator as he. Maybe...maybe she was earnest. He had to be sure. That wouldn't wait thirty minutes.
"Do I? Drawing a blank." Gliding his palm up the side of her slim throat, he nudged the peak of her chin higher. His thumb swept the fullness of her lower lip to see if she’d pull away, if she’d had too much. Leaning near once more, his nose glanced off hers, adding a little play. That felt more familiar, for them. "How about you show me. Now." A large palm conformed the back of her head and neck before he kissed her. Cricket's affections had been butterfly wings and warm breeze, but something in him snapped: a cold, craven thing which had begun to germinate at the back of his mind two weeks before. James bent over her like he'd renewed hope that just this once, he'd found something to end the ceaseless ache of his hunger. His hand wrapped in the satin fall of her hair, he shrugged off inhibition and lost focus in the soft hollow of her mouth, as though he sought a part of her which he needed in order to breathe.
She could stop him, if she wanted, and then he'd know.