I untuck his shirt from his waistband. My hands skim up over his back, greedily touching every warm curve I can get to.

“I want to kiss you every time I hear the shower turn on and know that you’re in there,” he rasps.

I touch his stomach, his chest, the muscles tightening as my fingertips brush over them, and he takes hold of my hips, lifting me up into the truck.

“I want to kiss you all the time, Daphne,” he says. “Sometimes it’s just easier to find an excuse.”

I pull him closer by the belt loops, his hands grazing over my thighs as he pushes in between them. The curves of our bodies melt together. His parted lips run along my neckline. I scoot deeper into the truck, drawing him in after me, then climbing across his lap.

His hands trace down my sides, his eyes dark. “Daphne,” he says, a throaty rumble.

I reach back and undo the clasp at my neck, let the front of my dress fall to my waist.

He groans, lightly cupping my breasts, lowering his mouth to lick me, then take me between his lips.

I gasp, grip the back of his neck, my body arching into his.

“What are we doing?” he murmurs against my skin.

“What do you want to do?” I ask.

A slow, testing thrust of his hips, the friction dividing my thoughts into fractals.

His mouth drags back up my throat, his breath hot. “I want,” he says raggedly, “to undress you. And taste you. I want to hear you come again, and feel it too.”

The fractals become fireworks, a kaleidoscope of sensations and needs.

Miles’s silky dark hair between my fingers.

His rough hands up under my dress, finding the lace of my underwear.

The pressure of his warm mouth on my chest, and the cool air kissing every other inch of exposed skin as the need and pleasure build together.

“Miles,” I gasp, moving myself against him.

His eyes slant up, his mouth still on me, his eyes nearly black. It’s an unbearably sexy image. “Tell me to stop,” he says.

“I don’t want you to stop,” I pant out. “I want to undress you. I want to taste you. I want to feel you come.”

“Fuck, Daphne.” He presses his forehead against my shoulder, his heart slamming into me, his hands braced lightly against my ribs, holding himself back from me. His low groan turns into a pained laugh.

He straightens up, redoes the clasp behind my neck, and lets his hands slide down to my thighs. “I’m not good at this,” he says roughly.

“Good at what?” I ask.

“When things get complicated,” he scratches out, “I panic and shut down, and I don’t want to do that right now. I can’t.”

My stomach sinks. “It doesn’t have to be complicated.”

“It already is,” he says.

“Because of Petra?” I ask.

“No,” he says, tenderly tucking a strand of hair behind my ear. “Not just that.”

I slide out of his lap, blushing furiously.

“Hey.” He reaches out, takes my hand.

“It’s okay,” I say quietly. “You don’t owe me any kind of explanation.”

“Daphne,” he says, his voice heartbreakingly soft.

I look up and meet his eyes, all dark now, without any kind of glimmer.

“There’s a lot of shit I don’t like to talk about.” His voice splinters. “The thing is, I have a bad habit of letting down the people I care about. I don’t always think things through, and my feelings aren’t something I can trust.”

“What is there to trust?” I shake my head. “You feel however you feel.”

He looks down at our hands, folds his fingers into mine. After several seconds, he clears his throat, but his face stays torqued, his eyes hyperfocused on our hands.

“Growing up . . .” He hesitates for a long moment, visibly weighing his next words. “Our feelings—mine, Julia’s, my dad’s—those didn’t matter much.”

His jaw muscles flex as he swallows. His pulse speeds against my palm. “All that mattered was how it affected our mom,” he says. “If we made her look good, then she loved us. And if we didn’t, then we were ‘out to get her.’ Once I had a stomach bug, and she was so mad at me for throwing up in the night. Said I was faking to get out of school, and if I kept pretending, I’d be grounded for a month, so I just went to class the next day, and every time I went to the bathroom, I threw up as quietly as I could. So the school wouldn’t make her come get me. Whenever I did anything that she thought made her look bad, it turned into this huge thing about how I must hate her, to try to hurt her like that. If I was upset, or anxious, or hungry, or even sick, she acted like it was something I was doing to her, and I believed it.”

“Holy shit, Miles.” I pull his hand into my lap, cup it between both of mine.

He drags his eyes up to mine. “It’s okay.”

“It’s not,” I say.

“That’s the thing, though,” he scratches out. “I need it to be okay. Because I need to be okay. As a kid, I just felt so fucking scared and powerless, all the time, and now I just need to be okay.” He shakes his head. “I honestly think that’s partly why Petra and I worked together. I’ve never met someone who was so . . . ‘in the moment,’ and that’s where I have to be, because if I think too much about the past or the future, I come apart. So I mostly just keep all of that stuff where I don’t have to think about it.”

I drop my eyes. “I’m sorry. I’m not trying to pry.”

His eyes come back to mine, his voice a scrape. “You’re not,” he says. “I want you to know. I just . . .”

“What?”

He looks over my shoulder. “I don’t want you to look at me like I’m broken.”

“Miles.” I touch the sides of his neck and pull his gaze back to mine. “You’re not broken. You’re okay. But what happened to you isn’t. It’s fucked up.”

“It’s over,” he says quietly, his hands ringing my wrists.

“That doesn’t mean you can’t still have feelings about it,” I tell him.

The corners of his lips flutter, for just a second. “That’s the problem, though. Whenever any of us had a negative emotion, it only made things worse. She turned it around on us, and we’d end up apologizing for being hurt or angry or sad, and I never knew what was right or normal. I mean, everyone who met my mom loved her. Teachers, the other parents, my friends.

“If she wants to, she can make you feel like the center of the universe, like her favorite. I used to love having friends over, because she’d turn into this different person. This funny, warm mom who loved me.

“All I wanted was for that version of her to stay. So I stopped showing it when I was upset, just went along with whatever she said and did. And eventually, I just sort of . . . stopped getting upset. Stopped feeling the bad stuff. And things got better. For me, anyway.”

He looks down, his eyes dark and glossed.

“I’m sorry,” I whisper, running my thumb over the hinge of his jaw. “I get why you didn’t want to talk about it.”

“It’s not just that. I mean, I do hate dwelling on this shit, but . . .” His Adam’s apple bobs. “I let her really fucking hurt Julia. And when Julia’s around, it’s hard not to hate myself. All those feelings, they just come back. And my mind starts to feel so loud, and dark. I just want to escape.”

A dagger spears through my heart. I wrap my arms around him and burrow my face into his chest. I don’t want to make him keep talking, but he is, like he’s been uncorked and now it’s all coming out.

I picture it spiraling down a drain, hope that’s what this confession is doing for him, rather than scraping at an old wound.

“She was way worse with Julia than she ever was with me. She’d compare Jules to our cousins, tell her who was prettier and smarter, or better behaved. She’d compare Jules to herself at that age, shit that probably wasn’t true.” His voice wavers. “She’d scream at her for the dumbest shit, as long as I can remember. And I let it all happen.”

I rear back. “What were you supposed to do?”