Chapter 4

Kimani

Roan went completely still.

Not the kind of still where a person pauses to think. The kind of still where everything just stops. His breathing, his movement, the slow deliberate way he had been taking me apart piece by piece for the last several minutes. All of it just stopped and he looked down at me with an expression I had never seen on his face before in the entire time I had known him.

Like I had said something in a language he did not speak and he was waiting for me to repeat it so he could decide if he had heard correctly.

I looked back at him and kept my face as steady as I could manage which was not very steady at all because my heart was doing something loud and complicated behind my ribs and the warmth of his body was still pressed all along mine and thinking clearly in that condition was genuinely difficult.

Why did I want to break up with him?

I turned that question over in my head and looked at it from different angles and the honest answer was that I did not have a good one. He loved me. I knew he loved me the way you know something that has just become part of the furniture of your life, settled and solid and not something you question on a normal day. And did I love him back. Absolutely. Without question. Without hesitation. In a way that sometimes scared me when I sat with it too long in a quiet room.

Was it the age gap? Was it the fact that he was thirty and I was nineteen and there were eleven years sitting between us like a number someone could point at. No. That was not it either. The age gap had never felt like a problem from the inside of it. It felt like him and me and the specific way we worked together and I had never once looked at him and thought he was too old.

Was it Jaxon? Was it the fear of what would happen if my brother ever found out that his nineteen year old sister had been in a secret relationship with his thirty year old best friend for the past year. That one was closer to something real but it was not the whole truth.

The whole truth was messier and I did not fully have the words for it yet. Something about wanting space to breathe. Something about the way loving Roan felt so large sometimes that it took up all the room and I could not find where he ended and I began. Something about being nineteen and not knowing what I wanted except that I wanted him and wanting him so completely at nineteen felt like something I should probably be more careful with.

I told myself I just wanted a break. I told myself that and I mostly believed it.

But I had sent the breakup text. And he had left it sitting for six hours without responding and I had spiraled and blocked him and then gotten sick and now here we were.

"I thought that was a joke, Lia." His voice came out quiet. Not soft. Quiet in a way that had edges to it, a careful evenness that I recognized as him managing something he did not want to show me yet. He was still above me, still not moving, still holding that complete stillness like he was waiting for the ground to tell him what it was going to do next. "I read that message and I thought you were being dramatic."

"I wasn't joking," I said. I kept my voice even. "I'm serious. I'm still nineteen, Roan. I'm still nineteen and you're thirty and you're going to get tired of me eventually. You're going to wake up one day and realize you want someone who makes more sense next to you, someone older, someone who doesn't throw tantrums about literally everything, and when that day comes…" I stopped and then made myself continue. "And Jaxon doesn't know. My mum doesn't know about any of this and if he ever found out he would…"

"What the hell are you saying, Kimani."

My actual first name, not Lia, not firefly, Kimani, and the way it came out of his mouth was nothing like the way he said my middle name. It was low and it was tight and it had heat underneath it that was a different kind of heat than anything else that had happened in this room today. I had heard him use my first name exactly once before and I remembered it because it had felt exactly like this. Like a door closing.

"I'm saying…"

"You are not permitted to break up with me, Lia." He shifted above me, and his knee pressed between my thighs and parted them and I opened up before I had finished deciding whether or not I was going to and I hated my own body so much in that moment. His eyes had not left my face. "That is not something you get to decide unilaterally."

"I don't need your permission to end a relationship." I felt my jaw set. "I did not ask for your permission before I agreed to date you in the first place. That is not how this works, you don't get to just tell me I'm not allowed…"

"How long have you been sitting on that text," he said over me, "actually believing you could just send that and I would let it happen."

"It is not about letting it happen, Roan, it is about what I want and right now what I want…"

His hand moved.

His fingers were at the hem of my shorts, just at the fabric over my core, and everything I was about to say restructured itself into nothing. I wanted to protest. I formed the intention to protest very clearly in my mind and then his fingers shifted the fabric and drove one finger into my wet dripping puxxy and the moan that came out of my mouth was not small or manageable.

"Ahh…"

"Your body is lying, Lia." His voice was rough against my ear, close, too close. "Tell me again how much you want to leave. Tell me you want to break up with me."

I bit down on my lower lip so hard I could feel the pressure of my own teeth. He was moving too slow. I could feel how slow he was and it was deliberate and targeted and my hips were trying to change that equation entirely on their own and he was not cooperating.

"I'm serious," I managed to get out, my voice catching halfway through both syllables. "I mean it."

"You can never escape me." His mouth dropped to my neck and I felt his teeth press into the skin there, not hard enough to hurt, but firm enough and slow enough that I knew exactly what it was going to leave behind. I knew and I could not find the part of me that wanted to stop him. "This body knows who it belongs to."

I wanted to argue that. I had the argument ready somewhere and I could not locate it.

He was still moving slow. Deliberately, insufferably slow, and my whole body was winding up tight with it and my brain had fully stopped generating useful thought and switched over to just feeling everything and cataloguing it in real time.

"Roan…" It came out wrong again. Soft and breathless and nothing like the firm boundary I had intended it to be.

"The same amount of time it took me to fall in love with you." He spoke against my neck, low and deliberate, and his finger curled slightly and I stopped breathing for a second. "The years I spent fighting what I felt for you before I stopped fighting it." He paused. "That is what you get. That is the time you have."

My thoughts snagged on that even through everything else happening. "What?"

It came out as a moan but he understood it. He lifted his head and looked at me and his eyes were dark and completely serious under all of it.

"You want to break up with me," he said, "then earn it. Make me fall out of love with you. Make me hate you, Kimani Lia Bennett. That is the only permission I will give you. That is the only way out of this that exists."

I stared up at him and he stared back down.

My brain was trying to process what he had just said and process everything else at the same time and it was not managing either task well.

"Kim baby!" Jaxon's voice came up from downstairs, loud and easy. "I've got your chocolate bars. Where are you?" A pause. Then, with a different energy entirely: "Where the fuck is Roan?”