Touch Me Like You Mean It

POV: Matteo

"Stay," Rhys said, catching my wrist as I moved to pull the blanket up and step back toward the chair I'd been sleeping in for six nights straight. "Just stay. Please."

"You need to rest," I said, though my feet didn't move.

"I've been resting for a week," he said, his thumb tracing slow along the inside of my wrist, deliberate in a way that sent heat straight up my arm. "I don't want to rest tonight. I want you."

The words landed somewhere low in my chest, dangerous and warm at once. Dave's voice was still sitting in my ears from that afternoon, I wonder what you'd do to protect yours, the guilt of the healer's assistant and my careful lie still crawling under my skin. And underneath all of it, hunger. Two years of hunger I'd trained myself to starve quietly.

"Rhys—"

"Tell me to stop and I will," he said, close now, his forehead nearly touching mine, his voice rough and low in a way I'd never once heard from him before the injury. "But I don't want to spend one more night in this bed without you close enough to touch."

I should have said something about the lie sitting between us. I should have told him about the healer's assistant, about Dave in the corridor, about every reason this fragile tenderness might not survive contact with the truth.

I didn't say any of it. I let him pull me down instead.

His hands found my face first, careful, like he was memorizing something he was terrified of losing again. "You're shaking," he murmured.

"I'm not used to this," I admitted, my voice barely above a whisper. "You. Like this."

"Then let me get you used to it," he said, and kissed me slow, deliberate, nothing like the cold, correct distance he'd kept for two years. This was hunger wearing patience as a disguise, and it undid me faster than anything cruel ever had.

I felt the weight of him, the careful strength he held in check, the broad, commanding presence that had once made whole rooms fall quiet now bent entirely toward me, toward learning every place that made my breath catch, every place I flinched from old habit and every place I melted despite myself.

"Tell me if I do something wrong," he said against my throat, low, uncertain in a way that had nothing to do with lack of confidence and everything to do with how badly he wanted to get this right. "I don't remember what you like. I want to learn."

"You're not doing anything wrong," I breathed.

Guilt threaded through even the good of it, sharp little intrusions between every point of contact, Dave's words circling, the healer's notes I'd steered away from, the whole curated version of our marriage I'd been feeding him for days. I pushed it down each time it surfaced, chasing the warmth of his hands instead, telling myself I could feel guilty tomorrow.

Later, tangled close, his mouth against my ear, his voice rough and unguarded in the dark, he murmured something low, half a laugh in it, intimate in a way that made my whole body go rigid.

"Just like the greenhouse," he said, soft, almost fond. "You always go quiet like that near the end."

I stopped breathing.

We had never once been to the greenhouse together. Not once in two years. It sat locked and unused on the far edge of the estate, a place I'd never told him mattered to me at all, a private detail I'd never spoken aloud to a single living soul.

He shouldn't know that. He couldn't know that.

Unless some part of him remembered something he wasn't supposed to.

"Matteo?" Rhys pulled back slightly, propping himself up on one elbow, brow furrowing at whatever he saw written across my face. "What's wrong?"

I lay there, my heart hammering, the words what did you just say caught somewhere behind my teeth, and I had no idea, not for one single second, whether I dared let them out.