บททั้งหมดของ Screwed Into Forever [Forbidden Collection]: บทที่ 191 - บทที่ 196

The digital clock on the nightstand read 1:47 a.m. Elise hadn’t meant to notice the time. Noticing time made the night feel finite, and finite was the one thing she kept trying not to think about.He was still awake. She could tell by the steady way his thumb moved against the inside of her wrist, tracing the faint red line left by the necktie. The mark would fade by morning. She already knew she would miss it when it did.“You’re quiet,” he said.“I’m cataloguing.”“What?”“The way this feels. So I can remember it accurately later.”He shifted closer. The sheet rustled. His chest pressed against her back, solid and warm, and one arm slid around her waist. The hold was loose enough to escape, firm enough to feel deliberate.“Tell me one thing you want that you haven’t asked for yet.”Elise stared at the dark window. The city lights blurred. “I want you to use your belt next. Not the tie. The belt. Around my

The sky had begun to change when Elise opened her eyes again. Not light yet. Just the faintest thinning of the dark at the edges of the windows, a suggestion that the night was no longer endless. He was awake. She could feel it in the careful stillness of his body behind hers, in the way his hand rested on her hip as if he had been lying there for a while simply watching her breathe. “What time is it?” she asked, voice rough from sleep and everything else. “Almost five.” Almost five. The number landed like a stone. Two hours, maybe less, before the city would start moving and the rules would demand they become strangers again. She turned in his arms. In the gray pre-dawn light she could see him more clearly than before—the exact shape of his mouth, the faint shadow of stubble along his jaw, the way his eyes looked when they were soft instead of intent. “One more time,” she said.

Elise lasted three days before she cracked.She had done everything right. Different elevator. Later coffee runs. Headphones in the hallway. Eyes fixed on her screen whenever he walked past the open glass of the marketing bay. She treated him like furniture—present, unavoidable, and completely irrelevant to the version of her life that existed between nine and six.Adrian Vale made it impossible.He never sought her out. That would have been easier to hate. Instead he was simply *there*, professional to the point of pain, addressing her only when the work required it and never once lingering. Yet every interaction carried a private current that no one else in the room could feel. A glance held half a second too long across the conference table. The faint, knowing curve of his mouth when she answered a question with more edge than necessary. The way he said her name—*Elise*—as if he were still testing the sound of it after having lived without it