THE ONLY THING I’D LET RUIN ME
She’d built two years of walls and he dismantled them in one evening. He didn’t announce himself. He never had to. The last person she expected walked in like he was exactly where he was supposed to be.
Halle hadn’t seen Adrian Vale in two years. Two years of carefully avoiding his name in conversations, his face on screens, and the memory of waking up in his bed, fully dressed, completely alone, and somehow disturbed by that, than if anything had actually happened. Then he showed up to her best friend’s wedding like he owned the place. He reached over her shoulder, lifted the glass of champagne from her hand without spilling a single drop, brought it slowly to his lips, held her gaze the entire time and had the absolute nerve to look good doing it. Adrian Vale didn’t do anything halfway. He never needed to raise his voice because the room already belonged to him. He never reached for things…things simply found their way into his hands. Including, apparently, her. On a moonlit dance floor, his hand slid warm and certain up her spine, his forehead dropped to hers in the dark, and he said the thing that short-circuits every rational thought in her head.
“You’re the only thing I’d let ruin me.”
He pulled her in for a kiss, close enough to feel his breath, close enough to lose her mind completely, and then he pulled away. Leaving her wanting.
He calls her starlight like it’s a secret only he gets to keep. And Halle is so embarrassingly, helplessly gone for him.
The ones who make you forget your own name? Those are the ones worth ruining yourself for.