Maybe it was.

But no one said we needed to touch each other to get off.

Bane looked tortured. I’d never seen him look that way before. He was always assertive, ruthless, and confident beyond belief. Dark energy crackled around him, like he’d been struck by lightning, split in half, and filled with rage. He was simmering, shimmering, and glowing.

He was lusting.

His desire for me empowered me, because he didn’t take, like all the rest.

Hell, he didn’t even ask.

Another reason why he was the perfect sexual partner.

I circled my clit with my index finger, feeling anxious, elated, turned on, and on fire. Yes. On fire. Him watching me ignited every match in the pit of my stomach and had me burning for him like the brightest torch.

I’d seen him around women. They had to be surgically removed from his environment. And I knew all about his affairs. His married and influential lovers. I told him I didn’t care, and to an extent, it was true. I cared more about healing than about what he did in his recreational time. About being able to writhe under a man without panic tightening around my throat like a coarse rope and my limbs flailing, begging for me to flee.

I needed him inside me with a passion that scared me. A need so basic, I wasn’t above begging for it.

I slanted my chin up, rubbing my sensitive bud faster and faster. At first, he didn’t react. Just stared, like he was trying to calculate his next move, his palms frozen on the table, his eyes ablaze. My heart flipped inside my chest, a warning that this was more than sex for me. I chose not to listen.

I needed him to fix me.

I needed him to make me come.

“What the fuck are you doing, Jesse?” He moaned, his voice so thick with sex, that lust dripped between us.

“Seducing you,” I said simply. I opened my thighs wider and moaned, knowing that he liked what he saw. Agony colored his face. I looked down, watching his cock swelling in his surf shorts behind the small table. I waited for fear to grip my body, but it never came. I wanted to slip his shorts off with my teeth, take his thick ridge into my mouth, and show him I wasn’t broken. Not beyond repair, anyway. Not like I’d previously thought.

What are you thinking? What are you saying? Do you even know yourself anymore?

But it was exactly who I was. The old Jesse took. She’d demanded and claimed the things she had wanted.

And she came out to play in the storage room.

I pinched my nipple through my shirt, knowing it was puckered and visible even through my sports bra. Normally, I gulped the space Bane allowed me with thirst. He didn’t try to change who I was. The Untouchable. But today, I wanted to be taken, to be possessed and devoured. I wanted to show myself that I could do it.

I could be touched.

I could feel.

I could break in someone’s arms without feeling broken.

“Jesse,” he growled, his forehead falling to the table on a sigh. His breaths were deep, heavy. Like he was losing an inner battle. His knuckles whitened as he tried his best not to flip the table aside and charge toward me. I wanted him to. I didn’t care about all those people outside.

“Do you want me?” I coaxed.

“Want you?” The table nearly flew to the other side of the room from the impact of his slap on it. “I’m way beyond want. I’m somewhere between need and desperate. And I don’t like that place, Jesse. I don’t like it at all.”

“Take me, then.”

He stared deep into my eyes, like he was trying to communicate something to me, a thought that even sounded stupid in my own head. What would he try to tell me?

“You’re not ready.” Emotionless. Indifferent. Too bad I didn’t buy it for one second.

“Who the hell are you to say?” I grinned.

“Your only lucid friend,” he deadpanned, blinking at me slowly. “And I’m not fucking up what we have for a fuck.”

“You’re a jerk,” I groaned.

“Yeah,” he said.

“Bane.”

“What part of the word no don’t you fucking understand?”

All of it, apparently. I didn’t understand why we couldn’t do it. The attraction was obviously there—I saw it in his eyes. And he was the only man I wanted. The only man I felt safe with. If it wouldn’t be him, it wouldn’t be anyone—and that thought scared me.

Everyone needed someone. Even The Untouchable.

Lust sizzled between us like fire, hot and heavy and red. I pushed two fingers into myself, spreading my lips and showing him how pink and normal and unscarred I was from within.

His throat bobbed again.

“Tell me you don’t want to be the one doing this to me,” I hissed, a knot of pleasure tightening in my belly. I trailed my index finger around my clit, watching his eyes sparkle as the pink bud swelled under my touch.