Her knees wavered and he felt it; the slight buckle, the softening, the structural failure of a girl whose legs were forgetting how to hold weight because his hand was on her hip and his voice was in her ear and every cell in her body was rerouting power from standing upright to the urgent business of feeling.
His hand beneath her chin shifted, his fingers slid into her hair; gentle, threading through the strands at her temple with the kind of care that made her want to weep, his palm cradling the side of her head like something precious and breakable.
He tilted her face toward him until her mouth was inches from his.
Close enough to kiss and she could feel the warm fan of his breath across her swollen, parted lips; not kissing her was its own exquisite cruelty of a deliberate withholding that made her whimper again, higher, needier, the sound vibrating in the charged sliver of air between them.
"I know," he said softly.
Her eyes flew open. Glassy. Wet.
