I spun to face him, an onslaught of tears pooled in my eyes.
“You can’t mean that,” I said softly.
The look on his face told me that he did. The look on his face also told me that he didn’t want to believe it. It made me feel like I could prove him wrong if I only knew how. The hammering in my chest and the heat between my legs told me I did know how.
I sucked in an unsteady breath as the tips of his fingers brushed over my cheek. Like the straw that broke the camel’s back, his touch was almost imperceptibly soft, and still, it caused all sorts of breaking on the inside of me as desire crashed through every cell.
His face drifted closer towards mine. Underneath the lab coat and my uniform, my nipples hardened as his chest just barely brushed against them.
He wanted to deny it. He wanted to deny me.
But in this moment, when there were molecules larger than the space between our lips, I knew that I wasn’t the only one who felt this… this thing… between us.
Magnetic. Gravitational. Centripetal.
Whatever force that was pulling us together was one that science couldn’t stop.
“Love isn’t a miracle or a hypothetical; love is a law, Damien.”
The difference between a hypothesis and a scientific law is that a law is proven.
Love isn’t just a tale. Love is real, even if he didn’t think he deserved it.
Whether he thought I was right or wrong, whether he was tempted to think about my hypothesis or not, it was clouded by my final mistake of the evening - because all these things come in threes. My words weren’t just an insistence, they were a promise - a promise that I’d made to Damien, the man, not my best friend’s dad, Mr. Milanovic.
And if there was any proof needed that even though nothing had happened, something had happened; calling him by his first name had broken the invisible wall that was between us, the wall that prevented conversations about love.
But just because the wall was gone, didn’t mean he had to cross the line.
“Clean that up and finish washing the beakers. Then we are done for today, Miss Montgomery,” he said curtly as he spun and stalked back to the other side of the lab, leaving me to collect myself.
The break in our connection sent me reeling. It didn’t matter how many obstacles the apple ran into on its fall from the branch, at some point, gravity would win out on pulling it to the ground.
I found my lungs were all out of breath and my heart all out of beats.
This man wanted to be all equation and no emotion.
For the first time in my life, I wanted science to be wrong. I wanted him to be wrong.
Curing cancer from this lab wasn’t a miracle to him, but maybe healing his heart would be.
Chapter Three
Damien
Since the moment I almost kissed her, half of the alveoli cells in my lungs had been replaced. Four days. Another four meant all of them would be brand new. But I didn’t need to be a goddamn genius to know that even at that point, the only thing I’d want to breathe was her.
Vanilla.
That’s what she smelled like up close. Not the vanilla-scented perfumes you could find in stores but like the pure extract that you’d use in cooking. Up close, I could practically taste her sugary sweetness as I breathed her in.
Four days since she’d shown up at my lab.
Four evenings that I’d cursed myself for giving her one of my lab coats to wear. I thought I was being smart - hiding how well her uniform fit over her perfect, lithe body. I should have known that when it came to anything about Lilith Montgomery, I was invariably the stupidest man on the planet.
First, by agreeing to this torturous arrangement. Then, with the lab coat…
Yes, it hid her uniform.
It also made it appear like she was wearing nothing underneath. No matter how many times I told myself that wasn’t the case, my eye did a double-take every time her movement caught my gaze and my dick jumped to attention, wishing that she really was wearing nothing underneath the lab coat except those fucking knee-highs.
Almost equal to my sexual frustration was my guilt - guilt for having one of the smartest girls in Troy’s class - her friend, no less - as my intern and not giving her an ounce of work worthy of her intellect. I made her clean and organize and arrange and transcribe my notes. Tedious and trivial. But anything more meant more contact, and more contact meant more room for error. And if there was one thing that I knew anything about, it was about how to quickly remedy the opportunity for error in future experiments.
“I finished all your notes from last week,” she said with that same warm smile that reached right into my chest and flexed around the organ, a few months ago, I could have promised was never meant to work, let alone work properly.
“All of them?” My gaze narrowed on hers - not because I didn’t believe her, but because I couldn’t let it stray to the rest of her as she stepped closer to me.
My eyes remained frozen, but my body jolted like a livewire the second she came within the distance where I could reach out and touch her.
She nodded. “Troy is making spaghetti and meatballs tonight.” Why was she telling me? “Maybe you could finish up and go home… and eat with us.”
“That’s not how I work.” Responsibility. Expectation. I thrived on doing what I did best - and emotions… family… love… no amount of science or miracles could make me better at them. It’s why Mary and I drifted apart; it’s why she found someone else and asked for a divorce; it’s why Troian had grown up with less-than-half a father.
“You mean you don’t need food to survive like the rest of us normal nincompoops?” she asked flatly, one of her perfect eyebrows arching as she brushed the hair away from her face.
I stared at her for a good, long second. An abnormally long second before I burst out laughing.
Maybe my frustration was making me delirious.
Maybe that’s why I was laughing like a child because she used the word ‘nincompoop.’
And then she was laughing, too. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d been around someone who’d laughed. The truth was I was never around people. Cells and molecules, I could control; cells and molecules had no emotion and no unexpected reaction. They followed predictable rules, whereas people were inherently unpredictable. People, on the other hand, were far too complicated for a genius like me.
But that wasn’t the only jarring truth about the sound.
My laughter faded because of hers. Because I needed to hear hers. Operas, symphonies… from professionals to prodigies… I’d heard them all. And none of them made me feel an ounce of what I felt surrounded by her laugh.
My fist clenched when she followed suit and the heavenly noise ceased; I wanted to tell her to keep going… I wanted to tell her that it made me feel like my heart was beating again. But I couldn’t. So, I let her think, instead, that laughter was unacceptable.
“Why don’t you ever want to eat dinner at home?” she asked softly.
“Too much work to do. Cancer won’t cure itself,” I replied gruffly.
Her fingers toyed distractingly with the buttons of the lab coat she was wearing - my lab coat. “Yes, but life won’t live itself either. I… I think Troy would really like it.”
She said it with all the best intentions, and still it felt like all the worst accusations.
“If Troian wanted a parent who would make her dinner and eat with her, she should have gone to live with her mother,” I bit out and turned on my heel, stalking somewhere… anywhere away from her and all the questions that no one had ever made me accountable for.
“You don’t mean that,” Lilith’s voice followed me as I made for my desk. “You can’t want her to live with someone that you hate.”
I stopped in my tracks, half-turning back to her. “I don’t hate her mother,” I said with all sincerity and complete confusion as to why she would think that.
Not all divorced people hate each other.
&
nbsp; “Y-you don’t?”
“Why would I?” I demanded. “More importantly, why would you think that I did?”
“I just… I mean…” Pink rose in her cheeks and then began to fall down her throat, over her collarbone… and lower, to where I wished I could see. “Just from what Troy has said. The way she made it seem. I-I assumed you hated her for leaving you.”
The noise that came from my chest some might classify as a laugh, but it was anything but; it was harsh and angry and only mocked the happy sound it masqueraded as.
“I don’t hate her for leaving,” I said sternly. “Honestly, I’m surprised she stayed with me so long.”
“Why?”
Everything about this situation was too close. Her body. Her questions. Her need. It rolled off her in waves - both to heal me… and to fuck me. I shouldn’t want either of them. Instead, I answered because I craved both.
“Because I never cared about her the way that I should have. I wanted to, but we were too focused on other things instead of each other and by the time I realized how far apart we’d grown, I realized I didn’t love her the way that I did when we were younger.” I adjusted my glasses on my nose, hating how the words kept coming out of me - like she’d started a chain reaction that I couldn’t stop no matter what I threw on the fire to douse it. “Actually, I just realized that while I was capable of many extraordinary things, being able to love someone wasn’t one of them. And she deserved better.”
Why the hell was I telling her this?
She had no right to know. Hell, she had no right to ask.
“I don’t believe that. I don’t believe that you aren’t capable of feelings,” she said with just enough pity to make me angry and the perfect amount blind belief to make me want to hope. “I don’t believe you aren’t capable of love, you’re wrong.”
With that last curse of a word, she inched closer to where the very edges of our clothing brushed when we inhaled at the same time.
“You’re too close,” I ground out. Too close to my body. Too close to my pain. Too close to my heart. “And it doesn’t matter what you believe because you can’t prove me wrong.”
I stared down into her sky-wide eyes that streaked with defiance a moment before she inched closer. Defying me.
“You need to step back, Lilith. Now.”
She didn’t comply. She moved closer and I couldn’t move away. Our arms were at our sides, but it didn’t matter because our chests were flush - fighting for who got to breathe in first.
“And you, Damien,” she said breathlessly, “need to kiss me.”
I didn’t flinch. In fact, I hoped that if I stared at her long enough, I would jolt awake and realize that this was just one more dream that I could masturbate away. Seconds proved my theory false. She was real. And, like she said, so was my need to kiss her.
“And what purpose would that serve? Hypothetically, what possible, useful result would that experiment yield?” I demanded hoarsely.
I was toeing the line. Not because it wasn’t going to be crossed, but so I could look back and ease my conscience with the fact that I had tried.
“So that I can prove you wrong,” she said simply even though I could see the fluttering of her pulse along the creamy white length of her neck. “Unless… unless you’re afraid that a silly little girl like me is going to prove the great genius, Damien Milanovic, wrong in his own lab.”
My teeth ground together. I would have kissed her anyway - whether she said anything or not. She was too close and whether it was my sex-starved imagination that felt her pebbled nipples against my chest or not, she didn’t need to taunt me for me to take what should never even crossed my mind.
I laughed harshly. “I told you, Lilith, miracles don’t happen in this lab - only science. And this - me - is a goddamn law of nature.” Her lips parted slightly and that’s when I knew I was done for. “Love… emotions… they’re like a cancer, so I’ll be happy to prove you wrong, because that is my fucking job.”
My hands clutched her face as my lips crashed onto hers. Sweet and pure. I could almost believe that she hadn’t been kissed before except that her mouth stayed parted and her tongue was waiting for mine. She might have been kissed before, but not by me. And not like this.
I ravaged her mouth like fire sucks up oxygen to fuel its blaze.
Lips, tongue, teeth… I took it all. When this experiment was over, there would be nothing left of them but ash. Burnt reminders of what happens when you add too much accelerant to equation.
Later, I would tell myself that I was in complete control.
Later, I would assure my conscience that I hadn’t lost some of myself in that kiss - in her mouth that tasted like sugared hope and candied lust. I’d convince myself that I didn’t kiss her for as long as I was and that my fingers weren’t itching to feel her tits that were pressed against my chest and taste the heat that I felt radiate against my hips.
Damien Milanovic. Cancer curer. Child kisser.
Angry, I kissed her harder and of course, she moaned for more.
But she wasn’t a child, I argued with myself, she was eighteen.
That still didn’t make this right.
I bit at her tongue and instead of pulling back, she gasped and shoved it further into the clutches of my teeth. Fuck.
I kissed her right up until the point where the fire I’d started pulled enough oxygen from the room to tip my mind over the edge into believing what else besides a kiss was acceptable - was necessary - to prove a point.
Ripping my mouth from hers, I stepped back, tearing myself from the grasp I hadn’t realized that she’d had on the sleeves of my lab coat. Not only did I move back but I side-stepped so that there was part of a table between us.
And it was a good thing.
Running a hand over my mouth, I looked up to where she stood. She was like a peach: ripe, sweet, and so damn juicy when all I’d taken was one bite.
I’d always been a man of science. But in that moment, I was nothing but an animal with base thoughts and even baser needs. Tomorrow, I’d see the indents of where my fingers dug into the countertop; it was the only thing that stopped me from throwing her on top of it, pushing up her skirt, and taking what instinctively felt like mine.
But if there was one other animalistic trait strong enough to stop me from ruining my life - and hers - it was the need to dominate. And in this situation, I could kill two birds with one stone.
“Well, I’m sorry to say that you were wrong, Miss Montgomery.” I sent her a tight smile along with my harsh words, ignoring the way she flinched at her name and the way it made me hate a little bit more of myself. “An… admirable… attempt, but I have to say that I’m unfazed and still remain unfeeling. In fact, the only thing I’m feeling is actually hunger. Since that is the case, I think I might be able to make it home in time tonight to have dinner with my daughter and her best friend.”
By the time I finished, all that was left between us was the charred remains of a test flame.
This could never happen again.
Forget feeling or loving… anything more than this I might not survive.
Chapter Four
Lilith
Part of me wanted to go home and cry. Break down into those ugly tears that make you choke and gasp for air, the ones that no one should ever see. The other part of me wanted to prove that what had just happened affected me as little as it had affected him.
A fool’s errand.
It was pretty obvious just what that kiss had done to me, but if Damien could convince himself that he didn’t know how to love, then I could convince myself that the kiss meant nothing.
As teeth-grindingly guilty as I felt walking through the door to see Troy’s smiling face, as much as the betrayal… the wrong… that I’d inflicted on my unknowing friend ate away at me, I stayed because even if I was wrong, I refused to look like a failure.
And I refused to believe that I was wrong.
Troy was shocked to see Damien wa
lk through the door a few minutes behind me. He wouldn’t know, but I noticed how there was more lift to her step and a smile tugging at her lips knowing that he was here. I felt guilt again that she was the unwitting middle-man in the experiment between Damien and me.
All through dinner I bit my tongue and smiled like nothing had changed even though the switching of the magnetic poles of the Earth would have had less of an effect on my body than that kiss. I chatted with Troy, pretended like I was learning so much at my internship, and even pleasantly spoke several words to the man who’d so glibly made me feel like nothing a few hours earlier.
Admirable attempt.
It was a lie.
It had to be.
I felt his heartbeat in his fingers on my face - the way it jumped and galloped as he kissed me. I felt the way his mouth claimed mine, marking me harder with each moan of pleasure that escaped. I’d never had sex before, but I knew that with him, it would be nothing like with anyone else.
“Do you just want to stay over, Lil?” Troy’s voice startled me as we walked out to the kitchen with our plates.
For some reason, my eyes darted over to Damien.
Not like it ever mattered… not like she’d ever needed his permission… to have me over before. Still, I searched for his reaction.
Barely there. Like a fingerprint on a glass.
Which is why I turned to her with a smile and said, “Sure, that would be great. It’s been a really long day.”
She huffed and turned. “Dad, I told you to not be crazy!” she scolded him, and heat flushed into my cheeks again. “Not everyone can work like there’s no tomorrow.”
The muscle of his jaw twitched. He was remembering everything that I’d said to him about Troy and working too much.
I pulled my lower lip into my mouth, savoring the tenderness from where he’d abused it earlier; it was still slightly swollen. I was prepared for it to be bruised by the morning.
“I’m not crazy,” he replied, but only I caught the edge in his tone and the steel in his eyes. Which was fair since they were only meant for me.
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