Make Me Hate You

by Kandi Steiner

He stepped into me, and I swallowed, tilting my chin up as my heart pounded so hard that I knew he could feel it through the veins in my neck. I knew he could feel how I trembled under his touch, how I shivered from the rain and the wind and the tornado that he had always been in my life. Back away. Pull away. Stop this right now. But I couldn’t. I felt the heat of his breath on my lips, and I gasped, parting my own, feeling the most intense mixture of warning and desperation swirling within me that I had ever felt in my life. It was elemental, primal, powerful. Unstoppable. His hands slipped into my wet hair, tilting me even more toward him, and his bare, wet abdomen brushed my chest, eliciting a sharp inhale from my lips. It was his nose that touched me first, warm and wet, sliding down the bridge of my own before his forehead melded with mine. His hands gripped harder where they held my hair, and that’s when I realized. He was shaking, too. His arms trembled as I wrapped my hands around them, holding onto him, begging him not to pull away as much as I begged him to put distance between us because I knew we should — and I knew I couldn’t be the one to do it. Every new beat of my heart was a flash of memory, of a past life, searing through me like hot sparks as I gripped him tighter. I saw what once was, what maybe could have been, and more than anything, what never was. My breaths were ragged and shallow, eyes still shut, every other sense on high alert. Tyler’s lips wer...