It began with a laugh, the kind that comes too easily when wine loosens the air and the evening feels like it belongs only to the two of them. He said something teasing, she swatted at his arm in playful protest—and then her hand landed on his wrist.
She froze for just a heartbeat, as if realizing what she’d done. Her fingers curved lightly around him, resting against the steady thrum of his pulse. She looked at her hand, then up at him, guilt flickering across her features. “I shouldn’t,” she whispered, voice low, almost lost to the hum of the room.
But the strangest thing happened: she didn’t move. Her hand remained, warm and small against his skin. The contradiction lingered in the air—her words pulling back, her body leaning forward.
He felt it instantly, the duality of her restraint and her surrender. Her fingers weren’t gripping him tightly, but they weren’t leaving either. They hovered in that dangerous in-between, where intention is disguised as hesitation. His own wrist tingled beneath her touch, not because of the pressure, but because of the meaning.
She tried to cover it with a nervous smile, her thumb brushing lightly as if it had a mind of its own. “Really, I shouldn’t,” she repeated, but softer now, as though each syllable excused her less. The warmth of her skin seeped into him, threading through his veins with each beat of his heart.
He could have pulled away. It would have been the proper thing to do. Yet he didn’t. Instead, he stayed perfectly still, letting her decide how long this moment would last. He could feel her trembling faintly, not from fear, but from the thrill of doing something she shouldn’t.
Their eyes locked. Hers held a question, a plea for him to either release her from the weight of temptation or silently grant her permission to continue. His gaze gave her nothing and everything all at once—steady, unreadable, yet unwilling to break the spell.
Slowly, her fingers shifted, stroking the inside of his wrist in a motion so subtle it could be mistaken for an accident. But it wasn’t. She knew exactly what she was doing: mapping the rhythm of his heartbeat, feeling how it jumped under her touch. It was her way of confirming what she already suspected—that he wanted this as much as she did.
And though she whispered again, “I shouldn’t…” the words had lost all conviction. They were no longer a boundary but an invitation, trembling on her lips.
When she finally pulled her hand back, it wasn’t because she wanted to. It was because she feared what might happen if she didn’t. Yet even as her fingers slipped away, the ghost of her touch lingered, and the silence that followed was heavy with everything unsaid.
For both of them, the memory of her hand on his wrist became a secret, more binding than any promise.