Everyone thought Michael was just another affectionate man — the kind who couldn’t keep his hands off the woman he loved. But the truth was more layered, more dangerous, more human.
He didn’t always kiss her lips first. He’d start at her collarbone — that small, curved stretch of skin where her pulse hid beneath a thin layer of warmth. To anyone watching, it looked like a habit, a tender gesture. To him, it was something else entirely.
The first time it happened, they were standing in her kitchen. Emma had just gotten out of the shower; her damp hair stuck to her neck, her oversized T-shirt slipping off one shoulder. She laughed about something unimportant — a joke he couldn’t even remember now. But her laughter made that hollow between her neck and shoulder move, and he couldn’t stop staring.
He leaned in. His lips brushed her skin just below her throat. She froze. Not from shock — but from being seen.
It wasn’t just a kiss. It was recognition.
He kept doing it — every time they were close, every time she leaned into him, every time she turned her back and her collar slipped down just enough. The kiss wasn’t about claiming her. It was about calming something restless inside him. That spot… it was where she was most unguarded. No makeup. No performance. Just skin and pulse and quiet breath.
When she tilted her head back slightly, it told him she trusted him. But when her hand moved to his wrist — not to push him away, but to keep him there — it told him she wanted to be reminded of something. Something she didn’t say out loud.
Michael once asked her, “Why don’t you ever stop me?”
She smiled, that half-smile that always looked like a secret. “Because you always start where no one else dares to.”
That stayed with him. Not because it was erotic, but because it was honest. The collarbone was where vulnerability began — close enough to the heart to matter, but far enough to still pretend it didn’t.
Sometimes, when they fought, he’d still find himself looking at her there. The way she folded her arms, her necklace resting unevenly on her skin. He wanted to fix it. To touch her again. But he wouldn’t. Not until she softened first.
And every time they made up, his lips would find that same place again.
It became their unspoken rhythm — the quiet reminder that intimacy isn’t loud. It doesn’t have to be naked. It lives in small, stolen places: the side of the neck, the collarbone, the breath that trembles before a word.
The hidden reason he always kissed her there wasn’t lust. It was memory.
A promise that no matter how much they argued, how much time passed, he would always start from the place where she first let him in — where she stopped pretending to be strong.
That’s why he never started with her lips.
Because the collarbone was where she told the truth.