I was touching him as he was touching me. Together, we explored each other in the darkness, falling into a desperate rhythm of rhapsody. Our kisses turned to oxygen, overrun by the high we were building up for and with each other. My knees were shaking, and I slipped, slipped, slipped under his touch, crumbling.
Julian growled, grabbed my thighs, and lifted me, folding me into him and slamming my back against the wall. His shaft slid across my wetness, and I broke apart into tiny pieces, seeing stars in this dark place with him. The friction of us lit a passionate fire, every nerve-ending exposed and reaching new heights. The tips of his fingers stroked me, driving me wild. My head rolled back as he moved me, grinding my wet center against his length, his moans deep and thick.
We lost ourselves in the craze, and my legs started to shake, clenching around his waist. Julian’s fingers dug into my bottom, having complete control over me and guiding my sex against his but never entering. Fingers from his other hand grazed and pressed and kneaded my entrance, and I couldn’t come down from this climb. And he let go of my ass to tug on my bottom lip.
“Come with me,” he spurred as if he were saying, “Come with me, and I’ll show you everything no one else will. Come with me, and I will tell you things no one else will tell you, I’ll give you everything, feed all your forbidden thoughts, things you never knew you wanted.”
Julian ran his tongue up my lips once before latching his mouth to mine when a whirlwind of sensations exploded within me. My nails pierced his scalp as he exhumed my orgasm from me as if it were my soul. His grind turned precise and deep, my sex sliding up and down his length. He slammed his palm over the steel wall beside my head, sending a vibration inside the train car. Warmth seeped over my skin as he came, his finger dragging up inside me, petting the places no one has been before him.
My head threw back—my body in spasms. I was overrun and flying, gripped and freed, possessed and pardoned, all in a single breath that I couldn’t take. Julian kissed my throat as I pulsed around his finger.
Afterward, I dropped my head into the curve of his neck and tasted nature and woods and twilight on his skin. Our chests heaved together, and Julian held me for a moment until our breathing slowed, and his palm drifted up and down my back as he buried his face in my neck too.
“You’re so quiet when you come. You’re like a whisper,” he said into my hair. “I’ve tried to ignore it, but I can’t. No matter what they say, you were always mine, and you always will be.”
I didn’t understand the words he was saying, and the tap of his pulse in his neck hit my lips, running rabid with his words with me in his arms. And I closed my eyes, reminding myself it had to be the poison. The poison was making him say all the things, do all the things, and eventually, this night would pass, and he would disappear again.
“I can’t believe we did that. I’ve never done anything like that before.”
We were both sitting on the edge of the train car, my head in his lap, his hands in my hair. Julian’s mask was back on, as were our clothes, and the September winds felt like ice against my heated skin.
“Me either,” he said through an exhale, then looked down at me and shook his head as if in amazement.
“You don’t do that stuff often?” I didn’t know why I asked but wished I hadn’t. Did I want to know?
His eyes lifted to the woods as he skipped his fingertips down my neck in deep thought. “Never. What we did was different. I’ve been involved in intercourse for rituals, yes, but that was all it was. The Heathens are the only ones born with magic from my coven. But I’d never done anything without my mask before. Never gave more than my body, until now.” Julian was calm, sedated, his words lazy and patient as if he were drugged. Yet, he’d said it without emotion and more of a simple fact, a duty, and my heart felt his. “They can take parts of me, but I refused to let them have all of me.”
“Then, why me?” I asked, his words not making sense based on what we had just done. Even though we didn’t have sex, it still was something. Or had that only been a small piece of him too? And if so, would he ever be willing to give me everything?
Julian’s chest caved. He hung his head and looked down at me, resting his palm over my stomach under my tank. The stars cast little light over his flushed ivory skin. His wild black hair was damp from the heat firing between us earlier, a glow gleaming off the tips down to his hairline. I waited with a held breath for him to tell me that what he did with me was a mistake because he was intoxicated from Mina’s drink, and I was only a strange girl he’d found in the woods at the right time.
“Because when you look at me, you see me. It’s different with you. You make me forget the mask is even there,” Julian said, telling me, instead, he was the strange thing in the woods. He was the freak, not me. “I’m going to break this curse,” he added in a whisper. “I have to.”
For a long time, we sat in the train car listening to the night under a comfortable silence between us. I’d always imagined being with someone as strange and weird as me, and yet how beautifully bizarre the story would be, falling for Julian Blackwell—one of the monstrous things who made the woods their hiding-place, yet looked at me as if I were a mosaic masterpiece. There was no doubt I was equally terrified and intrigued by him, one of the cursed Hollow Heathens.
Terrified … because he could very well destroy me.
But I was sure to be destined for a grotesque love my grandchildren could tell their grandchildren about, and their grandchildren’s grandchildren, wasn’t I? The kind of stories Marietta had told me. The kinds of stories written about creatures everyone feared the most, yet loved painfully without limitations. Because freaks like us deserved the strange and the weird. A love so severe.
“I want to show you something,” Julian said.
I lifted myself off him before he popped onto his feet. The train car moved when he jumped down with a loud thump! over the earth, then turned to grab my waist. Once my feet hit the ground, Julian was off, running through the woods. My eyes fixed on his magnificent form, the stars outlining his silhouette as it passed under the cascade of moonlight. I took off after the Heathen who wore his soul, chasing him wherever it was he wanted to go. Julian’s hands slid over the skin of the trees as he glided through the naked forest, allowing it to soothe him, guide him, nurture him.
We chased each other in the deep dark woods until he guided me to a tree he called “the upside-down, half-heart tree,” where he lifted me and sat me in the bend. I clung on to the white bark of the trunk as he gazed up at me, wonder passing through his silver irises as I smiled down at him. Julian tilted his head to the side for a moment, then looked up at me through thick and heavy lashes.
Afterward, we balanced over fallen logs, and Julian walked backward with such stealth, his hands behind his back, eyes on me.
His eyes were always on me.
“Do you like fixing cars?” I asked him, carefully putting one foot in front of the other.
“Yes,” his answer laconic.
I jumped off once my feet reached the end of the log. “Why?”
He thought for a moment, looking up at the canopies. When his eyes settled back on mine, he said, “I don’t really know why. I just do, I suppose.”