He only presses his mouth on me.
But then slowly he breathes.
Slowly, he opens his mouth over mine and his sweet and smoky breath fans over my lips. And his life-giving air goes down into my lungs and slowly resurrects all the dead spaces inside of me.
Slowly, I come alive and I breathe too.
I not only breathe, I open my mouth and I gulp down all the air he gives me.
And when I’m all alive for the first time in two years, I kiss him.
I kiss the guy I fell in love with when I was almost sixteen, and the sky opens up.
Exactly like it did two years ago.
Two years ago, when Reed Roman Jackson kissed me for the first and only time, the sky broke into pieces and scattered around us in raindrops. The same thing is happening right now and it’s a shock to my body.
It’s a shock to his body too but he doesn’t take his mouth off like he did that time, and I thank God for that. I wasn’t about to give him up. I can’t. Not yet.
And it looks like he doesn’t want to give me up either.
He doesn’t want to let go of my mouth, so he keeps kissing me.
Although the rest of the things, he does them exactly as before.
Last time, he picked me up from the ground and cradled the back of my head. He made me take shelter in his big body before he carried me to his Mustang to protect me from the rain.
This time too he does all of that.
He picks me up and my thighs go around his waist. He cradles the back of my head but only to press our mouths closer and I wind my arms around his neck only so I can let him.
Still kissing, he takes me over to his Mustang.
And God, I’m going to start crying.
I’m going to start sobbing because he’s still doing it, isn’t he?
He’s still protecting me.
After all the things I said to him just now. After how I’ve angered him and hurt him and invoked his jealousy and violence, he’s still taking care of me, and my heart squeezes in my chest.
My heart cries for him. For this guy who has a penchant for acting like a hero when he’s the villain.
Why does he do this though?
Why does he make me hurt for him? And Jesus Christ why does he taste so good?
Why does he taste like something I want to eat and consume and drink for the rest of my life?
Because he does and I missed it.
I missed his taste.
You’d think that a guy like him would taste spicy and tangy, but no. He tastes like my favorite dessert.
He tastes like cupcakes.
He tastes sweet and sugary and rich. So addictive, so toxic for my broken ballerina heart.
So injurious.
But fuck it.
Fuck it because I’m going to taste him tonight and I’m going to curse and open my mouth over his so he can taste me as well.
So he can taste me as much as he likes.
I let him eat me, eat my mouth. Bite at it, nip and lick and suck. Everything that he wants to do to me as he carries me to shelter in the pouring rain.
And with the grace of the athlete that he is, he opens the door and bends down to deposit me inside his car. And yes, we have to break apart for that to happen but the separation only lasts like two seconds before he’s inside the car too and like the last time, I hurry over to straddle his lap.
And then we’re back at it.
He’s back at kissing me, grabbing my jaw to deepen the angle, and I’m back at kissing him too as I fist his hair, rub my fingers over his stubble that feels so smooth to touch but irritates the life out of him.
I don’t know how long we go on kissing each other. I don’t know how long he sucks on my lower lip or how long I claw at his t-shirt but somewhere during all of that, something has happened.
Something vital and important that hadn’t happened two years ago and I feel it in my thighs.
I feel his hands on my thighs. Both of them.
His fingers are gripping me, my flesh, and they’re so forceful, so dominating that it makes me whimper and gasp in his mouth.
Our lips break apart and we pant.
With a heaving chest, I glance down between us.
I see his soaked t-shirt that sticks to his contoured muscles and raindrops decorating his arms. But more than that I see myself.
I see why it was such a shock to have his hands on my thighs.
Because my dress — as soaked as his t-shirt — is all messed up.
My ivory dress with a lacy overlay that I wore for him tonight, that was hiding me away from the world, from his animal eyes, has ridden up.
All the way up to the tops of my thighs.
And he can see what he couldn’t. Back then.
He can see my panties.
A peek of them at least. A very tiny peek of my cream-colored lacy panties, and he’s right there.
His hands with knobby knuckles and long fingers and moon-kissed skin are right there. At the seam of my panties. So much so that if he decides to stretch out his fingers more, he’ll touch it.
He’ll touch me. My core, and even though it’s covered, I don’t think it’s much protection from him.
I snap my eyes up to his face then and blurt out, “Reed, I need —”
He doesn’t let me talk though.
He gropes at my thighs forcefully, making me gasp again and fist his damp shirt on his shoulders.
“No,” he growls, sitting back in the seat, sprawled and wet and sexy. “You don’t get to talk anymore. Time for talking is over. It’s time for something else, isn’t it?”
I swallow, staring at his features, all tight and leached of color. “Reed —”
“It’s time for you to show me what he taught you.” He squeezes my thighs again. “Show me all the new skills you’ve learned from him.”
I shake my head, squirming in his lap. “This is not about that, Reed. You —”
He lets go of my thigh then and brings one of his hands to grab my face, cutting me off. Pressing his fingers on my cheek, he asks, “Did he teach you new moves, Fae, huh? New tricks. Did he teach my Fae, my pure, daisy fresh Fae, all the new shiny tricks? Is she going to dance dirty for me now, huh?”
“Reed.”
“Because she knows everything now, doesn’t she?” He shifts up from the seat, his muscles taut and angry. “Thanks to one fucking Toby. Who I’m going to end by the way. I’m going to find him and I’m going to tear him limb from limb for taking what was mine. What belonged to me.”
I grab his face too then, my eyes stinging, my body burning with his jealousy. With the heat radiating out of him. Out of his vampire skin and his black, villainous eyes. “It didn’t belong to you, okay? It didn’t. Please, Reed. This is about us. This is —”
He rises from the seat like a coiled animal then, ready to strike, to bite, to leave teeth marks all over my skin and poison my veins with his venom and my stupid heart rejoices at that. That he’s leaving something in my body that will stay with me and it doesn’t even care that it’s poison and that it will kill me slowly.
“There’s no us though, is there?” he growls, the words ripping out of his chest. “That’s the whole point. There will never be an us. Isn’t that why you want me to do this?”