Текст книги "Sublime"

Автор книги: Christina Lauren

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Текущая страница: 8 (всего у книги 13 страниц)

“I’m glad,” he says, leaning to kiss her cheek. “I’ve always felt safe with you. I wonder if ghosts like you are everywhere, protecting people.”

“You’re not surprised?”

“Why would I be?” he mumbles, already drifting off.

Lucy turns and looks out the window, for the first time realizing that she is the only one who is surprised by any of this.

In the middle of the night, Colin pushes the heating pads off his chest and legs and climbs out of bed. He wraps himself in about four sweaters, twitching with constant shivering. His desk chair creaks as he sits down and begins typing. It’s 2:14 in the morning.

“What are you doing?”

“Looking stuff up,” he mumbles.

“What stuff?”

“Spirit stuff. Dying.”

“Do you want to talk about it?”

He scratches the back of his neck and throws her an apologetic glance over his shoulder. “Not yet. Sorry.”

She lies back to stare at his ceiling, at the tiny solar system she likes to imagine Colin meticulously sticking in place everywhere he’s moved. “You okay?”

He grunts in affirmation, and she rolls over, wishing he would come closer. She’s had a taste of what he must have felt when she was gone, and here in the dark, with him so far away, she feels a strange itch to talk some more about what he felt on the trail and what he thinks happened. It feels like a tight spring has been lodged in her chest, uncoiling slowly upward.

“Do you know how many people have had near-death experiences?” he asks, oblivious to her anxiety.

“How many?”

“Thousands. More than thousands. Most of the stuff written about it is religious. But not all. Some people think that near-death experiences are a form of hallucination, but since I know you felt everything, too, we know I wasn’t hallucinating.”

She rolls back over, forcing a lighter tone. “Are you cruising around NearDeath.org?”

“No,” he says without humor. “Seriously, Luce. So many people have almost died or actually died, and seen things or experienced things like I did, and these people are fine. There’s even a Journal of Near-Death Studies. There’s a Near Death Experience Research Organization. Like, science.”

“Pseudoscience.”

“Lucy, that makes you pseudoscience.”

“I’m not near dead, Colin. I’m dead dead.”

He ignores her, and she listens to the sound of his fingers on the keyboard. They don’t seem to be cooperating, and he swears repeatedly under his breath. “You’re neither dead nor alive,” he counters. “You’ve been sent back. Or, maybe your mind has separated from your original body and has figured out a way to come back as my Guardian. And I can be like you; we know that now.”

“Not easily,” she says, growing strangely full of excited energy. She stands, feeling like she wants to take off running. “And probably not again.”

“I felt you, Luce. You felt me, too. And not in a maddening too-much-too-little way.” His tone makes the vibrations inside her grow. There’s a steely determination there she hasn’t heard before. “Are you telling me you didn’t like it?”

She’s silent, unable to speak past the strange humming in her chest. She did feel him, and he felt better than anything.

“This one guy had the same thing happen,” he continues “Fell in a lake, hypothermia, saw the world in a way he’d never seen it before. The whole thing.”

“Huh.”

“Yeah, and he’s on this message board saying he did it again, because he wanted to know that what he saw was real.”

“You need to recover,” she says. “You’re not seriously thinking about this as a good thing, are you?”

The answering silence fills the room like rushing water. She walks closer and leans over him, reading the message board posts over his shoulder. There are thousands of entries. He follows a link and creates a user name and password.

She bends and kisses his jaw, his neck, hoping to distract him, but she can feel him grow tense under her touch.

“You need to sleep.”

“In a minute. I want to join this site.”

“I think this goes against Guardian protocol.” She tries to keep her voice light, but the words come out stiff and formal. She doesn’t want to police Colin’s activity. Even more, she doesn’t understand this strange hyperactivity that has overtaken her. “This website creeps me out,” she says instead.

He laughs at this, at the ghost girl being afraid of ghosts. “This one guy sees hypothermia almost like an extreme sport. Because of the way your cellular activity slows, brain death is the very last thing. This guy on here, ColdSport, thinks it can be done in a way that challenges the system, like biking up a big hill or running a marathon.”

He’s serious. She looks at the forum he’s logged into. There are three user names that take up most of the posts. Three crazy people out there preaching to their own tiny crazy choir. She slips her hands inside his sweaters, along his skin. “Colin, stop.”

His skin is fever hot, and he shivers beneath her palms. Standing, he reluctantly follows her back to his bed, but her mind is reeling. When he finally falls asleep, she slips over to his desk, hovers on his chair, and focuses intently on pressing each key on his keyboard to enter her search.

She finds hundreds of stories, but shuts down the computer when she registers that none of them sound like what happened at the lake.

CHAPTER 22 HIM

THE SILENCE IS LIKE A THICK CURTAIN BETWEEN them. Colin washes dishes as best he can and hands them, through the invisible film of discomfort, to Dot, who dries and puts them away.

“You’re awfully quiet,” he says, digging his hands into the warm, sudsy water. They’re better today: fingers less stiff, his grip steadier.

“So are you,” she shoots back.

He drops the baking sheet he was scrubbing and turns to look at her. “Christ, Dot. Just say whatever it is that you’re thinking.”

“Are you going to tell me about this Lucy?”

Colin groans, turning away and looking out the window.

He’s been expecting this ever since Dot heard the name.

“Lucy” at the hospital. Dot remembers Lucy’s murder as clearly as if it happened yesterday, but as far as he knows, Dot’s never seen him with her. For all she knows, it’s just another girl.

“She’s a girl in my class,” he says, returning to the dishes. “I’ve seen her, you know. She looks a lot like a girl named Lucy who went here years ago. In fact,” Dot says, stepping closer, “she looks a lot like the dead girl you asked about a few weeks back.”

Colin stares at his hands in the water. They’re shaking now, but it has nothing to do with having gone into the lake. “I told you, I always heard the stories,” Dot whispers, her voice trembling. “Different people insisting they’d seen a girl at the lake, the man in uniform sitting on a bench, or a man walking around campus, sweeping the walkway. Maggie swore up and down for years that this place was haunted.

But, Lucy . . . being such a part of your world . . .” Colin turns to her, eyes pleading. “Dot, do you remember when you told me and Jay that there are things we don’t understand in this world?”

Dot nods, eyes wide.

“And do you remember when you promised me I wasn’t crazy? Do you believe what you told me?”

She laughs, reaching up to put a soft hand on his cheek.

“I do.”

“So can you trust me?”

Shaking her head the tiniest bit, she whispers, “I don’t know. It just doesn’t feel right.”

“It doesn’t feel right because you don’t understand it, not because it’s wrong,” he says. “For the first time in my life, I feel like I know what I want.” Looking back and forth between her eyes, Colin can see that Dot is going to give him more leash than she’s ever given him before.

Her eyes fill with tears, and she offers him a half smile.

“Just feels like I never see you anymore.”

Colin shifts where he stands, his eyes boring into the soapy water. “Been busier than normal. School . . . friends,” he says, swallowing down the guilt that blooms in his chest. The silence stretches on before Dot sets her towel aside, reaching over to place her hand on his forearm. “Promise me you won’t do anything dangerous.”

When he nods, Colin realizes he’s made a promise he has no intention of keeping.

Colin is accustomed to being the center of attention. He’s competed in bike races and trials competitions practically since he could walk. He’s crazy tall; he’s never been shy. And when his parents died, no one gave him a minute alone for years.

But the attention he’s getting today is all wrong. Two news vans are parked on campus, and the reporters camped inside try to ask him questions before Joe calls security. His classmates are hysterical; some are insisting it was the ghost of the lake that made him fall in. Others eye him like he’s some kind of mythical creature. Everyone wants to touch him. Teachers seem shaken, and there’s a mandatory assembly on winter safety in the gym. He feels the pressure of every pair of eyes, watching to make sure he’s okay, that his arms work, his gait is steady, that he’s making sense. The words “tragedy,” “close call,” and “fences” are being thrown around.

Here’s the thing: It wasn’t a tragedy. It wasn’t a close call. If they build a fence around that lake, he’ll tear the motherfucker down. He wants to go back. He wants to know that what he saw was real, that the way Lucy felt wasn’t his imagination. The minutes with Lucy in that world felt better than any crazy trick, more visceral than anything else happening around him. His body might have been dying, but he felt alive. Really alive.

He knows that should scare him, but it doesn’t. “Oh. My. God. Colin!” a voice screeches behind him, and reflexively, he ducks his head, anticipating the set of claws that will run up his neck and into his hair.

Amanda grips his head and digs in her nails as she pulls him into a hug. “I heard you died for like an hour!”

“I didn’t die.”

“I have been freaking out, Colin. Freaking. Out.”

“Sorry,” he says, extracting himself from her clutches. Of course, Lucy chooses this exact moment to drift down the hall and settle beside him. She glances at Colin, then at Amanda, but where he expects raised eyebrows, he gets only an amused smirk.

“Hey,” she says.

“Hey.” He smiles at her, eyes lingering on her lips until she smiles outright. “That’s better.”

Amanda ignores Lucy. “Shelby called me last night and told me what happened. And, oh my God, I totally flipped out. Like, what if you had died? What if you had died, Colin? We would have been completely fli—”

“Amanda, have you met Lucy?” He interrupts, hoping she comes up for air. He’s embarrassed both for Amanda’s lack of manners and the Past-Colin who actually had sex with this girl.

Amanda regards Lucy as if she’s never seen her before. “Hey,” she says, uninterested, before turning back to Colin. “Did it hurt? Did you get all hot? And undress?”

He lifts an eyebrow in the way that Lucy likes and feels her slide closer.

“I didn’t undress,” he says.

Amanda has the gall to look disappointed. “Oh, good. I hear a lot of people do that when they’re hyperthermic.” “Hypo,” he mutters.

“I was getting there,” Lucy says, grinning up at him. “Just didn’t have enough time.”

Colin feigns shock, pressing his fingertips to his rounded lips. Out of the corner of his eye, he can see Amanda working up to something. She fills with an inhale, pulling together irritation and outrage and trying to coat it in indifference. “You were there?”

Lucy nods mildly at Amanda and stretches to kiss his jaw. “See you later.”

He waves, cursing Lucy under his breath for leaving him alone with his ex-girlfriend, though he can’t exactly blame her for not wanting to stay. With perfect timing, Amanda’s roommate approaches, wearing a sympathetic smile.

“Hey, Colin,” she says. “How are you?”

“I’m fine,” he answers, for the thousandth time today. But this time, he doesn’t mind as much. He’s always liked Liz. He owes her big-time for the damage control she managed after his breakup with Amanda “How are you?”

“Good,” she says simply. And right when Colin expects her to move on, she adds, “I had a cousin who fell through the ice. Up in Newfoundland.”

He nods, disappointed and already disengaged. He’s heard a variation of this story about half as many times today as he’s answered the obligatory “How are you?” What follows will be the predictable: You’re lucky you made it out alive. He was never the same again. She lost her left thumb, had permanent nerve damage in her face.

But he should have known Liz would break the mold. “He was unconscious on the ice for hours and lived.”

“What?” Amanda forgotten, he steps closer to Liz, surprising her so much she steps back into the wall.

“He fell in and managed to climb out, but it was four hours before he was found with no detectable pulse. At least, that’s what they guessed.”

“And he’s a vegetable?”

“No, that’s the weirdest part,” she says, smiling in a strange way that makes his skin hum. “He’s totally fine.”

By the end of the day, Colin is practically vibrating to talk to Lucy. It’s only when he sees her headed toward him and away from a mass of students walking to the trail, bundled up in holiday-themed scarves and hats, that he remembers tonight is the Winter Social.

“Where is everyone going?” Lucy asks once she reaches him, turning to watch the migration.

“The upperclassmen have this evil thing called Winter Social every year before the holiday. Everyone except us townies gets nostalgic and weepy over being separated for two whole weeks. The seniors decorate the overlook above the lake and—” “Our lake?”

He looks down at her and smiles at the possessive bite to her voice. “Yeah. But don’t worry. They don’t venture down to the lake itself. Nobody does,” he adds, hoping she hears the same in his. “They decorate the area on the hill above it and play horrible pop music, and everyone makes out with everyone else and then people start fighting because they’ve snuck in alcohol, so it turns into a giant drama.”

Lucy grins. “Sounds fun.”

“It’s a social at a boarding school. So, basically, you hang out with the same people, just half a mile away from where you usually hang out.”

Ignoring him, she says, “And it’s about time you took me on a date.”

“Trust me, Lucy. It’s not your thing.”

“How would you know?” Her grin turns seductive. “Being near the lake and kissing you sounds like my thing.”

He finds himself unable to argue with that reasoning.

A long path of battery-operated lights line the way to the overlook, and thousands more hang from every possible tree branch, illuminating the dozens of bodies that wave in swarms to the music blaring from four speakers flanking the area. The overlook is outlined with propped-up wreaths of holly, and everything in the surrounding area looks icy blue in the moonlight.

It’s hard to believe how close he is to where it happened, and Colin finds himself looking off into the distance, down the hill to the other side of the lake, where the ice opens up to the blackness below. There’s no way he’ll be able to see it from here, but he imagines the jagged hole surrounded by warning tape, the signs telling everyone to stay away. He wonders what it says about him that he’s not afraid, and rather than fear or dread at the memory of being plunged into the darkness, he feels longing and anticipation, the tease of adrenaline trickling through his veins.

Jay walks up beside them and stretches. “The lake looks so much smaller from up here.”

It feels like the world around them falls silent for a beat before Jay coughs, breaking the tension. Colin turns his attention back to the other students.

“Kiss me, Lucy. We’re under the mistletoe.” Jay makes exaggerated smooching sounds at her, pointing over his head to one of the many branches laden with plastic mistletoe.

Lucy pretends to stretch to kiss Jay’s face, but then runs away, feigning disgust. Colin watches, fascinated, as Jay chases her off down a small hill and she ducks behind a tree, laughing and shrieking when he tries to touch her. Colin has no idea how Jay would react if he felt Lucy’s skin against his, and even more, has no idea how she would react if he managed to actually grab her, but for the moment, she doesn’t seem concerned about it. It’s the first time Colin has ever seen Lucy act her age.

“Having fun?” he says when she returns. He can’t be imagining the pink flush to her cheeks, or the way she seems almost breathless with happiness. He can’t be imagining how substantial she feels when she presses against him, as if a solid girl is forming beneath the fog of her skin.

“The most. I have yet to see any flasks, kissing, or drama, though.”

Colin watches as Lucy bends to tie a loose shoelace on her boots. The boots are black, but tonight, under the lights and snow, they look iridescent. He wonders if everything becomes somewhat unearthly as soon as she puts it on.

“Ready to dance?” she asks.

“Not even a little.” He follows her anyway.

As Lucy dances, Colin wonders how she doesn’t stick out like a lit flare among the other, less graceful, students. Her hands move rhythmically over her head. Her feet glide, almost disconnected from the earth. She’s weightless as she playfully dances circles around him, lighting up with laughter. He’s never seen her like this, and it makes it easier for him to resist the pull he feels down the hill, toward the lake.

And then her smile fades for a beat, and her eyes move past him to edge of the overlook, the tipping point, sloping downhill. The lake feels like a throbbing beacon in the blackness. Her eyes turn the same warm amber they do when they lie side by side, and he can think about nothing but how badly he wants to kiss her. As he stares, she blinks up to him, caught.

“I was remembering what it was like,” she says, guilt draining her eyes to a soft gray, adding, “I’m so glad you’re okay.”

For whatever reason, her voice sounds fainter when she says this last part, and he knows exactly why. If she feels what he feels, she wants to walk downhill, into the shadows, if only to just look at the sharp cracks and cold, silent water beneath.

CHAPTER 23 HER

SHE’S STRADDLING HIS WAIST, BUTTONING AND unbuttoning the first half of his shirt, over and over, fascinated with how much concentration it takes.

She’s seen him do this with one hand in only a few seconds. But after he fell in the lake, it took him a week to be able to button his shirt easily.

She watches her fingers move along his chest and down across the toned lines of his stomach. Her flesh flickers between ivory and peachy opaque. She has no scars, no freckles, no bruises. Aside from the way her skin seems to glow and dim, there’s nothing that differentiates her from an airbrushed photograph. Colin’s hands are rough and damaged. He has a small birthmark on the back of his left wrist, scars across two knuckles on his right hand. He’s so obviously human, and she is so obviously not. She wonders for a flash what it’s like for him to see these differences now, after the lake and the snow, and their skin that felt the same. “What do you think I’m made of?” she asks.

“I think you’re made of awesome.”

“I mean, you’re mostly carbon. Nitrogen. Oxygen. Hydrogen. Some other stuff.”

“Probably a lot of other stuff.” He laughs. “I eat a lot of junk food.”

“But what am I?” She presses her hand to his chest again, brushes a curl off his forehead. Even when she’s trying as hard as she can to be still, she swears she can feel the collisions of thousands of molecules inside her. “I feel like my body is solid mass but . . . so different. Like I’m made up of the elements that happen to be hanging out in the air at any given moment.”

He slowly peeks up at her and smiles. “You’re definitely here, and you’re definitely different. I think I like your theory.” His eyes sparkle. “So I guess we should be glad you weren’t brought back somewhere near Chernobyl. You’d be even hotter.”

She laughs and he grins at his own cleverness, but their smiles fade as they stare at each other.

“When I kissed your cheek at the lake, before I went in, you were more solid,” he says.

She felt it, too. Felt stronger, more present. “Maybe it’s the water in the air. It’s drier here in your room with the heater on. If there’s more moisture in the air, there’s simply more content for my body to steal and use.”

He makes a sound in the back of his throat that sounds like agreement.

The question bubbles up, escapes. “What were you thinking when you found me on the trail but you were still in the lake . . . ?”

He blinks away, looking out the window. “I didn’t feel cold or hot or scared. I only wanted to find you.”

“Why don’t you seem to want to talk about this?” He pushes his hands behind his head. “Because I want to do it again.”

The sentence, finally and so plainly spoken aloud, echoes in his room, hanging like a thick, plastic curtain between them and coating the moment with a strange, leaden shadow. Her immediate reaction to his words is a paradoxical relief, so her response comes out thickly, like it’s fighting to stay on her tongue. “Colin, that is insane.”

“What do you mean?” he asks, sitting up so she’s forced to move off his lap. “I ended up on that trail, beneath your tree, Luce. There was something different about that world, something perfect. And you were there. It isn’t insane.” She tucks her legs under her and stares at him. Part of her—the part that is dark and tiny and dangerous—feels a thick, curling love for what he’s saying. He’s right; it wasn’t insane. For those few minutes, she could touch him, kiss him.

He was hers. On the trail, he was just like her.

And then she remembers that she’s supposed to be his Guardian, and a sharp spike of guilt shoots through her. “It was easy to find you,” he says. “Like we were meant to be there together.”

“Colin, I know what Henry says about me protecting you, but . . . I mean, you could have frozen to death. You could have drowned.”

He leans forward, carefully kissing her bare shoulder next to the strap of her top. He pushes it aside and kisses the spot where her heart should beat. What feels like pure white electricity shoots through her. She wants to put her hands in his hair and hold him there.

“I don’t think so,” he says. Lucy opens her mouth to argue the obvious, but when no words come out right away, Colin shakes his head. “Just listen. Okay?”

She nods, unable to protest convincingly. She has no idea how much time she has with him. It lends a certain urgency to every minute. She wants him in the water, on the trail, in the underwater starry sky, with her.

“What if I could go into the lake again and have an hour with you every now and then? Just us, curled up together in the snow. Luce, the world was crazy there. It was silver and light and, like, alive.” When he pauses, she can’t find words, and in her silence he barrels on, encouraged. “I have to see it again. Jay could come with us and pull me out fast. . . .” She remembers feeling his skin and his lips and his laughter. She remembers tasting his sounds and feeling how they fit. He kissed her like he was discovering a new vibrant color.

And while she remembers other kisses, smiles pressed tightly to hers, she knows it was never like this. Still, the temptation tastes wrong somehow, a vinegar-dipped sugar cube. “I don’t know if he would be up for that. . . .” She trails off shakily.

“After you walked away in the hall, this girl Liz came up.

She said her cousin fell into this lake in Newfoundland. He got out, but was unconscious on the ice for four hours.” Her eyes snap to his. “What?”

“Four,” he confirms, grinning at her reaction, as if she’s already signed on to this.

She stands, moving to fiddle with a cup full of pens on his desk. She lifts it easily, as if it weighs nothing. Before she has a chance to marvel at the achievement, he stands and walks over to her, buttoning his shirt.

“I read about the story, Luce. It’s true. It was all over the local news. And it’s happened before. Apparently, there’s at least one story about it every winter. The reporter is one of the guys on the forums now. He’s totally obsessed with it.” He puts a hot hand on her shoulder and squeezes gently, but this time she barely registers it. She wants more information. “I think if we’re careful, we can make it work. Plus,” he says, quieter now, “that kid didn’t even have a Guardian.” “If I let you do this, I’m not a Guardian,” she says, stepping out of his grip. “I’m something bad.” She tries to keep her voice light, but the truth keeps the words stark, blown bare like a smooth tree trunk.

“You’re definitely not bad,” he says with the kind of conviction that she’s certain she’ll never have. “Do you know how I know?”

She looks up and melts. In the dark room, his eyes are deep amber, his lashes long and his blink so slow and patient.

“How?”

“Because I’ve lost everyone I loved. Instead, I got you. The universe might have taken the others away, but it sent you back.”

“But don’t you ever wonder why you need a Guardian, and why it’s me?”

“I used to.” He glances out the window and then down at his shoes, kicking at something on the floor.

She watches him closely. With a small tug of anxiety beneath her ribs, she realizes he’s kept something from her.

“What changed?”

He looks up again and meets her eyes. “I think we’re connected because I was the kid who saw your murderer take you into the woods. I told Dot, and she called the police.” Lucy stills, her hands bracing on the desk chair behind her.

“Why didn’t you tell me this?”

Colin speaks over her, apologizing immediately. “I was afraid that if you had closure, if you knew all the details, that you’d go away.” He reaches out, touches her arm as if to convince himself that she is, indeed, still here.

“So they caught this guy because of you?”

He shrugs. “I think so. That’s what the article said, anyway.”

She feels her smile form on her face and spread down into her chest, where she never feels hollow when she’s with him. “I may have only a pocketful of memories about anything useful, but I do know one thing.”

“What’s that?”

“You were my Guardian first, then.”

His grin matches hers, but it has a distinctly cocky twist to it. “I like to think so.”

CHAPTER 24 HIM

C OLIN IS POSITIVE THAT LUCY IS INTO THE idea of returning to the lake. Her eyes are this crazy orange, as if her entire brain is on fire with the possibilities, and the light passes back through her irises like a telegraph to him: Do this. Do it.

“This can only end badly.” But her voice wavers a bit, and he wonders if it’s something she’s thought about before today too.

Days turn into weeks, and the snow keeps falling, blanketing everything that doesn’t move. Colin doesn’t push, doesn’t talk to Lucy about going into the lake anymore. Instead, their conversations slowly grow heavy with everything left unsaid.

One morning she asks him what he’s thinking about and his starkly honest answer, “How you felt on the trail,” makes her turn and walk away, arms crossed over her middle as if holding herself together.

But she finds him later, after class, a small apology in her eyes and in her smile.

He says his aloud. “Sorry. I know you don’t like the idea.” And holds her face between his palms, repeating it against her lips.

They walk together, hands entwined, back to his dorm. She reads on his bed while he does homework, lying on her stomach, her legs bent, feet slowly kicking back and forth. Colin gives up pretending to read for outright staring at her, remembering the trail, her hungry kisses, her solid weight. There was nothing insubstantial or unsatisfying about the kiss on the trail. He felt her laughter.

“Lucy.”

She hesitates before looking up, as if sensing something particular in his tone. “Mmm?”

He watches her fingertips stroking her collarbone while she stares at his hands. Her eyes flash warm and deep amber when she catches him looking at her throat, at the spot he first parted his lips and tasted her skin. It was sweet and the tiniest bit salty. She tasted of girl and rain and relief. He doesn’t say anything else, only looks at her, thinking, Please. Please.

“I can’t,” she says. “ You can’t.”

“Why?”

“I wouldn’t be able to live with myself if we did that.” He can’t help it. He smiles when she says this, and her mouth twitches at the corners.

“Colin, I’m serious.”

But he can’t stand the thought that it won’t happen again.

His curiosity feels like an itch across every inch of his skin. “I need to know if what I saw was real.” Her eyes melt to the color of warm honey before she turns back to her book, her fingers making a tight fist around his comforter.

“There’s nothing in the world as good as what happened on the trail,” he says.

When she looks up, she looks so miserable. “I know.”

“But we don’t have that here,” he whispers. “It isn’t the same.”

She squirms, pulling her hair over her shoulder and squinting at the words on the page in front of her. He ignores her feigned distraction, crawling toward her in a way that makes him feel like a predatory cat hunting prey.

“Lucy.”

Her eyes remain trained on the page. “What?”

“Let me try this.”

“Try what?”

He reaches for her, gently urging her to twist and lie on her back, easing her down onto his pillow.

It takes nothing to undress her. The slip of a button, a tug of a zipper. Soft fabric pulled over her head. He pinches a simple clasp and exposes a world of smooth, bare skin.

“I have an idea,” he assures her, his hands slipping her pants down her legs. “Just trust me, okay?”

“Okay.” She nods, watching him with eyes that churn a deep, coffee brown.

“I’ve given this some thought.”

She laughs, and it’s husky and low. “I bet you have.”

He tastes the skin of her ankle, her knee. Thigh. He blows a breath across where leg meets hip. “Is this okay?”

She nods, eyes wider than he’s ever seen them, and he simply exhales right where her legs are parted.

He doesn’t even have to pretend to breathe fast. He’s practically out of his mind with wanting this girl, watching her writhe below him. Her fingers find his hair and pull. Her back bows, and with one last puff of air across her skin, he hears a sound he’s never heard a girl make before, something between a sob and a plea. But still, he sits up and kisses her afterward, and apologizes.