CASPIAN
I drag Blackwell to his cabin. The minute the door shuts, I push him back against the door. He’s frowning—the same frown that’s been on his face since we sailed away from Grythmoor. I know he’s been avoiding me. I know why. If I’m being honest, maybe I’ve been avoiding him too.
My thumb presses on his lower lip, sliding the pad across his skin, memorizing every line of his face, the fullness of his lips—
“Stop looking at me like that.” His voice is nothing but a breath between us.
“Like what?” I’m still looking at his lips, tracing my thumb along his jawline.
“Don’t make me say it.”
I look up at his eyes, shimmering with all the questions I don’t have the answers to. I close the few inches between us, my lips brushing against his.
“Then show me,” I whisper.
I suck his bottom lip, tugging it between my teeth. His breath hitches and he shoves me backwards, gripping my shirt as he comes with me. There’s a flurry of clothing being ripped off, hands on warm skin and lips that don’t ever want to leave each other.
His tongue finds mine, the kiss deepening until I can’t breath—the tightness in my chest won’t let up, and when he pulls back and looks at me with those dark eyes full of my ruin, my heart lurches into my throat.
The words are on the tip of my tongue. Words that confess my truths and bare my feelings.
Words that ask him to stay.
Instead, I shove my hands through his hair, studying every line of his face. I kiss along his jaw, down his neck, nipping his collarbone. I move lower, dragging his nipple between my teeth, watching his skin pebble, filing away every hitch of breath in case this is the last time I get to hear it.
I kiss the raised scar along his neck and he shivers, a soft exhale, his hands grip my hips hard enough to bruise. I kiss another scar, and another, my fingers following the ones my lips can’t. I want to worship him so he remembers what it’s like to feel revered.
“Caspian.”
He says my name like a prayer. It drags across my skin, both the blade and the balm.
When he can’t take my touch anymore, he pulls me to the bed.
Climbing over me, he kisses down my chest, trailing my own scars and mapping his own memories.
I see him linger along the scar on my side, his finger traces it before his tongue does and I shiver—both from his touch and the memory of him stitching that very wound.
When we can’t possibly take any more, where there’s nothing left to chart, nothing left to touch—we come together with a fierceness laced with possession. Both of us trying to tell the other what we can’t seem to put into words.
Every glance is a question. Every kiss is an answer.
We spend the next several hours lost in each other, trying to figure it all out and when at last, the knock on the door comes with the message that night has fallen and the Straights are in sight, we leave the cabin with aching hearts and an intense foreboding of the yawning future before us.