Chapter 7. Ophelia #3
I open my mouth to argue, but the weight of hundreds of eyes stops the words from coming out. Colette is stood beside Belladonna on the edge of the crowd, not a lick of surprise in their expressions.
Traitors.
Go. The word is sitting on the top of my tongue, heavy and uncomfortable.
The song changes to something softer, slower.
Even the staff that hurry around with trays of drinks seem to have frozen, suspended in time until Colette drags Vincenzo onto the dance floor.
“I’m sure Alex and Ophelia would love to have a dance?
” she says, loud enough for half the student body to hear.
I catch her gaze. I’ll murder you in your sleep, my glare says.
Not if you’re busy banging Alex, hers says back.
Alex’s hands settle on my waist, wide and scorching through the thin material of my dress. Panic flares up in my chest, frantic flames that lick the wall around my heart. “I don’t dance.”
I try to step back, but he has me ensnared in his grip, bright green eyes glittering with something that’s so comfortingly familiar that a shard of pain slices through my chest. “Alex.”
His fingers flex and unflex around my waist, as if testing that I’m real. The weight of so many eyes has my shoulders drooping, fighting that lifelong urge to fold in on myself and disappear. “Ophelia.”
“You agreed to leave.”
A small smile lifts his lips. “I was young and foolish back then.”
“Two days ago?” I breathe out, in disbelief.
He pulls me to his chest as more drunken couples surround us. His voice is a deep rumble beside my ear. “Yeah. Old news. Forget that ever happened.”
I fight to stay focused, fight to keep my brain still and steady when it feels like the rest of my body is being dragged into his orbit.
He doesn’t look good. His hand sliding down my back doesn’t set my blood on fire.
“It wasn’t foolish, Alex. It was the only sensible thing we’ve done in the last two months. ”
He lifts my hand in his, twirling me once.
When he drags me back to him, my back is pressed to his front, his arms snaking over the soft flesh of my stomach.
His lips press just beneath my ear, his next exhale bordering a moan.
My knees feel like they can’t be bothered to hold me up anymore.
“It was foolish,” he rasps, “because I’d have to be unthinkably stupid to give up on a chance with you. ”
My lashes drift shut as I revel for a split second in the feel of his warm, hard body around mine.
His scent soothes my senses, the rapid thrum of his heart against my back in perfect time with my own.
“And do you think you have a chance?” I ask, letting my hands slide behind me, clumsily finding their way beneath his jacket. “This isn’t Monopoly.”
His laugh is a husky, treacherous thing. The music seems to slow, suspended in treacle like the rest of the world around us. The hall is full of laughter and conversation, but I can hear our breath louder than anything else. “If it was, you’d be Mayfair.”
My head is swimming, a heady combination of alcohol and Alex Corbeau-Green’s hands that run up and down my body like he can’t get enough. “And you’d be in jail.”
“But I get three tries to get out, right?”
Fuck. “Not in this game.”
“I’ve used one,” he breathes, lips tracing the shell of my ear. Desire is a punishing drumbeat somewhere low in my belly. “And I won’t need a third.”
“You used your first when you almost hit me with your car.”
He spins me back to face him so fast that I’m pressed flush against him before I can blink. “That’s not fair. You were standing in the middle of the road.”
“When you ate the last Jelly Baby our first night together, then.”
The blush that accompanies his small, hopeful smile chips away at me. “One last chance to get out of jail, Twist. Please.”
I press my cheek to his chest, let out a ragged, tortured sigh.
Even with my eyes closed, I see it. The flash of a camera, jarring me out of whatever trance I was in. Another comes, and it’s too bright, too harsh, like that blinding light that hovers too close to your face at the dentist.
And here it is. Another reminder of why he and I are oil and water. Our worlds don’t mix. I pull my hands off the hard, warm muscles of his back like he’s on fire.
When I swing my eyes open, Vincenzo is punching the phone out of someone’s hand and Alex is hiding my face with his body. A few other students take pictures like this is the most interesting thing to happen all year, and I know they’ll be somewhere online before the evening is up.
“Fucking idiots,” Alex mutters, dragging me toward the bar.
But I don’t need a drink. I don’t need more eyes on me, more pictures of me traveling around the university’s depressing hallways. I need to get out. I yank myself from his grip, instead making a jog for the small wooden door to our right.
The rain is hammering down outside the castle, running down Sorrowsong’s rusty pipes and pattering through the dense tree line in front of me. I tip my head back, letting the icy droplets snatch my breath away in a desperate attempt to wash the sticky, hot desire from my body.
I hear the door clatter shut. My stomach sinks into the wet earth at my feet. “Just go.”
“No.”
“I—” My reply fizzles out on my tongue. “What?”
“No,” he breathes, as thunder rumbles above us. “I’m saying no, Ophelia.”
“We don’t get a happy ending.”
“Says who?”
“The universe!” I shout back, over the storm that whips my hair around my face. I turn away, anything to not have to see the look in his eyes. “Do you see the way they stare in there? We’re a car crash.”
A warm hand shoots out to grab my biceps before I can walk into the woods, away from him. “That’s bullshit, Ophelia.”
I spin to face him, snatching my arm from his grip. All I’ve given him so far is anger, but when my voice cuts through the howling of the wind, what I hear in it is the hurt and the insecurity that he put there on that miserable January morning. “You left me!”
“I know.”
“I never want you to have to choose again. I never want you to be split in two again. I never want to feel the way I did when you left again.”
“It won’t happen again.”
“How can you know that?”
He pulls me to him, sheltering me from the rain. His voice is softer now, barely audible over the howling wind. “Because every day that you’re not mine is knocking another year off my life.”
I rest my forehead against the soaking fabric of his shirt, feeling the thundering heart beneath.
I’d do anything to protect that heart. “It’s not just what happened last month.
It’s everything. It’s what your father did to me.
It’s the distance between us. I am a student, Alex.
You’re a CEO. We are worlds apart. I’ll hardly see you for the next few years.
I can’t get on a plane to see you, and I can’t ask you to spend time away from the girls. ”
I feel his cheek rest on the top of my head, the two of us standing outside Sorrowsong’s lichen-covered walls in the driving rain. I wish that being in his arms didn’t feel like coming home. “I’ll still see you.”
A couple times a year, if we’re lucky.
His hands slip beneath the low back of my dress, over my frozen skin. His shaky exhale warms the top of my head, voice ragged with desperation when it splinters our silence. “I need you. I can’t live without you.”
I sigh into the curve of his neck, a warm, dry haven in the violent storm. “Alex. We’re young. We don’t know what we need. We don’t know anything about anything.”
“Is that what this feels like to you?” he asks, hands sliding down to my hips, pressing my body against his. “A young, foolish fling?”
No. This feels like the beginning and end of the world.
The unbridled hope of a sunrise and the regret and closure of the sun sinking behind the horizon.
It feels like he’s holding the needle and thread to stitch up my broken heart.
If I let him in and he pulled away again, the thread would rip through the delicate flesh and leave me to bleed out on the floor.
But my judgement is clouded by lust, emboldened by the whisky I can still taste on my tongue.
Desire is a potent drug, and Alex seems to inject me with it.
He plants his soft lips at the point where my pulse drums in my neck and gently sucks, sending my head dropping back involuntarily.
His hand slips down the low back of my dress.
The thunder covers any noise he makes, but I feel the rumble of it in his throat. “Please.”
I walk him toward the wet stone wall behind us, legs wobbling.
“Give me until midnight. Three hours. Just give me three hours.”
Three hours. One hundred and eighty minutes to remind my lonely heart of what it feels like to be loved again.
I don’t know how anyone could be strong enough to resist.
His next kiss on my neck makes my knees buckle.
He pulls away, waiting for my answer with bated breath.
His wet hair tumbles down in tousled strands, the black ink on his chest peeking through the soaking fabric of his white dress shirt.
A fat raindrop seems to drip from his clumped lashes in slow motion as his gaze drops to my lips, asking, begging, wanting.
“Midnight,” I choke out, and his lips come crashing down on mine.
Nothing about the kiss feels young or foolish. His touch is rough and reverential all at once, spanning my neck and jaw to hold me in place. My skin turns to gold wherever his fingers sink into my flesh.
I push his blazer open, feeling the muscles of his abdomen tense beneath the crisp white cotton. The hand on my jaw squeezes gently, forcing my mouth to open just wide enough for him to deepen the kiss. Desire trickles down my spine, pooling in my lower stomach like warm honey.
God, I’ve missed this. But it’s not just this—I’ve missed him.