Chapter 33
Chapter Thirty-Three
The warmth of the library wraps around me. Between these shelves, time moves differently. I’m not the outsider, or the homeless kid. I’m just another shadow among shadows, losing myself in words that make more sense than life.
Paradise Lost sits open on my lap, but I’m not seeing Milton’s words.
I’m thinking about last night. It was cold, too cold.
My muscles ache from sleeping on the ground, I have a constant headache.
I can’t remember the last time I slept properly.
But it didn’t matter last night. It was worth it. Because she was with me.
Her scent hits me first, and my body responds before my mind catches up, heart stumbling over itself, skin warming because it knows she’s near. These days, she’s written into my skin, carved into places I didn’t know could feel anything.
She appears at the end of the row, moving with the confidence of someone who knows what she does to me.
Last night, she traced constellations on my skin, connecting invisible stars with her fingertips, while we lay tangled in blankets she’d brought with her for warmth. The memory of her touch still burns.
“Found you.” Her whisper carries through the quiet.
The space between us crackles with energy. Ever since that night, her birthday when everything changed, touching her has become as necessary as breathing. As dangerous as dreaming.
She settles in the chair beside me, but that isn’t close enough. Not anymore.
“Paradise Lost?” Her fingers brush mine as she touches the page, and the contact sends heat straight through me. “A little heavy for lunch time reading.”
“I needed something to focus on.” Something other than the memories of how she feels when she’s in my arms.
“How’s that working out for you?” Her voice is teasing as she shifts closer, her thigh pressing against mine.
Instead of answering, I stretch out an arm and wrap it around her waist. She comes willingly when I pull her closer, lifting her onto my lap. The book falls forgotten as she threads her fingers through my hair.
“We’re hidden here.” Her breath fans across my lips. “No one comes to this section.”
When she kisses me, everything else fades away. The cold, the thoughts of what I need to do to survive. It all disappears beneath the touch of her mouth. She tastes sweet, and it makes me forget why I shouldn’t want this.
She twists, straddling my legs, and rocks her hips against me in a slow roll. Stars explode behind my eyes. My fingers slide under her sweater, finding warm skin, and she shivers, pressing closer, until I can feel her heart beating beneath my palm.
“Ronan.” She presses kisses along my jaw. “Can I come to the factory tonight?”
I should say no. But her skin is like silk beneath my fingers, and her eyes hold the promise of a future I’ve never allowed myself to imagine.
“Please?” She rocks against me again, and coherent thought scatters. “I need you.”
Those three words undo me every single time. She shouldn’t need me, or want me. She shouldn’t look at me as though I’m something worth having.
“Okay.” The word comes out rough. “Tonight.”
Her smile lights up the darkness inside me.
Later, after school, when the sun has set, she arrives carrying her backpack, and more blankets.
“It’s freezing in here.” Her voice carries worry, the way it always does with each temperature drop as winter takes hold.
She drops her things and moves into my arms, winding hers around me and pressing close. “How are you not frozen solid?”
I don’t tell her that I am. The cold burrows so deep sometimes that I forget what warm feels like. Instead, I bury my face into her hair, breathing in the scent of her shampoo. “Used to it.”
After a moment, she steps out of my arms and spreads out the blankets.
We’ve done this enough times that she knows how to create our own private world.
One blanket on top of the two I already have, making a barrier against the floor that steals heat.
Two to wrap around us. Her backpack becomes a pillow.
When she pulls me down to her, the world narrows to just this. Her skin against mine, her hands on my body, her lips finding mine. She kisses me, pouring heat straight into my blood.
“Touch me.” Her voice is needy. “Please, Ronan.”
I slide my hands under her hoodie, finding bare skin.
She shivers as my cold fingers move over her—the curve of her waist, the ridges of her spine, all the places that make her arch and whimper.
My fingers are always cold these days, no matter how long I’m indoors. But she never flinches away from them.
“You’re thinking too hard again.” She cups my face, thumbs stroking over my cheeks. In the dim light, her eyes look black. “Stay with me. Here. Now.”
I catch her wrist, kissing the pulse point. It races beneath my tongue. “I’m here, Phare.”
“Are you?” She rolls her hips.
Instead of answering her, I kiss her. She opens for me, tongue sliding against mine as she tangles her fingers into my hair. The kiss turns desperate, messy. Heat and need colliding.
When she tugs at my hair, I growl against her mouth.
“Off.” She pulls at my shirt between kisses. “I need to feel you.”
I let her strip me, even though it’s freezing, because it means she’ll put her hands on me and I’ll forget about everything except how she feels.
“God, look at you.” Her fingers find the scar beneath my ribs—a souvenir from one of Rick’s rages. But she doesn’t see ugly marks of survival, she sees stories. Sees me. “You’re so beautiful.”
The word should make me flinch. Beautiful isn’t for boys like me. Yet she says it with absolute conviction, something she believes with her whole heart.
I capture her mouth again, swallowing whatever else she might say. My hands slide up until I cup her breasts, and she arches into my touch with a broken moan that echoes off the walls.
“Shhh.” I smile against her lips. “Someone might hear you.”
“I don’t care.” She rocks against me harder. “I need you. Please.”
I strip the hoodie off her, leaving her bare from the waist up. Moonlight through the window paints silver across her skin as she moves. Her nipples pebble in the cold, and goosebumps rise on her arms, but she doesn’t complain. My mouth finds her throat, nipping gently at the pulse hammering there.
“Ronan, please.”
I know what she needs. I’ve learned every sound she makes, every way her body moves. I know how to touch her, taste her, and take her apart until she forgets everything except my name.
She comes with my name on her lips, shaking in my arms, nails leaving marks in my shoulders that will still be there tomorrow. I hold her through it, whispering poetry against her skin.
After, she curls against my chest, her breathing slowing. I wrap the blankets tighter around us, trying to keep her warm. Her fingers trace patterns on my skin.
“Tell me something true.” Her words ghost across my collarbone. It’s our game, started that first night when I couldn’t find words for what she’d given me.
“I dream about mornings.” The confession spills out before I can catch it. “Real ones. Not stolen moments before school. Waking up with you. Making coffee. Watching you steal the crossword before I can get to it.”
She props herself up on one elbow, the blanket slipping down, her eyes searching mine. “Yeah?”
“Yeah.” My fingers trace a circle around her nipple. “I dream about having a real place. Somewhere with a porch, where we could sit in the rain and read. Rooms full of books. A bed that’s ours.”
She lowers herself against me, head on my chest, fingers walking up and down my ribs. Sometimes she adds her own dreams. A garden full of flowers and herbs, a cat that sleeps in patches of sunlight, photographs on the wall that tell the story of us.
“Tell me more.”
I curve my hand over her waist. “I kept your note. The first one. About the library copy of Steinbeck.”
“You did?”
“Yeah. Read it so many times the paper is falling apart.”
“Why?” She leans more into my touch.
Because it was the first time someone saw beyond the image I showed to the world.
I don’t say that. Instead, I kiss a path along the curve of her throat.
She makes sounds that echo around the room, soft and needy. Her fingers tangle in my hair again as I move lower. I spell letters over her breasts, her stomach, her thighs with my fingertips, while my tongue and lips taste other parts of her.
“Ronan.” My name is a gasp. “What are you writing?”
I smile against her skin. “Byron.”
Kissing along her inner thigh, I move inward until I reach my destination. I sweep my tongue over her, pressing my lips against her.
“She walks in beauty, like the night.” My tongue touches her clit as I push two fingers inside her. “Of cloudless climes and starry night.” I curl my fingers, finding that spot that makes her back arch. “And all that’s best of dark and bright, meet in her aspect and her eyes.”
Her soft laugh turns into a moan.
“You and your poetry.”
“You inspire it.” She makes me want to write endless verses about the way the moonlight turns her skin to pearl, how her eyes hold entire universes, and how her touch makes me believe in impossible things.
We lose ourselves in each other again, while her hands roam over my body, holding me close as though she’s afraid I might disappear if she doesn’t hold on tight enough.
I know the feeling.
“I want to give you more than this.”
She kisses my chest, just above my heart. “I don’t need more than this.” Her fingers stroke over my jaw. “I just need you.”