Chapter 13
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
DAKOTA
“Put your swimsuit on,” Mason said as he walked back into his bedroom.
I shook my head, sliding further under his comforter.
He’d basically kidnapped me after my last class of the day, and I’d been held hostage at his apartment ever since.
Micah was irritated I didn’t show up to work in his lab when I was supposed to, but it wasn’t really my fault.
“No.”
“Yes.” He crossed the room in a few long steps, then snatched the corner of the comforter and ripped it off me, grabbing my ankles and yanking me down the bed. I gasped, hands grabbing pointlessly at the sheets. “You’ve gotta stop defying everything I say, baby.”
“Well, you never explained why I needed a swimsuit in the first place,” I argued as I pushed up to sitting on the edge of the mattress, brushing my hair out of my face. Mason stood at the end of the bed, towering over me, his face shadowed in the low light.
“There’s a pool here, and I want to swim with you.”
“It’s also cold outside,” I pointed out, but excitement was quickening my pulse, a low throb beginning between my thighs. The combination of Mason and water was so fucking dangerous, but so fucking addicting. It’d been too long.
“The pool is heated all year.”
“You just want to swim?”
“Yeah,” he said, his voice rougher as he threaded his fingers through my hair, holding the back of my head. “I won’t push you under.”
Liar.
I’d told myself I would never put myself back in this position again. I’d promised myself.
Memories of that fateful day flooded my mind. A cold beach, a dark ocean, rough hands on my body under the waves. Glass on the shore and blood dripping off my heel. Regret and terror and lust and hatred overtaking my brain.
I swallowed hard.
“Promise you won’t?” Promise you will?
“Promise.”
His eyes were locked on mine, dark and thrilling.
It felt like the first day I’d seen him, when he was a complete stranger to me, when I’d had no idea all the things he was about to do to me, all the ways he was going to fuck up my life.
He’d taken the tiny bit of safety I held in both hands and ripped it to shreds, tossed me into the deep end of my darkest fantasies, pried open my ribs and branded his ownership on my heart.
And now, months later, I was still here. Still willingly caught in his web.
There was a certain numbness to that thought.
I felt as if I fully acknowledged it, the spell would be broken.
Because I’d already gone over the edge, already stepped off the cliff, and I wasn’t sure what that meant now.
We’d never spoken about it again—or about him holding a gun to my head.
And we hadn’t done anything similar since.
Everything was unfinished, holding motionless in mid air, waiting for a small disturbance to shatter the illusion.
A drop of water to break the glassy surface.
Getting in the pool with him would be that spark.
I wasn’t sure if I was mentally ready to step back into this endless darkness with him, but when had he ever given me a choice? I’d never been mentally ready for anything he’d ever done to me.
“Fine,” I agreed and stood up, then grabbed my bikini from my bag and started undressing. Mason watched me silently, his heated gaze dragging all over my figure. I could barely get the strings tied, my hands were shaking so bad. My mouth was dry.
Yeah, I needed to touch that edge again.
The boundary of my own life.
Needed to be reminded of just how strong that feeling was.
Maybe this was what we needed. It could fix us, put us back in the place we’d been before the cliff and the gun. Where everything was terrifying in the exhilarating way instead of the exhausting way.
I finished dressing myself and Mason did the same, then we left his apartment with towels and nothing else. We stepped outside, the night sky arcing high above us, the cold air stealing my breath.
He tugged me along behind him, my flimsy flip flops slapping on the concrete as I tried to keep myself from stumbling. Goosebumps raced over all my bare skin, and my teeth started to chatter.
“It’s fucking cold,” I whispered.
“You won’t be cold for long.” Mason pulled me around the corner of the building to a gate, then unlocked it with the fob on his keys and pushed it open, the metal gliding smoothly.
We stepped into the pool area together, Mason’s hand grasping mine tighter and my eyes darting around to take in the scene. There were a few low lights in the water, but it was still mostly dark. Dark enough to see all the stars sprayed across the black sky, silver and twinkling.
A chilly gust of wind swirled around Mason and me as we walked past empty loungers and closed umbrellas. I hugged my bundled-up towel tighter to my chest.
We stopped at the edge of the pool and I set my towel down, then stepped out of my flip flops, looking expectantly up at Mason. There was some steam curling off the surface of the pool, illuminated by the lights in the water.
“Ready?” he asked.
But he didn’t give me a chance to answer before he picked me up and threw me in the pool.
A short squeal burst out of me the second before I hit the water, then it was swallowed by the rush of bubbles in my ears, my skin stinging from the impact. Hands found my waist almost immediately, and I was being pulled up out of the warm water, pulled against Mason’s hard body.
“You’re so fucking sexy,” he growled as he kissed me.
I instinctively wrapped my arms and legs around his body and he lowered us in the water, pleasant warmth surrounding me.
“What’s the longest you’ve ever held your breath?” I asked between wet kisses, clinging to him. His cock was getting hard, pressed to my center, nothing but the thin fabric of our swimsuits separating us.
“A long time.” He ducked his head to lick my neck, sucking my skin into his mouth.
“I know. You’ve said that. I wanted to know if you have a number of minutes—surely you’ve tracked it before.” I tilted my head back towards the sky as I canted my hips to grind on him a bit.
“Twenty one minutes and fifty nine seconds,” Mason answered, lips dragging up the side of my throat.
“That’s very specific.”
“You asked a specific question.”
“I know, but you could’ve rounded up to twenty two minutes or something,” I said as Mason straightened up to make eye contact with me again.
“But I’ve never held my breath for twenty two minutes. Maybe that single second is the difference between my life and my death. I wouldn’t know.”
Right.
He couldn’t feel those limits. I thought about that fact sometimes, but I never really thought about it. In all honesty, it freaked me out. A lot of things about Mason freaked me out, though that didn’t stop me from wanting to know more.
“What’s that like?”
“Normal,” Mason answered. “What’s it like for you to hold your breath?”
“Normal,” I echoed. “But that’s not really what I meant. You can still describe something that’s normal to you.”
“It feels good.”
“Like an orgasm?”
“No. Like…” He pushed his wet hair back off his face, then laughed. “Like you haven’t eaten all day and then you get to eat something really good. And it’s filling you up and bringing back your strength and energy. Or maybe drugs. Human drugs don’t affect me, so I can’t really compare.”
“Okay.” I laughed too, feeling freer the longer we were in the water together. “I didn’t know angels felt like shit after not eating.”
“One of the many downsides of living on Earth. I’m susceptible to normal ailments like hunger and bruises. Things last a little longer, hurt a little more, than they do in Heaven.”
“Not as much neon,” I guessed.
“Not even remotely close to as much.”
“So you don’t heal as fast.”
“Correct.”
“Still fast, though.”
“Also correct.”
More than once, I’d witnessed it firsthand. Cuts from my knife, gone before they should’ve been. Bruises, healed by the next day. The gold in his blood making it happen.
“Are we going to swim?” I asked, my cheeks pushed up with a little smile.
“Is that what you wanna do, baby?” Mason leaned closer. “You wanna swim with me?”
“Mm-hmm.” I nodded.
“Then let’s swim.” He slowly released his grip on my body and let me float away from him.
I spun around towards the deep end and dove into the water, feeling the warmth on my face as I kicked deeper, trailing my fingertips along the concrete bottom with my eyes barely open.
Everything was blurry and glowing from the hazy lights on the side walls.
The pressure on my head increased as I got deeper, my lungs compressed and my skull squeezed tight.
I pushed off the bottom towards the surface.
A hand caught my ankle and tugged me back down—only for a second, but long enough to make my pulse speed up.
I broke the surface, gasping as water dripped off my eyelashes.
“Mason,” I choked out.
He grabbed the back of my neck and hauled my mouth to his, firmly fitting his lips to mine without giving me a chance to catch my breath.
I softened for him, lips parting, tongue gliding along his, arms twisting around his neck.
Something about the water erased my worries, erased the persistent distance between us.
We understood each other here, speaking in our shared language of violence and drowning and sickness.
Or, that was what I liked to think.
I wiggled out of Mason’s grasp and dove under the water again, fluttering my legs, crawling forward with my arms. His palm skimmed up the back of my thigh, over my ass, settling on my waist as he yanked me toward him. He pressed his lips to mine, bubbles escaping my mouth when I smiled against him.
He flipped us so I was laying on top of him on my back, his arm banded around my chest as we rose.
I sucked in breaths of air in the few seconds Mason gave me before we were back below, pulling me with him along the bottom of the pool. My eyes stayed shut, but I could feel his strong body working as he swam, all his muscles flexing as we carved through the water.