Chapter Six
FOR A MOMENT, I thought the silence between us was so loud that he didn’t actually hear me. That he was lost, too, in the ringing that was in my ears and the hammering in my chest. Maybe he could even feel the way my pulse was taking on a drumming all its own.
Maybe I’d only imagined I’d said such a thing.
And maybe, I tried to reason with myself, I should be happy if that was the case.
I’d read enough to know that it wasn’t exactly a healthy thing to imprint on the first stranger who came around, especially when he’d been sent to take me out as a message to my father.
I didn’t have to read anything to understand that my attraction to Jovi was bad enough, but that this dawning belief that deep down, he and I were the same—
That wasn’t mentally challenged. That was straight up unhinged.
I’d been saved from my own worst impulses, I decided.
“Jovi,” I began, “the thing about—”
But I never finished that sentence.
Because he made a sound that I’d never heard before. It was deep and low. Animal.
It seemed to pour out of his skin, as if his bones were making their own kind of music in the only way they knew how. It was everywhere, a wilder sound than the ringing in my ears or that slamming heartbeat that I was surprised hadn’t catapulted me off the chair.
I heard it, I felt it, but more than that, I recognized it. I knew it. It was there, deep inside me, as if it had always been there. As if I had been made long ago to echo this thing in him.
That it only took meeting him. And now we could sing it out together.
That this was our song.
And we were made to sing it, just like this.
I knew this with every last cell in my body.
I thought he did, too. I was sure of it.
There was that look all over his beautiful face, that startled, astonished recognition that I could feel all over me. And deep inside me, too.
Jovi surged forward and took my face in his hands, lifting me up out of the chair and straight on up to my toes as his mouth covered mine.
I had never gone anywhere so willingly.
And the last rational thought I had was that I had truly never felt anything at all before this moment. Not one stray emotion. Not the faintest sensation.
Because this was everything.
It was every light, every color, every shade imaginable.
It was better than any song I’d ever heard or ever would.
And it was texture and need, swirling through me with a force that might have scared me a little if I wasn’t as wild for him as he was for me.
I could feel how much he wanted me.
It was the way he held me. It was the way he moved closer, pressing himself against me so I could return the favor. It was the urgency I could feel in every part of his body, mirroring mine.
Besides all this, his mouth was hard and demanding, stunning and perfect, and there was nothing the slightest bit tentative about the way he kissed me.
He kissed me the way he moved, lyrical and dangerous, deadly in every regard.
I wanted to put my arms around his neck, but I couldn’t. The chains prevented it and there was something about that restriction that made me surge against him even more, with a wildfire intensifying within me. Deep between my legs, I was alight.
Because this time, I could feel all those things I’d felt while face down on my bed, but it wasn’t the coverlet beneath me now.
This time I was pressing my breasts against the wall of his chest. This time I was finally getting drunk on the taste of him, finally understanding how the world could spin away and disappear, leaving only the way he licked into me and taught me how to do the same to him.
And it seemed to me that I was made for nothing at all save this.
If he pulled back and told me so, I would have believed him.
As if he was the flint and I was the match, and I was rubbing myself against him, desperate for that spark.
Yet I couldn’t think critically about that, or how to achieve it, or anything at all but the way he kissed me.
It was dirty. It was fantastic. He ate at my mouth, his hands moving my head where he wanted it, finding new angles, new fires, new ways to wreck us both. Everything was that dark, delirious heat, And nothing was neat or precise.
Nothing was cold.
We were scalding hot and burning brighter the longer it went on.
I wanted to kiss him forever.
I wanted to break free of the chains holding me and the ones I’d been locked in all my life and wrap myself around him. I wanted him with so much ferocity and certainty that I understood, at last, that I’d never truly wanted anything else in all my life.
He taught me how to kiss and how to yearn, all at once.
I could feel it everywhere. I could feel him like every slide of his tongue against mine was another way we were becoming one. As if we were melting into each other.
I could feel this in the breasts I rubbed against him, even in the hands that could not touch him.
I could feel it wind all the way around me, and burrow deep into me, and I understood that whatever happened between us back in my father’s house had been nothing more than gazing at an abyss through a safety glass.
This was something else.
This was a free fall.
There was nothing safe about this—about him—at all.
And I found it exhilarating. Magical.
Perfect.
Like I’d finally found my purpose.
His hands moved from my face to my neck, and I thought he was heading toward that choke he’d played with before. And I also thought…it would be all right.
If it happened now, it would be worth it.
But instead, Jovi pulled back.
He set me away from him, and the look on his face then was so ferocious that it made my legs feel weak—or perhaps it was just that he was the only thing holding me up.
Either way, I was something like grateful when I fell back down to take my seat in that chair. I expected him to thunder at me, do something terrible, or leave.
When he did none of the above, I decided I had no choice.
No choice but to honor all the terrible and wonderful and complicated things I could feel chasing around inside me. Because I really thought that despite his attempt to look as stone-faced as ever, what he actually looked like was shaken.
I knew that I was, and everything that had just happened suggested to me that he and I were more alike than not.
But I knew something else, too.
“Whatever you might think about the quality of life other people have, people who don’t live in our world,” I told him, my voice as measured as it could be when my mouth no longer felt like mine, “I haven’t lived in either one.
No fake security. Just the cages my father set out for me.
I’ve never felt more alive than I have tonight, Jovi. I didn’t know it was possible.”
He was so still then. So still, and yet I was sure that I could see that fire still hot and wild in his gaze.
I could still feel it burning in me.
“It seems like a waste,” I confessed. “To live twenty-two years but only really be alive for a few hours of one night.” And now the taste of him in my mouth was the only thing that I could think about.
The taste of him and the memory of his tongue moving on mine.
The way he held me so tight and the way he made the kiss go on and on and on.
“Tell me something, Jovi. What do I have to do to live?”
But that wasn’t really what I wanted. I didn’t want him to set me free on some shady boulevard in some city I’d only read about.
I wanted a very specific life with whatever time I had left.
So I decided I had to ask for it directly, because this was no time for playing games with the things I really wanted.
I might not get the chance to ask again.
I took a breath. “What do I have to do to live a little longer…with you?”
I watched him take a breath, and in such a rough way that I was immediately conscious of the fact that until that moment, I hadn’t actually seen him do anything so human and relatable as breathe. It was part of what made him so still, so scary.
I felt something in me shudder that here, now, he wasn’t the stone sculpture he’d been when I met him.
“There’s nothing you can do,” he gritted out at me, but there was something in his gaze—some kind of tortured longing—that told me otherwise.
“There must be something,” I argued, filled with a certainty that I knew didn’t make sense.
But what I did know was this thing between us was extraordinary.
If it wasn’t, he wouldn’t react to it the way he did.
He didn’t live in the same cage I did. He would know better, surely.
Yet here he stood, so I kept going. “Didn’t you tell me everyone is wicked and compromised? Surely that means you, too.”
There was something stark in his gaze. His face suddenly looked ravaged. “I am a man of vows.” But he said it like those vows hurt him. Like they were tearing him apart where he stood. “I can kill you, and I will.”
If I expected that to be the end of it, if I thought that he would do what he had been threatening—and hopefully fast—he didn’t.
Instead, he stayed there, gazing at me in that same raw and savage manner, then turned around and left me there in that empty room.
With nothing but the heat inside me to keep me company.
But I could hear him close the door behind him as he went. The way I hadn’t been able to hear any of the doors close behind us as we left my father’s house, a lot like there was more force behind it this time.
A lot like he was feeling exactly the same way I was.
I could admit that was satisfying.
Because I was pretty sure I’d just witnessed the Jovi version of storming off and slamming the door behind him.
Nothing could ever convince me that he hadn’t felt that kiss the same way I had.
That we weren’t both equally destroyed by it.
The only difference was, I wanted more. And while I suspected he might, too, he had vows.
It occurred to me then that he might have meant a specific set of vows. Marriage vows.