Chapter 22 #2
“Arrogant bastard,” I whisper, which only makes him smile wider. Then I step back and start to unbutton my pants. He does the same, unhooking his leather belt and tugging it free from his sturdy elvish britches. In tandem, we wiggle our legs free, letting fabric fall to wood.
Our eyes don’t leave each other the whole time.
Rain showers our near-naked bodies from every angle.
I know my bra and lace underwear are see-through by now.
He can see almost all of me: the soft skin of my stomach, with its dimples and folds.
The outline of my breasts, which, since coming to college, have grown to an embarrassingly unwieldy size.
I start to shrink back, nervous for what he’ll think of my curved human body.
Daerios grabs my wrist, keeping me from moving away. His eyes travel the length of my body, taking me in. There’s a fire to them, a hunger, and I feel it heating me from the inside out.
“Race you,” I whisper.
I turn and sprint for the end of the dock. But Daerios is faster, and just as I’m about to jump into the air, his body tackles mine. I screech with wild laughter as we spin through the air, hitting the water as one tangled mess.
It’s cold. Very cold. As cold as the rain should have been.
But as we burst to the surface, gasping in dual breaths of air, I find that I barely notice the cold.
I’m too distracted by the shape of Daerios’s shoulders in the skittering waves.
By his slicked-back black hair and the fullness of his lips.
I paddle toward him, stopping only when I’m close enough that our hands graze as we keep afloat.
“No,” he says at last.
“No, what?”
“No, partying and boating and fighting is not my favorite thing to do.”
I pause, blinking in the rain. “This is?”
“Yes, Quinn.” His arms snake around my waist, pulling me flush to his body. It’s only then that I realize he must be tall enough to stand on the ground, feet sunk in the soft earth. “This is.”
My legs wrap around his waist. Daerios lays one hand at the crook of the neck, pulls me in, and kisses me.
It’s rich and tender, his lips moving against mine as if trying to speak the unspeakable.
As if their soft curves could whisper silent secrets.
I press in deeper, trying to say that I hear him, that I want to know, that I want to know everything.
And then Daerios pulls back, laying his forehead against mine. I don’t open my eyes. His breath drifts over me, a mixture of vanilla and pine. Pressed up to his chest, I feel like an uncut diamond. Rough and shimmering, hiding a deeper beauty, the possibility to become something more.
He whispers, “We can’t leave.”
“Hm?” I’m hazy. I’m dust in his arms.
“We can’t ride back to campus. It’s too dangerous.”
This gets my attention. “What?” I pull back, leaving my arms and legs wrapped around his body.
“The storm isn’t clearing up. And even if it were, we couldn’t spend an hour riding Vorrok after a swim in this water. You’d risk falling ill.”
I let go of him, paddling furiously at the water. “And you didn’t think to tell me that before you let me charge into the lake?”
Daerios shrugs, that hellish smirk quirking one edge of his mouth.
“Fine, then.” I turn away from him, paddling back to the dock. This water does feel cold, now that I think about it. “I’ll call us an Uber.”
“No chance of getting an Uber out here,” says Daerios. “Trust me; I’ve looked before.”
“Oh, have you?” Placing both hands on the wood, I push myself up and swing one leg onto its surface, then the other.
“When? With all the other girls you’ve seduced into coming out here before?
” As soon as the words leave my mouth, my heart coils with the possibility of their truth.
What if I am just another girl he’s brought here on some weird facade of a date?
But when I turn around to glare down at him, Daerios is frowning. “I’ve never brought anyone else out here before.”
“Well, aren’t I special?” I spin around and stomp over to my clothes, which lay in a conspicuous pile beside his. “How the hell are we supposed to get back to campus, Daerios? We’ve just as much a chance of getting sick and dying by sleeping in the rain as we do riding through it.”
“Well…”
Daerios pauses for so long after speaking this single word that I turn to look at him, pants dangling from my fist. He’s out of the lake now, water dripping in thick rivulets down his muscled body and silk briefs.
One hand scratches the back of his head as he stares into the distance.
He looks so exquisite I could punch him.
“Well, what?” I demand, ignoring the heat gathering in my stomach again.
“There is another option. Besides returning to campus or sleeping outside.”
“What’s that?” I ask, then my mind flicks to Daerios and I accepting the room key at some Massachusetts hotel, and I officially want to die.
“I own a cabin here.”
For a moment, I’m too shocked to speak. Then, I repeat, “A cabin.”
“Yes. It’s like a home, but in the woods?”
“I know what a cabin is.” Rain slips down the fuming red of my cheeks. “What the hell, Daerios? Have you been plotting this the whole time?”
“Me?” One hand to chest, eyelashes fluttering. “Of course not. How could I have planned a rainstorm?”
I throw up my arms. “I don’t know! You’re an elf. Elves can do anything, as you so love to remind us humans.”
“I assure you, we are not meteorologists.”
“A likely story,” I grumble, crossing my arms over my bra.
“Listen.” Daerios strides down the dock, laying one hand on either of my arms. “I promise I didn’t plan this trip out here to lure you into some weird backwoods fantasy. I wasn’t even planning on taking you to the cabin. In fact, you’re the only person I’ve ever told about it.”
My arms loosen. “Really?”
“Really.”
“Not even Berendir?”
“Not even Berendir.”
“Why not?”
He pauses. Absentmindedly, one thumb runs up and down my arm. “Every piece of my life belongs to someone else. To my father, to my brothers, to the people of Elaerion. The cabin is…” He exhales. “No one else knows of its existence. It’s the only thing that’s truly mine.”
“Your escape.” I repeat my words from earlier. “It’s not just the lake. It’s a home, too.”
“Exactly.”
“And you’re trusting me with this secret.”
“I am.”
A spark of guilt lights at the back of my mind. He shouldn’t trust me with this secret. He shouldn’t trust me with anything. Every piece of himself that he shares with me is another that I will eventually shatter beneath my feet.
But do you really have to?
The voice appears from nowhere, a sultry murmur at the back of my mind.
Do you really have to betray him?
It would be so easy not to. To let this—whatever this is—continue on forever. Being with Daerios makes me feel both terrified and invincible at the same time, something I haven’t experienced since I left the gymnasium for the very last time. It’s magic.
Don’t betray him, Quinn. Don’t.
I don’t want to. God, I don’t want to.
But I have to. For Michael’s sake. I have to know if he’s still out there. I have to get him back if he is.
But those are Regular Quinn thoughts, and Regular Quinn is still at Harvard, probably bored to tears as she waits in Vorrok’s stall. At Spot Pond, I get to pretend. I get to pretend that I’m just a girl, and Daerios is just a boy, and this is just a rain storm on a dock in the heart of New England.
“Yes,” I say before I can stop myself. “Take me there.”