ten
His mouth tasted like safety and danger all at once.
He was right, it was straight out of a novel. It was… It was breathtaking, heart-stopping, life-altering. It was Laurie and Jo, Jo and Laurie and it felt right. Nothing had ever felt right until this moment.
His arms went around her back, her waist, circled her neck, traced the lines of her cheekbones. His lips never left hers as his hands ran all over her body almost frantically, as if he wanted to make sure she was real. As if he were trying to assure himself that she was not a dream.
As if he were hungry for her, and had been for a very very long time.
His lips parted, but he did not push her further. Instead, he waited for her to invite him in, and when she mirrored him and opened her mouth, even though the movement was slight, he moaned with a shudder and tipped her chin up. He explored her lips gently, visibly restraining himself, as she grappled with emotions so raw and new, she hardly knew what was happening to her.
All she knew was that she had lost her mind, and that she had never felt like this before. The fire inside her bones was simmering to a dull throb, almost aching in its deliciousness. He breathed into her lips, not breaking away even for air.
She could not feel her knees, and a slow weakness spread over her entire body, turning her bones into jelly. She was made of air and water—there was nothing to hold her up. She tried to sigh, or take in some air, but her lungs refused to function properly. She was dying.
Dying in his kiss.
This felt exactly like drowning in the ice had—except that she was now drowning in fire. And she did not want to stop.
Laurie—Laurie!—was holding her head with both hands, pushing her wet hair out of the way, his mouth hot, demanding, but gentle, waiting. His hand cradling her neck was the only thing holding her upright, but pretty soon she grew so heavy and boneless, that he had to slide his arm around her waist, then her hips. His grip grew tighter as he ran his tongue over her lips. He tried to keep her together, but she was falling apart against him, falling, falling…
Everything started to go deliciously dark, like a velvet sleep, drifting into moonlight…
“Love, if you go weak like that only by a kiss, then, so help me, I—”
Jo tried to open her eyes; she couldn’t.
I don’t faint, she thought.
But she was fainting in his arms—he was making her faint by his kiss, his touch. And she adored every second of it.
“Don’t stop,”
she tried to murmur, but she couldn’t speak. Her lips opened up more, inviting him in, and he immediately responded, exploring her mouth further and further. She groaned softly.
“More. Please.”
Laurie sighed and pulled her up, clean off the water, hoisted her onto him, and kissed her more hungrily, more desperately. Suddenly, this change came over him, and while he had been gentle until now, he became desperate, frantic. His mouth opened and closed over hers, tasting her, stopping short of biting her lip. He was like a drowning man inhaling air after three days lost at sea.
He murmured her name over and over again as he held her folded into his arms, pressing her body into his chest, and she leaned her head as far back as she could to enjoy as much of him as possible.
The ripples of weakness and—pleasure? Yes, pleasure—that were washing over her were so delicious they made her ache with a burning dullness she never wanted to stop.
I do not want this to end.
Finally, it did. The ocean of pleasure and longing that was as exquisite as it was excruciatingly painful was over in a second, leaving her disoriented and hungry. She opened her eyes. Laurie’s face was inches above hers. She could barely stand to look at him, he was so beautiful. His eyes, hooded, dark with desire and hunger, his lips absolutely ravaged, destroyed by her.
He let her slide down his body and land on the ground, and then he just stood there, panting, a wet, Greek god of a man, hanging upon her every expression, her every word.
“That was…”
she tried to say, but could go no further. Her heart was beating so fast, she could not breathe. Could not think.
She had to concentrate on growing bones back inside her body—on relearning how to stand by herself. It was most odious.
“I need more,”
he panted.
She did too.
She told him she did, only with her eyes, and he understood immediately. With a relieved sigh, he buried his head in her neck.
“Miss St. Claire,”
he murmured in a completely sensual way she had not thought him capable of.
“Please. Save me from this torment.”
He trailed his mouth over the delicate skin of her throat, his lips sending waves of heat down the length of her whole body. She moaned softly and his legs trembled. He spread them further apart and planted them on either side of her body, so that he could keep his balance in the shallow water, but she could feel him shaking with her every sigh, barely able to keep himself from falling to his knees.
He is the one about to faint now.
I did that. I did that to him, as he did it to me.
She had never felt like this, so small beside a man, and yet so utterly powerful. So dizzyingly in control of his every breath, every move. She turned her head, offering him her lips again, and he descended upon them with such hunger, it was as if she was about to be devoured. Or at least, she hoped she was.
He kissed her until she could not breathe, and neither could he, until their mouths felt melded together. Until she could not remember what she had been doing her whole life if she hadn’t been kissing her best friend.
When he started to explore the wet skin of her arm, he seemed to forcibly stop himself with a huge effort. Their lips parted, and he held himself slightly apart from her, as if he did not trust himself to keep touching her.
As if this was a point after which there would be no return.
“It will never be enough, Jo,”
he rasped, and his voice shook as a man’s does when he has been stretched to his very limit of endurance.
“Never, until the end of time.”
She murmured something unintelligible. She had definitely lost the power of speech.
How had I not known this? I who have read so many books?
This was what kissing was? This terrible, soul-crushing desire that started a fire in one’s stomach and did not end until it consumed one whole? This was what the poets all talked about? This fainting, this hungering, this burning?
This feeling alive?
No wonder no one ever wanted women to know about it until it was too late—and they were married to the highest bidder. No wonder it had started wars, set worlds on fire, and inspired the world’s greatest novels and poems—
“I have been building my willpower for years,”
Laurie gasped, “and you destroyed it with one look. You—I have been pulled from the depths of despair into the greatest joy known to man.”
Oh no.
Please don’t say—
“You scared me before, Jo,”
he went on, “as I have rarely been scared in my life. But you have thought better of it now, haven’t you?”
Oh no.
No no no no.
But he was going on.
“Tell me,”
Laurie was panting, coming closer, as if she were drawing him in like a siren. He buried his head in her neck, as he had done since they were teenagers. But now, he was trailing his lips on her throat. The sensation made her tremble, buckle, go utterly weak. Melt.
“Tell me you don’t want this forever. Tell me you didn’t feel anything.”
Ah, there it was.
The proposal.
Jo came crashing down to reality.
If he had doused her in frigid lake-water, it would not have woken her up more violently. She pushed him gently, and he stepped away from her at once. His eyes grew into pools of darkness, filling instantly with panic, and something colder. Harder.
Resentment.
“Answer me.”
His desperation was turning hard; soon it would irrevocably turn into anger. She knew it. She was watching it happen.
But she could not encourage him.
She could not do it for her life.
“Laurie…”
Don’t, she thought at him. Don’t make me say it.
“Answer me!”
he was screaming now, spitting a little, standing there in his wet clothes and drying curls, trembling with passion and anger.
He is losing me, she thought, as much as I am losing him.
“I felt nothing,” she said.
The change that came over him was immediate and violent. It was as if he became a different person, right there, in front of her eyes. Cold and full of bitterness. He let her go so abruptly, she fell on her hands and knees in the shallow water.
He knelt to help her to her feet, completely silent. Cold.
“You saved me once,”
he murmured into her hair, as he helped her walk to dry ground.
“You have killed me now.”
She just stood there, shivering, completely drenched once more.
She could not feel her limbs. She could not feel her lips. His kisses that had lit her on fire were frozen, as if they had never happened.
But they had. They had.
Coward.
‘I felt nothing,’ she had told him.
It was the only way to stop him from proposing again.
Why did you have to ruin everything? She thought furiously, wildly. She did not know who she thought it at—Laurie or herself. Both, probably.
Both.
“Get inside,”
Laurie’s voice, unrecognizable, said, as he turned his back to her. He began to pull the boat’s rope out.
“Now. You’ll catch your death and your father will kill me.”
“You know there is no one to care,” Jo said.
But if he heard her, he gave no indication.
Within seconds, he was gone.
Dear Beth,
‘I have been building my willpower for years, and you destroyed it with one look.’ Who talks like that?
I could die just thinking of the way his lips