Chapter 25 Say The Words
Say The Words
…as they kiss, consume.
— WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, ROMEO AND JULIET
It took days to heal. Lucas only left my side to meet whatever requirements the Hunters demanded of him, but he always returned, greeting me with a kiss and a subtle hand to my forehead, checking for fever.
While he was gone, I rested and ate the food he left for me.
He removed the stitches after a couple more days, and my bruises faded from violet to yellow.
Moving grew easier, and I unsnarled the tangles from my hair with a hairbrush Lucas used to pretend was a knife.
I napped.
A lot.
Sometimes I woke to an empty house; other times, I opened my eyes to him lying beside me, sleeping or reading. It was so normal, like a war wasn’t happening right outside the window.
But it was.
The war remained the ghost in the room with us, haunting our every second together.
I’d never feared ghosts before, but now I was terrified.
Lucas Scott was a crisis of my faith. Short of a miracle, a great deal of pain loomed in my future, and I found myself praying to a deity I’d long forsaken to save us both from the inevitable.
No answer ever came.
“I should get back to headquarters soon, shouldn’t I?” I asked one evening, drowsing with his finger twirling a curl round and round.
His attention didn’t stray from his book. “You’ll go back when I say you can go back.”
I couldn’t stop the sleepy smile. “When will that be?”
“I’d prefer never.”
I peeked up at him. “You want to keep me forever, Lucas?”
He hummed noncommittally and turned a page.
“Theo will wonder where I am,” I said, scooting close enough that I could press a kiss to his shoulder.
“He knows you're safe.”
I stilled, my hand splaying over the pages of his book so he was forced to look at me. “What did you do?”
His brow lifted. “Who, me?”
“Lucas! Tell me.”
In a flash, he tossed the book aside and rolled until he had me caged beneath his body. His legs straddled my hips while he held my wrists in a loose grip against the mattress.
“Make me,” he said, and his treacherous mouth crushed mine in a hard kiss before he pulled away.
I would have—if I’d had the strength. I would have made him do a lot of things.
The heat in his eyes had only grown hotter as the days passed.
If he weren’t so afraid of injuring me, I was sure he’d have already surrendered to the magnet between us.
I had only to stare at him a certain way, and his gaze would light on fire.
Still, he resisted, and my patience waned. I wanted him, but I didn’t have the strength to act on it—a frustrating position.
After a week, once I could walk properly, he took me to his communications closet, where the carpet was stained brownish red with my blood. He’d long discarded my ruined fatigues, but he’d saved the objects in my pockets in a small drawer.
A switchblade. My dog tags. The bladed knuckles I’d dropped on the porch, still bloody.
My face burned as I stroked a well-worn note sitting in the middle of the pile.
Grief is like snow…
I never wanted him to know I kept it.
“I asked you to destroy that,” he said.
I nodded.
“But you were carrying it on you.”
I said nothing, my eyes cast down.
His voice grew stern. “Look at me, Sophia.”
The silence grated while he waited for me to oblige. Gathering every shred of courage, I lifted my chin, ready to argue.
“Do you always carry it with you?” he asked with deceptive nonchalance.
“Yes.”
A pained, intense blue flared in his eyes. “Why?”
The seconds slipped away while we stared at each other, and I swallowed down my chagrin. “I think I just…wanted you close to me.”
He cupped my cheek, searching my face. “I’m right here.”
“Right now,” I said, hating the sudden sting in my eyes. “But you aren’t, really. You’re nowhere. And everywhere.”
He wiped away the tears, studying me for several long, agonizing moments. His knuckles trailed down my throat. “I can’t make that uncertainty go away,” he murmured, the words tortured, his inability to give me what I wanted tormenting him.
Against my better judgement, my hands slid up his chest and anchored around his neck. “Just stay with me. It’s all I want.”
Again, the words slipped from his lips: “I will. Until I die.”
“That’s not good enough,” I whispered.
His forehead rested against mine. “It’s all I have.”
We stayed like that for a long time, but eventually, he pulled back like always, guiding me to the bed where he liked me best.
“I can’t stay tonight,” he said, once I was tucked under the covers.
I froze, searching his expression but finding no clues. “Why not?”
“Mission.”
I eased against the pillow, but every muscle had grown taut. “Dangerous?”
He shot me that familiar are-you-an-idiot face.
I grabbed his wrist, trying to tug him back to me. “No. Stay.”
He gave me a few inches, but didn’t relent. “I’ll come back.”
The tears reappeared. “You don’t know that.”
His hands landed on either side of me. He leaned close enough to kiss me, but he didn’t. “I will come back.”
Gazing into his eyes, I could see the sincerity etched within, but he could never be sure. I wouldn’t know which was my last moment with him until after he was gone.
His attention dipped to my mouth, but instead of kissing me, he retreated. “Rest,” he said and disappeared.
I slept in fits and starts, even my dreams punctuated with blood and death.
I startled awake sometime in the early morning when a weight depressed the mattress.
Lucas sat beside me, barely visible in the dark.
He still wore his Hunter black fatigues with the scarlet patch where the American flag should have been.
I glared at that patch for a long moment while he stared into space.
When he made no move to leave or come closer, I sat up.
His head turned slowly, and the second he met my eyes, I knew he’d returned to me from something terrible.
His bare expression was a pale smear in the surrounding blackness, but he looked…
fractured. Whatever he’d just done would haunt him, whether it was lives he’d taken or humans he’d imprisoned. They would live in his psyche forever.
I wanted to tell him it was okay, that he was only doing what he had to, but none of this was okay, and he didn’t have to do any of it.
He could choose death. He would’ve already chosen death, if not for me.
I was at fault here too. I wanted him alive, and in order to stay that way, this was the price.
“Lucas,” I whispered, setting a hand on his shoulder to cover the scarlet.
“Sophia,” he said, voice like gravel in the darkness.
His kiss took me by surprise, harsh and quick as it was, and I sucked in a gasp.
He cupped my neck and kissed me like everything would reset if only he could melt into me instead.
The kisses were long and hard and drugging, tasting of the same herbal peppermint as usual—the taste of his anxiety, the show of weakness that only I could see.
Perhaps it was the trauma of the mission or the culmination of days of self-deprivation, but something had unleashed him, and I could tell just by the strength of his grip on my neck that he wasn’t stopping this time.
He needed an outlet, and I was happy to give it to him.
I surrendered to his hands as they tugged me closer, melting into his touch.
In a blink, I was on my back, his body a cage above me.
Thrills of pleasure shot down my spine as his hungry gaze swept my face.
“Say what you want,” he said. “Out loud.”
“You.”
He seemed to like that word, or perhaps the needy way I said it, because his breath caught and he dipped closer until his mouth touched mine. “What do you want from me? Tonight? Right now?”
Heat flooded my insides, turning everything molten, and I hooked my good leg around him so he wouldn’t gain a sudden conscience and try to retreat again. “You know what I want, Lucas.”
“I need you to say the words.” He kissed a trail across my jaw to that sensitive place beneath my ear. The tingles were almost enough to distract me from his words.
What exactly had he witnessed this evening that had him begging for my consent?
“Lucas,” I grabbed his face, forcing him to look me in the eye. “I want you to fuck me.”
The aquamarine studied me closely, every hint of my expression and crevice around my eyes, but he made no attempt to comply.
Heart pounding, I counted twelve beats before he finally moved.
He dove under my loose T-shirt, hands greedy when they met my skin to slide the fabric up and away.
My obedient arms lifted as he stripped it from my body.
I lay beneath him in nothing but a pair of his boxers, while he remained fully dressed in Hunter fatigues.
I attacked the buttons of his evil shirt, wanting to tear that scarlet patch from his shoulder.
He distracted me with a kiss to the notch beneath my throat, then climbed the slope of my breast and took the peak into his mouth.
Pleasure arced, and I gave up on his buttons to thread my fingers into his waves.
He groaned when my fingernails raked over his scalp—the sound of a man starved for affection.
He palmed my other breast, and my hips bucked into him, seeking friction.
Desperate for more, I tugged harder at his shirt, but he ignored me.
His mouth released me, dipping to nibble the edge of my ribs and trail his tongue to my belly button and below.
Air whooshed from my lungs as I realized what he intended to do.
My subconscious had woven fantasies of this into the muscle fibers of my heart, but I’d barely allowed it purchase on my reality.
Now, fire scalded every surface of my skin as his fingers hooked around the elastic band and peeled it down my legs, careful of the healed wound.
Open-mouthed kisses trailed up the inside of my thigh as he spread my good leg wide and tugged me right to the edge of the bed.