Chapter 9 #2
The kiss is wetter this time, messier from the water and the laughter still ringing around us, but no less sweet.
His grip tightens slightly where his hands hold my hips, anchoring me more securely against him as his mouth moves with mine.
The pool water shifts around us, cool against my legs, while the rest of him feels impossibly warm.
He tastes faintly like whatever he’d been drinking, something cleaner hidden beneath it. My hands tighten behind his neck, pulling him closer even though there is nowhere left to close.
The cheers come a second later.
Go figure.
Cheyenne lets out a shriek loud enough to shake the whole pool, before water hits us from both sides at once. Maria and Chey start splashing like maniacs, laughing too hard to aim properly, the kiss breaking as both of us laugh into it.
“Rude!” Kadin calls over his shoulder, still keeping one hand locked at my waist as he turns just enough to shield me from the worst of it.
That only encourages them.
Another wave crashes over us, soaking my shirt through completely now, plastering it tighter to my skin. Burying my face briefly against Kadin’s shoulder to escape the spray, I laugh in spite of myself as the water churns around us, the whole backyard dissolving into noise, light and movement.
Maria’s hands hit my shoulders with more force than I expect.
One second I am laughing, half-hidden against Kadin as water flies from every direction, the next the world tips. Cold swallows over my head in a sudden rush, the pool closing above me in a sheet of blue and silver.
The shock should send me scrambling upward immediately.
Instead, for a few suspended seconds, I let myself sink.
Everything softens under the surface. The noise of the party dulls into a distant, underwater pulse.
Bass turns into a low vibration I can feel more than hear.
The shrieks and laughter above me blur into something warped and far away.
My hair lifts, drifting around my face, my shirt tugging weightlessly against my body, the water pressing cool against every inch of exposed skin.
There is a strange kind of mercy in it.
No eyes. No expectations. No one asking anything of me.
Just silence. Just the ache in my lungs beginning to build, and the calm that always lives for a breath or two before instinct takes over.
Shapes move above me through the wavering light, broken apart by ripples and motion.
One figure cuts cleanly through the blur, larger than the others, moving with far more purpose than the splashing chaos around us.
At first, I assume it is Kadin. He had been closest. He had been holding me seconds earlier.
Then those hands find me.
They do not flutter at my waist. They do not hesitate.
They land firm.
A broad palm spans my side, then the other follows, fingers spreading over my waist with a steadiness that feels almost possessive even through the water.
The grip is stronger than I expect, more angry, the realization traveling through me before thought can catch up.
My body is drawn forward through the pool in one smooth, controlled pull until there is almost no space left between us.
The contact is immediate.
His chest presses into mine beneath the water, clothing heavy and shifting between us.
One of his hands slides slightly higher along my side as if to keep me from drifting away, thumb digging in just enough to anchor me there.
The movement is not rough, but it is certain, and certainty feels more dangerous than force ever could.
My breath stutters inside my chest.
The surface glows above us, fractured by light, but still, he does not let me go. There is a beat, maybe two, where we remain suspended like that, my body held to his beneath the water while everything around us disappears into blue silence.
Then he drives us upward.
Air crashes back over me as we break the surface. Dragging in a breath, I blink hard against water streaming into my eyes, my pulse beating too fast to feel entirely my own. One hand stays at my waist. The other comes up, sweeping wet hair back from my face with a slow, almost infuriating care.
Then both of his hands frame me fully.
Not Kadin.
Silas.
The shock hits so hard it wipes the world clean for a second.
He is standing in front of me, soaked through and fully clothed, as if he stepped into the pool without bothering to think about the consequences.
The dark flannel clings to the hard lines of his shoulders and chest, the shirt beneath it plastered to him so completely that every movement of his breathing shows through.
Wet fabric drags heavily over his arms, over the ink winding up his forearms, making the black trees there look even darker beneath the pool lights.
Water streams from his hair in uneven rivulets, dark curls loose now without the cap, sticking at his temples and forehead.
The faint scars there catch the blue glow before disappearing again beneath droplets.
He looks ruined.
He looks furious.
He looks beautiful enough to make me hate him for it.
His hands are warm despite the water, large and unyielding where they cup my face, thumbs resting just below my cheekbones as if he needs to make certain I am looking only at him.
The rest of the party keeps moving around us.
Bodies shove water into waves. Someone laughs too loudly near the deep end. Music thunders from the house.
It all fades.
Silas watches me with eyes gone dark, blurred at the edges by alcohol, sharpened at the center by something far more dangerous.
His breathing is measured, but not easy.
There is tension in the way his chest rises against the cling of wet fabric, in the set of his jaw, in the flex of his thumbs against my skin.
He dips closer.
Not enough to kiss. Not enough to touch his mouth to mine.
Just enough that I feel the heat of his breath on lips already chilled by the water.
“You don’t get to hide from me,” he says, his voice so low I almost feel it more than hear it.
The words slide straight through me.
Water laps at my shoulders as people move around us, but his body stays fixed in front of mine, creating a pocket of stillness in the middle of all that movement.
One of his hands leaves my face long enough to settle again at my waist, this time lower, fingers curving around the side of my hip beneath the water as though the pool itself might try to take me from him if he loosens his grip.
The touch makes my stomach tighten.
His gaze flicks once to my mouth.
Then back to my eyes.
“You don’t belong to him,” he whispers.
There is no room in his tone for teasing. No sarcasm to soften the blow.
Only possession.
Only anger.
Only that awful, scorching certainty that he means every word.
My hands have found his wrists without me realizing it. Not to shove him away. Not yet. My fingers close around the soaked sleeves of his flannel, feeling the heat of him beneath the drenched fabric, feeling the tension in the tendons there, the strength he is trying too hard to leash.
He notices.
Shit.
His eyes narrow slightly as my grip tightens, and for one breathless second neither of us moves. The water presses between our bodies, cool everywhere except where his hand holds my waist and his breath warms the space between our mouths.
Then a wave from somewhere behind us rolls into our backs, jostling me closer against him, the sudden contact dragging a sharp inhale out of me. His hand clamps reflexively at my hip, holding me steady, the noise that nearly leaves his throat dying somewhere behind clenched teeth.
The heat between us turns blinding.
And still he does not let me go.
The heat of him is everywhere.
In the hand locked around my waist beneath the water. In the breath slipping over my mouth. In the way his eyes hold mine as if looking away would count as losing something he has already decided belongs to him.
My pulse is so hard it feels visible.
“W-What are you doing?” The question leaves me softer than I intend, frayed at the edges by cold and shock.
His face dips just a fraction closer, close enough that if I tilt forward even slightly, our mouths will meet.
“Claiming,” he whispers.
The word doesn’t just land. It brands.
Something hot and violent flares low in my stomach, so immediate it frightens me. My grip tightens on his wrists instead of shoving him away.
He feels it.
Fuck me. What am I doing?
A dark satisfaction flickers behind the haze in his eyes, gone almost as quickly as it appears. The hand at my hip presses in harder beneath the water, fingers curving with bruising intention as if he wants to leave proof of himself there.
It would be so easy, in this one terrible second, to stay exactly where I am.
To let the noise around us disappear completely.
To let his mouth finally close the distance, just to see what it would do to him.
Then a scream cuts through the backyard.
Not playful. Not drunk. Not the sharp shriek of someone being dunked or splashed.
It’s real… panicked.
“We need help!”
The sound tears through the moment like shattering glass.
Everything in me recoils at once, my body going cold in a way the pool never managed. The words hit some old, rotten place inside my chest, ripping it wide open.
Outside the water, near the patio, a cluster of bodies surges backward. Someone is on the ground.
My lungs seize.
No.
No, no, no.
That night rushes up so fast I almost choke on it. Stained carpet. My mother’s lips turning blue. The gurgling in her throat. The phone slipping in my hand while the 911 operator kept saying my name like she could somehow reach through the line and force me to move.
That isn’t intoxication, that’s-
The thought doesn’t even finish.
“Overdose,” Silas says quietly.
The word is already there before I can force it out, spoken in that same low voice that had been against my mouth a second ago, except now it is stripped clean of heat. No possessiveness. No anger. Just recognition.
“He’s overdosing.”
The hand at my waist is gone.
The loss of it is abrupt enough to feel like being dropped.
Silas moves away from me before the water has fully settled, turning in one swift motion, cutting through the pool toward the edge with a speed that sends waves slamming into my ribs.
He doesn’t look back. He doesn’t hesitate.
Water pours off him as he hauls himself out, soaked clothes clinging to every line of him as he pushes through the crowd gathering around the boy on the patio.
I stay exactly where I am for half a beat too long, chest tight, ears ringing, the whole world collapsing inward around the shape of one terrible memory.
This backyard is no longer a party… it’s a crime scene.