Jade
Darkness rises in Logan’s expression again, but his darkness doesn’t look like anger, or cruelty, or anything else that darkness is supposed to look like. It looks like a starving creature that’s been locked in a cage for too long and just heard the door open.
He’s on me before I can take another breath.
His mouth is demanding against mine, his hands shove under my shirt and find skin, and my brain short-circuits because there’s no preamble, no slow escalation, no are you sure?
The deck is hard against my back as he pushes me down. My fingers dig into his shoulders. The electricity is already building, humming through my blood, silver sparks flickering at my fingertips—
His whole body goes taut, and when he lifts his head, his eyes are dark and dangerous.
“On lotus island, your magic was dormant,” he says, and his thumb traces my hipbone, making me tremble from the contact. “It was like having you without truly having you. Now, I want to feel you. All of you. I want you to channel your lightning into me.”
My brain stalls. “You what?”
“I want to feel your lightning when I’m inside you.” His fingers find my waistband and pull it down, his hand sliding between my thighs. When he finds how ready I am, the low, guttural sound he makes deep in his chest almost kills me.
Electricity surges up from beneath my stomach, buzzing across my skin. Sparks leap from my fingers and crackle along his forearm where he’s touching me, and I flinch because I’ve been trained to pull it back, to contain it, to shove it into a glass sphere before it hurts someone…
But that’s not what he wants right now. He wants the power that killed hellhounds and split the sky apart. He’s looking at me like it’s not a weapon or a curse, but like it’s the best part of me, and he’s been starving for it since the island took it away.
So, I take his other hand, press my palm to his, and push my magic into him.
Silver crackles up his arm, his pupils blow wide, and the sound that comes out of his mouth isn’t pain.
It’s very, very much not pain.
“Yes.” He breathes the word like I’ve given him oxygen after drowning. “Just like that.”
His muscles loosen and tighten at the same time, his breathing quickens, and his hands grip me harder, as if my lightning woke up nerve endings that were sleeping before I touched him.
Then his fingers are curling inside me, and my hips arch into his touch as more electricity arcs off my skin. The silver light illuminates the veins in his arms, his shoulders, and his chest, turning him into a god carved from lightning and shadow, and his whole body shudders into it.
“More.” It’s a demand bitten out through gritted teeth, his fingers twisting inside me at the same time.
So, I reach under his shirt, press my palm to his chest, and release a surge of it.
His free hand fists in my hair and pulls, tilting my head back, his mouth finding my neck.
But he’s shaking so much that he clearly can’t hold back any longer, because he moves my hand off his chest, fumbling with his pants and shifting his weight.
And then his fingers are gone, and the thick heat of him is pressing against my entrance, pushing inside faster than I can process.
Silver light erupts along every point our skin touches, a current flowing between us, resonating in the base of my spine as his hips slam forward to fill me completely.
He shudders, a full-body tremor, and the sound he makes against my throat is almost pained.
It’s like he’s been starving for this—like my lightning is the only thing that makes him feel alive.
His forehead drops to mine, his arms shaking. “You have no idea what this does to me,” he says, and then he starts to move, and I have to clamp my hand over my own mouth because the sounds threatening to come out of me would wake every person below deck and probably some of the fish.
“Do it again.” His eyes are fever-bright and wild and so beautiful it hurts to look at them. “Don’t hold back.”
Electricity arcs from my fingers into his chest, and his entire body lights up.
The current races through him like liquid silver, illuminating every vein beneath his skin, making him glow like he’s lightning wrapped in flesh.
His back bows. His head tips back. His throat works around a raw, ragged sound that pulses between my thighs.
His hips stutter, then slam forward so hard the deck creaks.
“Again.”
I send another pulse, stronger this time.
The silver light ripples across his chest, down his abs, and along his arms. He looks like a god.
He looks like a monster. He looks like every dangerous, beautiful thing I’ve been told not to touch, and I have my hands all over him and electricity surging from my skin, and I think I might become the storm itself.
“That’s it,” he growls with a feral edge that makes my toes curl. “That’s what you really are.”
Lightning explodes from my palms, the current ripping through him in a wave that makes his entire body convulse. His hips snap into me with bruising force, and his hand tightens in my hair until my scalp burns, the pain and pleasure blurring into a white-hot current that obliterates all thought.
“Logan, I’m—”
“I know.” His thumb finds that spot, pressing and circling, and his next thrust hits so deep I see stars. “Let go for me. I want to feel all of you.”
Those final words destroy me, my body clenching around him as pleasure rips through me in a cascading, devastating wave. The electricity races with it—silver lightning bursting from every inch of my skin in jagged, wild arcs that light him up like a supernova.
For one searing second, it’s like our nervous systems are connected.
I’m the lightning flooding his veins, the warmth rushing through his body, and then he’s burying himself deep with a groan he barely muffles against my shoulder.
His hips jerk with each pulse of his release, electricity arcing between us in waves, his body trembling with each new jolt as his warmth flows inside me.
Eventually, the last of the lightning flickers out beneath his skin, fading from his veins like dying embers.
He collapses against me, and we stay like that until the tremors fade and the silver light dies, and all that’s left is skin against skin and the sound of two people trying to remember how to breathe.
Then, there’s only water lapping against the hull, wood creaking, and wind whipping across the sails.
“You’re insane,” I murmur in his ear. “You literally asked me to electrocute you.”
“I asked you to make me feel alive.” He pulls back enough to look at me, and his expression makes my chest ache—an unguarded, cracked-open vulnerability I almost never see. “There’s a difference.”
“Is there?”
“Electrocution kills you.” His thumb traces my cheekbone, featherlight. “And trust me—that was the opposite of dying.”
I want to make a joke about how he’s being dramatic, or about how we scorched the deck and everyone’s going to see the burn marks in the morning and ask questions we absolutely cannot answer.
But his eyes are going soft at the edges, and I lose about forty IQ points and the ability to form complete sentences.
“We should move before someone comes up,” he says.
“Probably.”
Neither of us moves.
I laugh, and it comes out shaky and breathless. “We scorched the deck.”
He glances down at where the wood is blackened in a rough outline of our bodies, my electricity carved through in charred, crackling webs.
“I’ll sand it down before sunrise,” he says.
“You will not.”
“Would you prefer I tell them it was a lightning strike?”
“On a clear night?”
His mouth twitches, just barely. “Stranger things have happened on this boat.”
He has a point. Depressingly so.
Eventually, we untangle ourselves, straightening our clothes and trying to look like we weren’t doing exactly what we were doing.
My legs are shaky as he helps me to my feet, and I’m pretty sure my hair is a disaster, but it doesn’t matter.
All that matters is the loose, satisfied feeling in my limbs and the guilt and fear fading to a distant hum.
The stars twinkle as they swirl around the sky, rearranging themselves into different constellations.
And for the first time since we fled Blaze Academy, the peace in my heart is real.