Chapter 14
Calren saw us to our dorms to rest before lunch. We’d only have a few minutes, he said, and he stayed there with us until we were all in our rooms, but that was okay. We could still talk—if not now, then at night when the rest of The Ever was asleep.
But when I closed my door, I found I couldn’t even bring myself to lie down.
I felt like I was being watched—only it wasn’t a real eye that watched me.
It was a mechanical one—just like that heart I’d drawn for March.
I grabbed my sketchbook and sat at the coffee table, planning to keep busy so my mind didn’t get overwhelmed again with questions I still had no answers for—when someone knocked on the door.
My heart jumped.
Had Lida come to get me for lunch already—or was it the other Hands?
Another knock. Not Lida. I knew exactly how she knocked, and it wasn’t this.
I made it to the door in a blink, and when I pulled it open, March threw a quick look back at the hallway and stepped inside. Grabbed the door and pushed it closed behind him. Grabbed my hand and went deeper into the room, almost all the way to the bed.
Meanwhile, I watched him with my mouth open and my mind blank except for one thing: March is in my room.
“I wasn’t sure if someone was watching,” he said in a hushed voice and looked at the door for another second before he turned to me.
I could have sworn that he was surprised just then. In that split second when his eyes fell on my face, he looked surprised, like he hadn’t expected me to be there at all. Or to look the way I looked.
Which then made me self-conscious about my appearance and wish I’d taken a second to look in the mirror when I came back, but…
A hand around the back of my neck. My heart all but stopped.
March leaned in, whispered, “Are you okay?”
A silly question I didn’t know the answer to, and he didn’t wait. He pulled me in and hugged me instead.
Yes. My arms wrapped around him instantly like they belonged there. I’m okay now.
We sighed at the same time. I smiled against his chest at the thought that he felt the same relief I felt. Nothing had changed. It felt like that trial had done something to us, but it hadn’t. We were still us. We were still right where we were supposed to be.
Then March said, “What is that?”
His arms around my body loosened, and I raised my head to find him looking somewhere behind me—at the coffee table. And the sketchbook that I’d left open when I went to answer the door.
Right there on the first drawing—that of the mechanical heart.
“Oh.” Heat on my cheeks. I stepped aside and let go of him all too reluctantly. “That’s, um…it’s a sketch.”
He looked at me, thick brows raised, a small smile slowly stretching his lips as I watched, and I was envious just now. I wanted to claim his lips slowly like that, then all the way.
Time’s Teacups, I was envious of a smile. Maybe the trial did more damage than I realized.
“A sketch.”
My cheeks were hot-hot-hot. “Yes.” I cleared my throat and went to the table just to have something to do. “I made it for you, actually. It’s, uh…it’s the heart we saw in the junkyard. Here…”
He was already right behind me, and he didn’t wait for me to invite him to sit at all. He fell in the armchair and took the sketchbook on his lap, his eyes never leaving the page.
He was mesmerized. He barely blinked, barely breathed as he analyzed the shapes and the shadows of the sketch. I went and sat on the other side because my knees were slightly shaking.
I never much liked to show people my sketches. They were too personal. Something that belonged to me and me only. It was my mind out in the open without barriers, without an ounce of privacy. My thoughts raw and unfiltered. Personal.
But this was March.
I analyzed his profile as he analyzed the heart, and the question was at the tip of my tongue: would you sit there really still like that and let me draw you?
Of course, they never made it out of my lips.
“You can draw,” March said after a beat—not a question, just a statement. He wasn’t even surprised.
“I thought since…you know, we can’t take that thing out of the junkyard, this would serve as a reminder,” I muttered. “I tried to stick as close to the original as I could.”
“It’s identical.” March looked up at me, smiling.
My heart did strange things.
“It might need a little more work…” It didn’t. I’d exhausted my memory of it. It was indeed as identical to the real thing as it could get, but I needed something to say when he looked at me like that.
And he continued like he knew, those red and brown eyes warming me like sunlight.
I stood up—my body couldn’t handle it. My blood was rushing too fast. “You, uhm…you can take it. Just rip the page. You can—” And I moved to grab the sketchbook, but…
“No,” he cut me off, and closed it. “This stays here.”
Suddenly he put the sketchbook on the table and stood up, too.
His hand found the back of my head again.
Suddenly we were very, very close…
“It’s…it’s yours. You can have it. I made it for you,” I whispered, my eyes on his lips that were just there, begging to be kissed.
“I want it to stay right where it is, and since it’s mine, I can come and look at it whenever I want.
” He grinned and my knees shook. He came closer and closer until our lips were less than an inch apart.
His breath became my lifeline. I hung onto it, and he said, “Remember what I told you last time?”
Oh, but I did.
I nodded because I didn’t trust my voice not to break just now.
“Do you see it coming?”
Holy Hour, I was going to burst into flames. I was standing on my tiptoes, too, and I hadn’t even realized it, but I was holding onto his forearm with both my hands.
The next time I kiss you, you’ll see it coming. That’s what he said last time at the junkyard.
Another nod and three and five. I saw it coming clearly, was hoping for it, was begging for it with my whole body.
His grin spread. He moved, leaned up just a little, and pressed his lips on my forehead. Then the tip of my nose. Then my lips.
I didn’t breathe, didn’t move, only existed to feel in those seconds, until March deepened the kiss. His tongue licked my lips, pried them open slowly, gently, slipped inside my mouth.
From that moment on, I lost control of myself completely.
A moan escaped me when he wrapped his arm around my waist, and I grabbed his hair in my fists.
I was still on my tiptoes, but he held me up all by himself against his chest as he kissed me, explored my mouth like it was the most important thing he’d ever do.
He took everything he needed from me, and the deeper we kissed, the harder he crushed me against his chest, the more I wanted.
I was a mess ten seconds in. The world fell away like I was touching those masks again, only I didn’t disappear into a memory now.
I drowned in the most intense pleasure, something I never thought myself capable of feeling.
Yes, I’d kissed before, but none of it came even close to this. This was a whole world on its own.
Then March moved us.
I wouldn’t care if he took us to the top of a mountain or threw us off The Spill to fall for the rest of eternity. I was with him all the way so long as he kept kissing me like that. The taste of him was otherworldly. It became a reason to live all too fast.
But when the back of my legs hit the edge of the bed, I really did fall back without hesitation, and March fell with me.
He was not only in my room now, but he was also in my bed, on top of me.
My body could have belonged to someone else because I wasn’t thinking at all, yet my legs knew to wrap around his hips, and I pulled him down by the neck harder, wanted to get all the way under his skin.
His moans mixed with mine until I had no idea who they belonged to, the perfect background melody to this incredible story our bodies were currently telling each other.
My hips moved. I was grinding against him, and he was hard. I felt him right there between my center, and my moans turned louder, and the pleasure spilled all over me anew. Such an incredible feeling, I never wanted it to stop.
His hair was in my fist, his shirt in the other, and I was pulling it up, reaching underneath to touch his bare skin, the urge to know every detail on him almost overwhelming.
He growled and bit my lip, sucked on them gently and hard, pressed his hard cock against my center with more urgency each time, and then he pulled my tunic up, too.
Slipped a hand underneath, pressed his palm against my stomach.
I cried out, dug my fingers into his back, bit hard on his upper lip—all instinctual.
March didn’t complain. Instead, he pressed his hips down on me harder and moved his hand farther up.
He touched me, rough and gentle at the same time somehow, and he leaned up just a little on his elbow to give himself space.
My legs were locked tightly around his hips, though, and he never broke our kiss, so we remained connected.
But even while I was kissing and grinding against him, my breath was held until his hand closed over my breast and squeezed.
My bra was in the way, unfortunately, but I still felt the pressure.
I still showed him with every movement of my body, and with my other hand that had somehow closed over his forearm and kept pushing it down, that I wanted more.
March did, too.
He muttered words under his breath I didn’t understand. I was delirious with pleasure and there were stars behind my closed lids, and my mind was blissfully empty.
His hand slipped under my bra eventually, and I cried out in pleasure so loudly, I should have been afraid someone would hear. I wasn’t, though. I didn’t even care if a world out there existed so long as March kept doing this to me.