Chapter 6
“This can’t be real.” The flimsy objection slips out as I cling to the possibility that it’s post-injury confusion or delusion brought on by the stress and lack of sleep.
He couldn’t have found me again. I used fake names, changed my hair, and bartered for my car. I was untraceable. Smoke in the wind. My pride stings a bit.
“Tell me. Does this feel real to you?” The pad of his thumb strokes across my bottom lip once again, the unique labyrinth of his fingerprint clear behind my closed eyes.
“Look. At. Me,” Hawthorne demands.
My eyes remain shut for several more seconds as I try to mentally prepare for the searing sting of bright overhead lights, but when I open them, the staggering clarity of Hawthorne’s gorgeous face is only illuminated in a soft warmth that makes the golden undertones of his brown skin glow and catches on his many piercings.
“Hello, Sol.” The nickname I haven’t heard in years is a mallet crashing through my denial. The steadying breath I was trying to take evacuates me in a sharp gust.
“How did you find me?” I hate the way my eyes flood with relief when I know that this reunion will be too short-lived.
“The how isn’t important. I was always going to find you; it was only a matter of time.” He runs a finger beneath the restraints around my wrist. I suppress the shudder that tingles in my shoulder blades.
“I told you to let me go. You were supposed to stay away.” Instead of the frustration I hope to convey, my words come out breathy and flustered.
“Told me. Supposed to.” His laugh is a painful rasp.
“You say that as if your leaving was a discussion, as if it was something we agreed to. You never gave me that chance. Now I’m not giving you a choice.
” His words aren’t angry, but they carry the weight of determination.
“Leaving a note. Running off in the middle of the night. Dictating the end of our relationship. After everything we’d been through…
” Hawthorne’s eyes are glassy as he looks up at me through the loose curls that fall across his forehead.
The distinct white streak in his dark hair is a reminder of the thing that stands between us.
“I deserved more than that. We deserved better.”
The criticism-averse part of me is alert, prickling at his admonition, and determined to shut him down. But as he watches me, his pain that calls to mine, buried as deep as it might be, it responds eagerly to his voice, overpowering that rebellious instinct.
“I did what I had to do,” I finally say, but it takes effort to summon the defense that I’m less sure of with every second that we share air, which is precisely why I’ve stayed away from him.
“And so am I,” Hawthorne sighs as he stands from his crouching position, leaning back against the table a few feet away.
The silence that follows is a yawning cavern that stretches between us.
For several minutes, he simply watches me while I try not to let my gaze rove over him in wonder. But we’re of the same mind.
His study of me is burning hot; a licking flame that catches at the tip of my toes and runs along every nerve ending in my body.
I lose the fight to remain stoic and succumb to the urge to stim to relieve some of the tension rioting within my body.
Each of my fingers takes its turn tapping against my thumb in quick succession, almost like they have a mind of their own.
With a few repetitions, I excise some of the nervous energy, the clashing tide of desire and overwhelm receding enough for me to focus on the conversation we need to have.
“Whatever you think you’re doing, it isn’t a good idea.” The words are barely out before he’s shaking his head in refusal. I chafe at his recklessness, his inability to let go. Even after all these years, he’s dead-set on defying fate.
Despite Ivan’s notable absence, like all things in my life, it’s too good to last.
“Listen to me, Hawthorne. You need to let me go. I have to put as much distance between us as possible. This was a mistake.”
“A mistake?” The word is rough and dirty as he rejects it.
“You have no idea what you’re bringing to your doorstep.”
“That’s never going to happen.” He crouches down, his fingers coming to gently cup my chin.
“There’s nothing worse than losing you again.
” His tongue drags over his full lower lip, a nervous tick of his that just happens to make my thighs clench.
His gaze homes in on the acute movement.
“If it’s so critical that you stay away, why were you so close? ”
“You call hours away close?”
“Yes. After years of keeping states between us, a couple hundred miles is close.” He leans into my space while pushing my hands up above my head until my wrists are resting against the back of my neck.
“I don’t think someone who truly wanted me to stay away would call me just to hear the sound of my voice. ”
“I didn’t—”
“Don’t you dare lie to me, Sol.” He shakes his head like he can’t bear the thought.
His knee rests on the chair, squeezing between my thighs and forcing them apart.
“You might have a lot of practice with deceiving yourself, but you’ll never be able to keep the truth from me.
I would know the sweet song of your breathing anywhere.
” He pulls out his phone, pausing as he navigates through some apps, then the sound of uneven breathing plays softly.
“Random numbers and the distance you put between you and the phone couldn’t distort the tune. Not when I listen to it while I sleep.”
The admission renders me speechless.
“When the calls stopped coming for months at a time, it was the only thing that held my sanity together.” His knee creeps closer, mere centimeters from where my pulse betrays me between my legs.
“But when those nights did come—and yes, I recall that they were all nights—were you drunk when you called?—they were the proof of life that restored my hope for just a bit longer. My heart was revived with each flash of unknown caller across the screen.”
“I don’t remember any of that.” Shaking fingers around strangers’ cell phones come to mind. “You’re right. I did drink the pain away some nights.”
“So, you admit, you missed me.”
The lie that I want to spew has claws and it digs them into my throat, refusing to be spoken. Instead, I settle for avoidance. “I missed familiarity. I missed my home.”
“I am your home.”
“Maybe you were once, but you can’t be anymore. I don’t have a home.”
“You said we were forever. Do you remember that?” A firm pressure sends a jolt of disorienting lightning through my body as his knee makes contact with my cunt.
The thick fabric of my leggings may as well be tissue paper.
My thoughts scramble when I can no longer drown out the blaring alarm of my racing pulse.
“I asked you a question, Solaneen. Do you remember the promise you made me?”
Tilting my head back and closing my eyes, I avoid the damning demand in his gaze. “We were young and naive, Hawthorne. We thought we had our entire lives ahead of us.”
“We still do.” I fight a moan as he leans into me, applying more pressure. God, it’s been so long since I’ve been touched.
“You wouldn’t say that if you knew everything that I do.”
“Try me.”
“There’s nothing you can do. Drop this. Untie me.”
“The only way I’m letting this go is if I drop dead.”
Pleasure and frustration tangle within me, making putting together coherent sentences even harder than usual.
“This is where our story ends. It should’ve ended a long time ago, but apparently, we love torturing each other.
Just a couple of masochists.” I grit my teeth as the entirety of my being quivers.
Pain radiates through my jaw and swells behind my eyes in silent protest.
“There is no end.” He grips my chin gently, forcing me to look right at him. “There’s only you and me.” His attention flicks to the keyhole tattoo in the center of my chest; the one that matches the antique key he has tattooed on the inside of his finger.
“Has our time apart made you doubt the depths of my devotion?” There’s an undercurrent of sorrow in his question. “Did you forget that there’s nothing I wouldn’t do for you? Even let you vanish into the night like an apparition because you asked it of me.”
I raise my bound wrists from my lap. “So much for that, huh?”
“Because it wasn’t what you truly wanted.
You told me over and over again in your own way, even if you didn’t mean to tell me, I heard your call and I answered accordingly.
” His thumb strokes the foliage that creeps up the side of my cheek.
“There’s no piece of myself I wouldn’t give to make us whole again. ”
“It’s never been about what you would and wouldn’t do for me. It’s about what I won’t allow you to sacrifice. I’m not willing to risk anything happening to you.”
“My sweet Nightingale, that decision isn’t yours to make anymore. It’s my turn. It’s time for you to put your trust in me.” His forehead meets mine. “Don’t you remember how good we are together?”
“I’ve changed, Hawthorne. More than you know.”
“Have you?” His knee slides forward another inch.
We hold one another’s gaze in a standoff.
“You can change your hair, cover your skin in more tattoos, even bury the most important parts of yourself under the rubble of your survival, I’d recognize you no matter what.
But more than that, you are mine, Solaneen.
Time, distance, and even death can’t change that.
” Soft lips vibrate against mine with his lowered, possessive tone.
“The woman you love is dead. Bury me and be done with it. Kill this incessant thing between us while you still have the chance.” An eerie stillness comes over him as if I’ve just poured magmatic granite through his veins, turning him to stone. His gaze hardens, eyes going cold and distant.
Have I finally shattered him? Concern lances through me sharp and hot, but before I can say anything, he snaps out of it.
“Leave,” he yells at whoever is on the other side of that glass, and then his eyes set on me, a burning desire there that sets my blood aflame and both of us tumbling into something that feels far too close to damnation.
We’ll be lucky if either of us survives this.