Chapter 16 Unfiltered #2
He grunted, then bent down to slide his arms around my shoulders and under my legs, picking me up by my knees and upper back, like he had the first time. He pulled me to his chest and began walking me over the tall grass.
“You’re sure no one’s here?” I slurred. I could already feel my muscles turning back to jelly, now that the adrenaline was leaving them for the second time.
He didn’t answer that, either.
I leaned my face back against his shoulder and closed my eyes.
He smelled like fire-smoke and cloves, what might have been hard alcohol and something else, something I couldn’t identify.
It had to be cologne, I decided. Probably something posh and expensive that no other mage in Malcroix was allowed to wear.
He snorted a little, but didn’t speak.
I snuggled into his jacket and sighed. I stopped trying to think, to care.
That time, I know I passed out.
My eyes opened just enough to confuse me. I stared up at a dark canopy over the bed where I lay, a high ceiling covered in stars, in a room that definitely wasn’t mine.
Strangely it wasn’t the unfamiliarity of the room that bothered me.
It was a groan I heard, somewhere else in the room.
I pushed myself up on my hands, arms trembling.
My mind still swam, if anything, worse than before.
I looked across the room, my eyes filled with a strange light, a blinding light I could scarcely see past. I saw him sprawled in a chair, though.
I saw the black crystal over him, the smoke and flame that seemed to always ripple in an invisible wind.
His arms were spread, his hands down, as if gripping the sides of the armchair.
He groaned again, his body arching, as if in some great pain.
He wore a white shirt, something close to a T-shirt, but I could see the scars on the top of his chest and on his arm above the dragon tattoo.
He’d either forgotten to charm them, or hadn’t bothered, given how much of his skin remained covered under the suit he’d been wearing earlier.
The scars shone strangely silver under the star illusion he had all over his ceiling.
I didn’t even try to think before I did it. I’m not sure anything I could have managed right then would have qualified as thinking, anyway.
I pushed and pulled myself to the side of the mattress with my arms, hands, legs. I climbed carefully down, and pressed the soles of my bare feet to the cold wood.
I didn’t walk well. It felt more like stumble-falling in his general direction.
But I made it to where he was and climbed into his lap in the chair.
I wrapped my arms around his torso, and laid my head on his shoulder.
He jerked when I first sat on him, then tensed, then abruptly relaxed.
His hand coiled into my hair, and his fingers gripped me against his chest.
For a long-feeling few moments, he didn’t move other than that.
I felt him breathing harder, like I’d woken him from a bad dream, or, maybe more likely, like I’d startled him, and he was still coming down from the shock of finding me sitting on him.
I was just dozing off when he cleared his throat.
“I think you’re missing the purpose of me sleeping here, Shadow,” he said by my ear. “Rather than in my actual bed.”
I thought about that.
I couldn’t make myself focus on it long enough to puzzle it out.
“Then sleep in the bed,” I told him.
He didn’t answer.
When I still hadn’t made any kind of effort to get off him, he dropped his hand from my hair and wrapped his arm around my back.
Heaving himself up off the chair, he brought me with him, holding me against his chest for the third time in what couldn’t have been very many hours.
He walked us back to the canopied monstrosity of his bed, which I realized stood next to a floor-to-ceiling window filled with moonlight.
His window looked out on nearly the same view I had from my own bedroom, yet his room was absolutely enormous, even compared to mine. I’d never seen windows like his in any part of Valarian, either, including on any of the mage floors.
All of that left my mind when he placed me carefully back on the open side of his bed. He started to straighten, and, unthinking, I grabbed his wrist.
He froze.
“Don’t go back to the chair,” I said, my voice half a mumble. “Won’t bother you. Promise. Won’t even breathe on you, if you don’t want.”
His gold eyes rippled briefly with a lick of those liquid flames.
For a few long seconds, he just looked at me, and didn’t try to pull away. When he finally moved back, removing his wrist from my fingers, I felt myself shrinking, certain he’d go back to the chair, back to his nightmares and whatever he preferred to me.
He didn’t, though.
I watched, silent, as he walked around to the other side of the mattress.
As he circled the bed, he reached back, and pulled his shirt up over his head from the back collar.
He tossed it aside, his eyes back on my face as he yanked the duvet and blanket back on that side of the bed.
He was still watching me as he crawled underneath and wrapped the duvet, blanket, and sheet around behind his bare back.
He remained on that side, his gold eyes faintly glowing, until I climbed under the blankets and pulled them over and around my body, too.
Then he slid towards me, his face still strangely blank, despite that odd, mesmerizing fire in his irises, and a faint tautness to his jaw.
I didn’t move but just waited until he’d gotten close enough to wrap his arms around me.
Once he had ahold of me, he yanked me up against his bare chest, nearly rough with me for the first time.
I didn’t let myself think about why he did it.
I didn’t want to think about any of it.
I doubted he did, either, so I was surprised when he spoke, his deep voice rumbling into my ears from somewhere in his chest.
“Why?” he asked.
I didn’t raise my head. I didn’t ask him to explain what he meant.
Honestly, I didn’t really need or want him to clarify.
Words came out of my mouth once my cheek rested on his bare chest.
“You were my friend,” I said, my voice blurred.
He stiffened.
I practically felt the conflict whisper around him, something like despair mixed with anger and a harder refusal.
“No,” he said. “I wasn’t.”
I don’t know how I would have reacted to that, if I’d not been exhausted and half-drunk, with my mind dipping and roiling from the drug, or if I’d eaten anything at all. As it was, the answer to me felt obvious, to the point where I found his protests ridiculous.
“Yes, you were,” I said. “We were. And you ran away.”
There was a moment where he just lied there on his back, breathing.
I felt conflict on him again, right before his arms gripped me tighter.
He pulled me against him, shifting his body so that every part of his side pressed into some part of me.
I’d just closed my eyes against his chest when he wrapped his hand into my hair again, clutching me closer as his other hand wrapped over my arm and shoulder.
I didn’t think about that either, just adjusted myself on him a little higher to make our bodies fit together better.
When he let his head fall back against the pillow, my mind wandered to the party, to how my evening started, and how he’d been dressed when I finally thought to look at him.
Like every one of my friends, he’d been dressed formally, expensively, in a suit that fit him so well, it had to be tailor-made for his body.
I thought about the unlikelihood of him not having a date for an event like that, and an odd twinge of guilt hit me.
It may not have been entirely guilt.
“Who did you kick out of your bed for this?” I asked, without lifting my head. “To play nursemaid to me?” I paused, thinking about my own words. “I suppose I should apologize for that. For ruining your night.”
He didn’t answer that, either.