Chapter 17 Morning
Morning
Present Day
Caelum Bones’s Living Quarters
Malcroix Bones Academy
Iopened my eyes slowly, wincing at a low ache in the back of my skull.
Apart from that mild headache, however, and a bitter taste in my mouth, I was intensely comfortable.
I was so comfortable and warm, so completely enveloped, I didn’t want to move.
Then I saw the window, and the sunlight pouring through an opening in the floor-length, red velvet curtains.
It wasn’t familiar.
Wherever I was, I hadn’t woken up here before.
That probably should have alarmed me, but somehow didn’t.
It took me a few seconds more to wrap my mind around the rest of it.
I wasn’t alone. My face pressed against bare skin that rose and fell under my cheek.
An arm wrapped around my back, crosswise so that the attached hand held my shoulder.
Both the arm and hand gripped me tightly, even in sleep.
It felt possessive, even confining, like their owner feared something might come and along and snatch me away while he slept.
I probably should have been alarmed by that, too.
At the very least, I should have tactfully tried to disentangle myself.
I couldn’t bring myself to want to, though, even beyond the intensity I felt off the person I was with. That intensity grew more profound the longer I lied there, assessing the situation.
He was breathing too hard.
His skin was really hot. It felt like he burned with a fever.
Was something wrong with him? Was he sick? Beyond his temperature, it felt almost like he might be having a minor heart attack, or like he was struggling to get enough oxygen. He let out a low sound while I thought it, and gripped me tighter in his hands.
I raised my head cautiously, without moving any other part of myself.
It was one of the few parts of me I could still move.
Once I did, I found his eyes closed, his lips slightly parted.
His face was bizarrely pale, the muscles taut.
His hair looked damp, with parts of it sweated to his face.
His jaw clenched and unclenched while I watched, and he seemed to wince, as if from pain.
I tried to decide if I should wake him up. Was he having another nightmare?
Or was there really something wrong with him?
I was about to shift my weight, to reach for him with a hand, when his whole body jerked, and his eyes flicked open.
He stared up at the canopy over his bed, still breathing hard, his expression visibly confused.
Then his arm tightened around me enough to cut my breath, and he looked down, directly into my face.
That fire filled his irises.
I’d never seen so much of it before.
Green, gold, and darker than I’d ever seen it, it rippled through his eyes, coloring his pupils, distorting the gold.
The wave didn’t appear then vanish like it normally did.
It sparked brighter and dimmer, like a lightbulb that was either getting too much electricity or not enough.
Now that he was awake, he looked even paler than he had.
Those dark circles under his eyes made me suck in a breath.
Gods, what was wrong with him?
He stared at me, unmoving, those fire-lit eyes out of focus, and I wondered if he could see me at all. Before I could open my mouth to ask, to say anything, his hand slid under the shirt I was wearing, and wrapped around the bare skin of my waist.
“Can I?” He barely got it out. It sounded more like a gasp than a question, mixed with something that might’ve been a groan. “Please. Fuck. Please.”
I felt like an idiot once I understood.
His magic. Gods, this was because of that bizarre magic of his.
His magic was overloading, or overheating, or whatever the hell it did, right in front of me.
That’s what I’d been seeing on him for weeks, ever since I first glimpsed him on the carriage to school.
I adjusted my hips to slide closer to him, so that his whole hand had contact with my skin.
He shocked me when I did it, letting out a groan that came from deep in his chest.
He was panting openly then, eyes closed, his face contorted in pain.
“Isis’s tits… do you want me to hurt you?”
I felt myself flush, even as it hit me what he was reacting to, at least in part. When I’d shifted my body, I hadn’t fully comprehended I had a leg wrapped around him, or that I’d just slid my entire thigh all along his very conspicuous erection when I changed positions.
I’d conveniently forgotten about that part of his magical overloads, too.
“Do it,” I said, half through gritted teeth. “You have my permission. Do it.”
His reaction was immediate, and abrupt.
He rolled over with me, moving so fast, I didn’t understand what he was doing until he’d already completed the motion. I found myself lying on my back, gasping, looking up at his inhumanly pale face, his glowing, unfocused eyes.
The canopy above us had lightened in the morning sun, and now looked nearly white.
He adjusted his hand on my waist. His other hand wrapped around my shoulder and neck, and then his whole weight bore down on me, even as he slid down my body just enough to get his lower half off mine.
He let out another half-broken groan as he did it, and I flushed hotter, realizing he’d just dragged his cock down me a second time.
Then he was hanging over me, eyes closed, holding me to his bed.
“I’m going to start.” His voice was harsh, clipped, and he wouldn’t look at me. He grimaced, and gripped me tighter in his hands. “I’m sorry, Shadow. It’s going to be bad.”
I only nodded.
He was already breathing like he’d been running, sweating. His hands trembled where they held me, when suddenly, his breathing stopped.
I felt the wave distantly at first, like the faint roar of a coming train.
I’d forgotten.
Gods, I’d really forgotten what it was like.
His magic slammed into mine, cutting off my breath, making me cry out in something like pain, mixed with something that definitely wasn’t pain.
Hot, liquid magic flooded through my every limb, infused my blood, covered my skin, filled my mouth and lungs and every other part of me.
It stripped us both of everything that stood between us––my defenses, his distance, every millimeter of psychological or physical barrier that had stood there since he’d left me by that fountain.
It felt like being plunged into nakedness and nearness with him without any preamble or any remaining impediment whatsoever.
His presence, wrapped into and a part of that magic, wiped out my physical vision, even as it caused me to cling to his arm and shoulder.
I think that was what unbalanced me the most.
No, I know it was.
It was the sheer amount of him I felt in that hot, crashing, electrical wave.
The blank, indifferent, contempt-filled stares of the past year mixed with the heat of his storm-like magic, confusing the hell out of me.
I fought to sort it out, to make sense of it, then to protect myself from both versions of him, but I couldn’t do any of those things, not like this.
I couldn’t avoid the understanding that he couldn’t do it, either, that he’d been holding back all of this for longer than he could deal with, and he’d lost the ability to even care now that he’d finally let it go.
I struggled and fought to maintain my separation, any shred of dignity, of privacy, of protection from him, but it was futile.
It felt like I was drowning in it, in him, but most of all in that strange vulnerability I’d always felt underneath his mask, a kind of needing, out-of-control, longing, wanting, confused, lost feeling that didn’t match any part of his external personality.
That part of him felt strangely younger than anything he deigned to show me on purpose.
It also felt shockingly, heartbreakingly real, and visceral in a way I couldn’t avoid. None of that had gotten easier in the time I’d spent away from him.
If anything, all those feelings were exponentially worse.
All of it felt deeper, more disconcertingly intimate, more, well… more him… than I remembered feeling it, even in those past memories of times we’d done this.
I felt things I hadn’t ever felt on him before, too.
Heavier emotions weighed on him now, things that devastated me once they reached me well enough for me to understand what I was feeling. I could barely find words to describe them in my mind before tears blurred my vision, and my throat tightened so much it hurt.
Defeat, guilt, failure… gods, so much grief and sadness.
A sense of loss and loneliness so profound, I couldn’t handle that, either.
A sob caught in my chest, too sharp and hard for me to force out. I wanted to scream when that feeling of deadened resignation worsened. I could feel a kind of despair on him, mixed with a self-hatred so intense, I groaned aloud.
By the time the wave crested, it felt like my body was on fire.
My throat hurt, my lungs, even my blood seemed to boil, but I didn’t push him away. My hands clung to him harder instead, one wrapping around the back of his neck, clutching his hair, the other holding his bicep and fighting to bring him even closer.
I couldn’t see at all when everything peaked.
I had no awareness of whether I said anything to him, or he said anything to me. My vision just whited out, until, at the very end, I lost consciousness entirely.
When I could see again, both of us were lying there, breathing hard.
He had his head on my shoulder, his face nuzzled up against my neck under my jaw, and he was gasping, his arm wrapped around my upper body and still half-under the long shirt I wore.
He’d slid partly to one side of me at some point after his magic finished expending itself, but his weight still pinned me down, bizarrely heavy, but strangely comfortable now, like I needed the extra grounding it provided.