CHAPTER 45 #4
The room settled as he placed me back onto my feet and held me against him. Tightly. I didn’t move. Like the night before, I let him hang onto me, breathing. “You’re so cold,” he said, the heat practically radiating from him, as I sagged into his embrace.
“It was raining hard, and …” My words drifted off the moment his fingers feathered across my back and to my arms where they drew a light caress.
He let out a shaky exhale, as he ran them up my shoulders and to my throat, where he held my face in his palms. The delicious spice and musk of his cologne mingled with the cinnamon on his breath, the intoxicating mix watering my mouth. His gaze fell to my lips, and I wondered if he’d kiss me.
The restive beat of my heart marked each passing second, as I waited for it .
With a shake of his head, he stepped back. “Forgive me. You’re the first thing I’ve felt in a long time.”
As he drew his hands back, I reached out to clutch his forearms, holding them there. “What was the last thing you remember feeling?”
Pain flashed over his face. “My brother’s hand, just before he was taken away and killed.”
“Oh, God. I’m so sorry.”
Brows tight, he ran his fingertips across my clavicle and licked his lips. “You feel good.”
My nerves caught in my throat as I said, “You do, too.”
Curious eyes seemed riveted on my lips, and he ran his thumb over their surface. Before I could gauge his next move, he leaned forward and pressed his lips to mine.
All sound faded. The world around us disappeared. The kiss began slow, a mere sampling, as he brushed his lips over mine. He grabbed either side of my face, pulling me closer, fully committing to the kiss, and a tingling deluge of excitement scattered across my skin.
Some kisses were said to feel like fireworks. His felt like a slow-drip anesthetic, silently siphoning my senses, until all I could smell, taste, and feel was him.
I held his biceps, as he ate the breath from my mouth and ran his palms over my exposed skin.
He pulled me closer still, kissing me with such passionate fervor that my knees weakened.
I’d never been kissed by a man. Boys, yes.
But never a man. Not even Ghostboy, who was technically an adult, held a candle to Professor Bramwell’s skill and mastery.
The way he teased with his tongue, and held me as if I were fragile porcelain.
It was right then that I realized, I’d never truly been kissed before, at all.
As his grip hardened, the need for oxygen burned in my lungs, punching at my ribs.
I tugged my head back, but he held fast, threading his fingers through my hair, jaw flexing as he dipped his tongue to deepen the kiss.
Dizziness settled over me, the need to breathe setting off alarms inside my head.
I whimpered against his lips and pressed my palms to his chest.
When he pulled away on a sharp inhale, a coldness filled the space between us, and the dizziness heightened, claiming my balance. I teetered to the side, and he caught me, holding me upright.
Forehead pressed to mine, he breathed hard. “I’m sorry. I don’t know what the fuck I was thinking.”
“It’s okay.”
“No. No, it’s not okay.” He released me and stepped back. “I can’t fuck this up. Not now.”
Don’t take that personally , my head warned.
Running a hand over his brow, he turned away from me. “Forgive me. I’m just overwhelmed right now. I didn’t mean–”
“It’s okay. I understand. It was a pretty tense moment for both of us.”
His gaze flicked toward the autopsy room behind me and back. “You’ll not speak a word of what you saw in there.”
“Of course not. But … you injected yourself with the toxin,” I countered. When he didn’t respond, only stared at me with that chilling, sobering look in his eyes, I kept on. “I remembered seeing the vials under the hood. You’re performing clinical trials on yourself, aren’t you?”
He slowly turned back around to face me. “You’re in a very precarious situation, Miss Vespertine.”
Spencer’s words echoed inside my head. Those warning me that Professor Bramwell was a bad man.
“Are you … infected with the worms?”
“No. Of course not. The toxin is purified.”
“So, you can’t become sick from it?”
“Not at all.”
Swallowing hard, I lowered my gaze. “I won’t tell anyone.”
“How can I trust you? How do I know you won’t use it against me?”
I reached for his hand and linked my fingers in his, keeping my eyes on him. “I give you my word.”
With a gruffness, he shook off the connection. “C’mon,” he said in a surly voice. “I’ll walk you back to your dorm.”
“My dorm? Won’t someone see us?”
“There’s a path through the woods.”
“It’s pouring rain,” I argued back, because I didn’t want to be alone, and I didn’t want to leave him alone. What if he fell into a seizure again and there was no one there? “Maybe I should stay a bit. What if you have a bad reaction?”
Not a single cell in my body imagined that he’d actually consider such a thing, and the argument to stay sat perched on the tip of my tongue, ready to fire off, when he gave a short nod. “Fine.”
* * *
A s Bramwell furiously scribbled notes into a journal, I sat sprawled on the couch in my long socks, reading a chapter from my textbook on my phone for the next day’s lecture.
Soft piano music drifted from the record player, the cozy ambience colliding with the feverish thrill still humming through my bones.
My lips tingled where he’d kissed me earlier, and as subtle as I could muster, I ran my thumb over them, wishing I could capture the feel of his mouth on mine again.
Focus, Lilia.
I turned my mind back to my reading, then yawned and stretched, settling further into the cushions, willing my eyes to stay open. Between the laboriously detailed text and the lingering echoes of that kiss, the maelstrom of thoughts in my head exhausted me.
“If you’re tired, the couch folds out to a bed. You can sleep there.”
Sleep there? I’d only expected to stay a couple hours to observe him. I never imagined he’d invite me to stay overnight, and I didn’t dare question it aloud. “What about you?”
“I’ll sleep here in my chair.” He planned to stay, too. The two of us, sleeping in the same room. “It’s raining pretty hard.” He’d gone to lock up the incinerator entrance about fifteen minutes earlier and must’ve noticed it then.
We were rained in together. Alone. In the dungeon of the building.
I was going to be sleeping over with Professor Bramwell. Doctor Death.
Perhaps that should’ve terrified me, especially since there was an eyeless corpse laid out in the room across the hall.
Unfortunately, it didn’t. As naive as it might’ve made me, I felt something with Bramwell that no other man in my life, including Conner, had ever made me feel–safe.
I let that thought wrap itself around me like a blanket, as I stared back at him, then snapped my focus back to the issue at hand.
“No need to be a martyr. You can sleep on the bed. I’ll just make a bed out of the couch cushions. ”
“I’ll use the cushions.”
“Don’t be ridiculous, you’re twice my size.”
“Have you always been so damn stubborn?”
“Since the womb, I’m afraid. I was born nine days after my due date.”
He grumbled and scribbled more notes. The man looked absolutely delicious in his half-buttoned black shirt that he’d since donned and the thin-rimmed glasses he wore as he read through books.
In the thick of his note-taking, he paused and ran his fingers over the shiny desk surface, then held his hand over the candle and quickly withdrew, rubbing his skin where it must’ve burned.
I smiled, watching him explore all the different sensations around him. How exquisitely rich his world must’ve seemed now that he could feel again. “So, what happens next? Now that you’ve had a successful variant?”
“I wait and see how it affects the moths. If they continue to respond favorably, we move to the next step.”
“I thought moths didn’t have a nervous system like us. How do you measure success in them?”
“So long as Patroclus and Achilles continue to fly, the toxin is working.”
“You’re going to be famous, Professor Bramwell.” Burying a smile into my phone, I mindlessly read the same line in my book that I’d read ten times already. “In all the textbooks for having cured Voneric’s Disease. Arthritis. Diabetes.”
“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves.”
“It’s called manifestation. And it actually works.”
“Yeah? What have you manifested?”
I quirked a brow. “Working in your lab.”
He groaned again, in disapproval. “Blackmail is hardly manifestation.”
“The mechanisms for achieving your goals are inconsequential, so long as they’re successful.” I sucked my bottom lip between my teeth, marveling at the man’s unbreakable focus on his work. “Perhaps I manifested that kiss.”
He froze, staring down at his notes, then slowly removed his glasses. “Now, why would you do that?”
I lowered my gaze to my fidgeting hands and shrugged. “Are you angry?”
“I’m angry at myself. Not you.”
“Why?”
“Because you’re my student. I’m your professor. I also happen to be a decade older than you. You’ve got a lot to lose, if someone found out. We both do.”
“Who would find out? There’s no one here.”
He ran his tongue over his lips, his eyes lost to whatever thoughts churned inside his overthinking mind. With a shake of his head, he snapped out of it. “I can’t do that, Lilia. This lab is still subject to the occasional visitor. The school provost, in particular.”
“I like when you say my name.” Not something I would’ve ordinarily confessed so boldly, but the kiss reminded me that I wasn’t alone in my attraction.
A heavy silence filled the space between us as we stared back at one another, the intensity only broken when I cleared my throat and stood up from the couch.
“So, I can start pulling these cushions off, then, to make my bed?”