Chapter 36 Adrian
Adrian
Clara is already there, a small, focused island of calm.
This time, I don’t take the chair across from her.
I don’t want the distance. I slide into the one right beside her, a deliberate act of assumed intimacy.
The leg of my chair bumps hers, and I feel the jolt of contact travel up my entire body.
She looks up, her eyes wide for a fraction of a second, a flicker of surprise she immediately smothers.
Her whole body goes still, a quiet, almost imperceptible brace for impact. She doesn’t tell me to move.
“Ready to work on your history paper?” she asks, her voice all business, a shield of professionalism she’s trying to hold up. But I see the faint blush that creeps up her neck, a traitorous signal that she’s hyper-aware of my thigh pressing a steady, insistent line against hers.
“In a minute,” I murmur, leaning closer, deliberately invading her space. I watch her pretend to focus on the textbook, her teeth sinking into the soft flesh of her bottom lip. “You do that when you’re concentrating.”
Her head snaps toward me, her eyes flashing. “Do what?”
“Bite your lip,” I say, my gaze dropping to her mouth. The urge to replace her teeth with my own is a sudden, physical ache. “Drives me fucking crazy.”
Her blush deepens, a satisfying crimson.
“Focus, Hale,” she whispers, but there’s no real heat in it.
She’s fighting a smile, her lips parting on a shaky breath.
I feel a surge of dark, possessive satisfaction.
The respect she earned from me in that classroom has only made me want her more.
The knowledge that I’m the only one who can shatter her perfect composure is a drug.
She leans over the book to explain a concept, forcing herself back into the role of tutor.
The movement brings her closer, and the scent of her shampoo drifts up—faintly citrus, sharp and clean, tangled with the smell of old paper and the warm vanilla that is just her.
I close my eyes for a split second, inhaling, and the memory of her in my bed crashes over me.
I shouldn’t notice. I do. I notice everything.
And then the lights flicker. Not once, but twice. A stutter of pale, buzzing light that makes the shadows in the room jump. We both look up. They cut out completely.
The darkness is absolute. Instantaneous.
The hum of the fluorescents dies with a suddenness that feels like a physical blow, leaving a ringing, pressurized silence.
Then the roar of the storm outside rushes in to fill the void.
An oppressive, suffocating blackness swallows everything until the room ceases to exist. A gasp escapes her—not of surprise, but of pure, unadulterated terror.
I hear the scrape of her chair as she recoils.
The memory of the first time this happened hits me, but this time is different.
I’m not just an observer. I know what this means to her.
My first instinct—the old, predatory one—is to use this, to see her weak and undone.
But it’s immediately crushed by a new, more powerful instinct.
Protect. Ground. Anchor. The thought is clear and absolute.
She’s mine to break, but not like this. Not by this.
“Clara,” I say, my voice a low, steady murmur, a deliberate anchor in the dark. “It’s okay. I’m right here. Just the lights.”
I hear her breath, a series of short, ragged, panicked sounds. I hear her swallow audibly in the thick silence. In the faint, gray light from the stormy window, I see her silhouette shift, her body instinctively leaning closer to my warmth. I don’t touch her. Not yet.
“Can you hear my voice?” I ask, keeping my tone even.
A long second stretches. Then, a shaky, almost inaudible, “Yes.”
Relief washes over me, so potent it’s almost dizzying. “Good. Tell me three things you can feel right now,” I say, pulling the words from some calm, unknown place. “The table under your hands. The chair at your back. What else?”
Another long pause. I listen to her frantic breathing, counting the beats between each gasp. Then, her voice, small but there. “The… the floor under my feet.”
“Good. That’s good, Clara. That’s real,” I murmur. My hand finds the edge of the table, and I slowly slide it across the cool surface until it’s near hers. “My hand is on the table. You can touch it if you want. I won’t move.”
Another moment of agonizing silence. I wait, every muscle tense.
Then, I feel it. The tentative, trembling touch of her fingertips finding mine.
She latches on, her grip surprisingly strong, desperate, her fingers ice-cold.
I wrap my own fingers around hers, my thumb finding her frantic pulse, and hold on. A solid, warm anchor.
We sit like that for a long time as her pulse slows under my thumb and her grip loosens from a panicked clutch to a simple, trusting hold. The frantic edge in the air disappears, replaced by a quiet, fragile stillness. To keep her grounded, to keep her here with me, I start talking.
“You never told me,” I say softly. “What you’re majoring in.”
Her voice is still a little shaky. “You never asked.”
“I’m asking now.”
She takes a long, slow breath. “Sports Psychology. My focus is on athlete performance. Mental blocks, handling pressure… the psychology of winning.”
My mind reels. Of course. The girl who diagnosed my dyslexia. The one who built workarounds for my brain. The one who anchors my chaos and understands the pressure. It’s so perfect, it’s like the universe has been playing a long game all along.
“Why?” I ask, my voice rough.
“My dad,” she says, her voice so quiet I can barely hear it over the storm. “He loved hockey. After he died… understanding the game, the players, what was going on in their heads… it was my way of keeping him with me.”
The raw vulnerability of her confession hits me harder than any body check.
She just handed me the key to the most important part of her, the piece that explains everything.
The reason she, and she alone, was able to see me.
I’m about to respond, to say something that can measure up to the gift she just gave me.
Just then, the power returns with a low electrical sigh. The fluorescents buzz back to life, flooding the room with a harsh glare that feels like a physical assault after the intimacy of the dark.
She pulls her hand from mine as if burned.
Her cheeks flush a deep, beautiful red. She looks exposed, raw, and more beautiful than I’ve ever seen her.
The adrenaline from the panic is still thrumming under her skin, a wild energy that hasn’t found an exit.
But now it’s mixed with something new. Something fierce.
She stands, her chair scraping back with a sharp, decisive sound. “Come with me,” she says, her voice a low command.
Before I can react, she grabs my hand. Her grip isn't just firm; it's a manacle, her fingers locking around my wrist with a strength I didn't know she possessed.
She pulls me to my feet. I follow, too stunned by her sudden audacity to resist, as she navigates the main stacks, pulling me deeper into the tall, dusty shadows of the history section.
She stops in a narrow, deserted aisle and turns, pushing me back against an imposing bookshelf.
I stumble back, thrown off-balance more by the audacity of the act than the force of it.
The ancient wood groans, the spines of a hundred forgotten books digging into my back.
She cages me in, her small body a wall of unexpected power, her hands flat on my chest.
“You just saw me at my weakest,” she whispers, her eyes blazing with a wild, unfamiliar fire. The adrenaline from her panic has clearly morphed into something reckless and powerful. “Now you get to see me in control.”
Before I can process her words, she drops to her knees, the thud of bone on the thin carpet a shockingly violent sound.
"Clara, what—"
"Shut. Up. Adrian." Each word is a gunshot. Her eyes burn into mine, pupils blown so wide they devour the iris. She doesn’t just unbutton my jeans; she rips them open, a button flying somewhere into the darkness.
My zipper surrenders with a violent snarl.
The library air slices across my exposed skin, but then her hands—Christ, her hands—brand me with a heat that borders on pain.
She devours me. No hesitation. No mercy.
Her mouth claims me with such savage hunger I taste blood where I've bitten through my own lip.
My skull slams back against ancient encyclopedias, vertebrae cracking against leather-bound spines.
I claw at the bookshelf, splinters driving under my nails as I fight to remain standing.
The absolute surrender of control is like freefall—terrifying, exhilarating, fatal.
Her tongue, teeth, and throat work me with such primal, vicious precision that reality fractures, my vision shattering into white-hot fragments of sensation.
I'm close—too close—the pressure building like a scream trapped behind my teeth. I reach for her, fingers trembling, desperate to reclaim some fragment of control from this freefall.
But she tears away, her lips glistening, her eyes black holes of newfound dominance. "I'm not done with you," she hisses, each syllable scorching my flesh.
She devours me again, relentless. Her nails dig crescents into my thighs that will purple by morning.
The wet, animal sounds she makes reverberate through my bones.
When she swallows me deeper, something inside me ruptures.
The cry that rips from my throat isn't human.
My body convulses, my consciousness fragmenting into shrapnel.
She remains there, predatory, watching my destruction with savage satisfaction, my essence gleaming on her mouth like war paint.
When she rises, she doesn’t just wipe her lips. She smears the evidence across her skin with deliberate, territorial violence. The look she gives me isn't just triumphant.
It’s the look of someone who has consumed your soul and found it delicious.