28. A Deep Dark Pool #2
I scrub my skin and wash my hair, paddling in place, wondering how deep this pool descends . . . and then quickly forbidding myself from thinking on such potentially ominous speculation.
Placing the soap back in the dish, I submerge my head, rinsing my hair off just as something grazes my foot.
I scream, launching for the rocky side of the pool, unable to find purchase in my panic. My hands slide against the slippery rock, nails scratching, desperate for a handhold.
A loud splash sounds to my right and my scream intensifies, certain something else in the water is after me.
Then I see Tage’s head break the surface, sloshing the hair from his face like a wet dog shaking off water. Of course, that is where the similarity ends. He’s all beauty and feral power as he looks around wildly, gaze sharp, jaw hard, muscles flexing and straining. “What?” he demands. “What is it?”
I give up on getting myself out of the pool and propel toward him instead. “Something touched my foot!”
His arm easily loops around my waist as he swims in place. Immediately my legs coil around him.
He peers down into the dark waters as though he can see into its depths.
I plaster myself against him, my hands gripping fistfuls of his tunic.
“It’s probably a fish.”
“There are fish in here?” I demand, twisting my head to look around me.
His gaze, as dark and fathomless as the pool we swim in, lifts to mine. “Yes.”
“Oh.”
He could have mentioned that sooner. Instead, I’d imagined some underwater creature, like the ones that inhabit the Dark Channel, devouring the live bait cast from ships passing between Penterra and Acton.
The live bait, of course, is of the human variety.
It is a well-known fact that prisoners sentenced to death are boarded onto these ships and used as fodder in the waters of the Dark Channel.
Such is the brutal world I left behind. Perhaps not so very different from this one.
I look from his water-speckled face to my hands clinging to him, knuckles white and bloodless. The sight is mesmerizing: me touching someone, making contact, feeling and being felt in return. It’s still so new, so incredible.
It’s been too long . . . and never like this. Never so charged and intense. Never in a way that makes me feel this strange achiness.
There isn’t even room for air between us. The warm water surrounding us heightens everything, reaching me everywhere, a fluid tongue licking, sliding, lapping . . . missing nothing, no part of me secret or hidden.
I’m unable to catch my breath.
My lungs feel too tight, the air impossible to pull in and push out.
I’m suddenly excruciatingly aware that I’m naked.
A definite role reversal. Usually, he’s the one without clothes.
A wild bit of laughter bubbles up inside me at that irony.
I should be shrinking away, my modesty in full outrage, instead . . . I lean into him.
His big hands hold me up, his palms broad against my back, slippery on my skin, each finger a burning imprint.
The lick of heat I felt in my belly last night returns in full force, and I acknowledge it with grim acceptance.
Just because I’ve been invisible for nearly half my life doesn’t mean I’m ignorant. I recognize the desire humming through me, the need pumping hard in my veins.
My very existence as an observer has, in fact, wholly prepared me to recognize what this is, to know without knowing.
Last night I had been an idiot, blind and in denial, too afraid to know what was unfolding between us.
“Are you . . . well?” he asks.
I don’t know if the question is spurred from my inability to breathe or the fact that I’m shaking so badly in his arms.
“I . . . Y-yes.” I nod jerkily and then gasp when one of his hands slips lower, rounding the curve of my hip. With my legs wrapped around him my heat, my core, presses snugly into him, his wet garments our only barrier.
I study his face, tracking the droplets of warm water that almost lovingly bead over his skin, running down the planes of his face slowly and dropping off the hard cut of his jaw, splashing soundlessly to the surface of the pool. I envy the water’s total freedom to roam wherever it wishes.
He stares back at me, his dark gaze unreadable, and I’m certain this is just me—my inability to balance my reactions, my overwhelming physical response to him, my awakening from a decade-long slumber, the sight and sensation of him food to my famine, rain in the long drought of my life.
He’s not human. I try to get that to stick in my mind, to matter, but it just falls free like a feather from a bird, tumbling through air without a care.
I try to convince myself whatever happened in his den last night was due to convenience. A woman in his midst—in his bed—when there’s a decided dearth. Aside from Danhy, it’s just me.
Although his words last night could not have been any clearer.
I mean kissing you, Arden. I mean fucking you.
But that was last night.
Now is . . . now.
After accusing him of wanting to harm me, after he stormed from his den like he couldn’t get away fast enough from me . . .
He can’t be thinking about kissing me anymore. I put an end to that. I’m certain he feels none of the inappropriate attraction that plagues me.
I swallow hard. “I’m fine,” I assert, and I don’t know if it’s for his benefit or mine—or even true. I’m feeling so many things. None of which I would characterize as fine.
“Are you? Fine?” His warm breath gusts over my lips and I shiver anew.
“Ten years. That’s a long time to be alone.
” One of his hands reaches out and I watch it descend.
He seizes a tendril of wet hair, twists it around his finger and holds it for a moment before unwinding it and then tucking the dark strand behind my ear, and I know he’s seeing me.
He. Sees. Me.
He sees the last ten years.
He sees me now.
I should disentangle myself from him, but my body has a mind of its own, continuing to press closer. Impossible as that seems. Any closer and we would be fused together, no end to him, no beginning of me.
Our noses almost brush. My eyes flit back and forth between his eyes and mouth, and I angle my face, adjusting so that our lips are almost touching.
It would only take one of us. A scant half inch and the distance would be closed, lips melded in a kiss.
Last night was my first. Stupidly, I didn’t realize it for what it was at the time, but now I know.
Now I want it so badly it hurts, but I can’t go back to that moment.
“Arden?”
“Hm?” I reply drowsily, mesmerized by the movement of his lips.
“I want you to know last night . . . that was a mistake. It won’t happen again. I’m not something you have to worry about, I promise you that. I won’t touch you again.”
“Oh.” I blink, then say again, hopefully without a ring of disappointment, “Oh.”
So that is that.
“Thank you,” I add even as longing burns through me like a seething storm.
Moments drift as we float in the warm water, and I tell myself that just because he won’t touch me . . . does not mean I can’t touch him.
Logic wages a war inside me, telling me touching him is a bad, bad idea. I can’t be the one to cross that divide. A divide so wide. Centuries exist in that gap. Countless lives. Wars. Dragons. Humans. Witches. Creatures I can’t even name.
My lower body shifts of its own accord, legs wrapping more snugly around his hips. I sink lower, my throbbing center seeking pressure, an answer to the pulsing ache between my thighs. More feeling. More sensation.
More, more, more.
I find it. Gasp.
My eyes flare at the undeniable push of his cock against me, his wet garment a slippery barrier that proves to both frustrate and stimulate.
Panting, I slide my sex against the length of him, the hollowness a terrible gnawing thing that I need to fill.
His dark eyes consume me, big hands not moving where they grip my flesh as I maneuver myself in a slow pump against him, my mouth open inelegantly wide, panting above his, seeking my long-withheld pleasure. A strangled cry welling up from my chest.
He doesn’t move. Doesn’t speak or make a sound. Violet light glows like flame at the centers of his eyes. He merely watches me taking what I need from him, and I wonder what he could possibly be thinking.
Does he consider me some manner of parasite clinging to him? It’s a mortifying notion, and still, I don’t withdraw. Water splashes around us as I work harder, faster against his hardness, desperately wanting to pull aside the fabric so that he can fully penetrate me.
“Tage! Tage!”
The voice jars me. I cling tighter to him, as though he might suddenly be ripped from me, and it’s in this position that Danhy finds us.
She bursts out from the tunnel and stops at the sight of us, her expression immediately clouding, stern lines of censure forming brackets on either side of her lips.
Her mouth forms an O of surprise before she recovers to say, “I’m sorry to interrupt, but we’re back.
” One glimpse at her tells me she is not sorry.
If anything, she looks quite irked . . . and disgusted.
“I see that,” he says in a tight voice.
“We found him, the onyx. He told us that he just spotted two armies, one from Penterra and the other from Veturland, both on a direct path for each other.”
He tensed. “How close are they?”
“They should meet up in the valley south of the Great Falls.”
He’s gone from me then, releasing me in an instant. I paddle in place, looking up at them both.
He has no trouble exiting the pool. He launches out of it in one smooth lift.
“Let’s go,” he commands Danhy. “You, me, and Viggo.”
“What about Cyphus?”
“He stays behind. He can keep an eye on Arvos and her.” Her. Me. “If they battle, soldiers will scatter and swarm the area. The last thing we need is one of them stumbling on the entrance to our cave. Cyphus can secure and protect the cave while we’re gone.”