XLIV
It wasn’t a kiss.
Not exactly.
His mouth pressed to mine, just enough to seal the space between us—cool and impossibly soft. The pressure was a gentle, undeniable command, and my lips parted on instinct.
My mind blanked. Every nerve in my body rearranged itself around the simple, world-altering fact of his mouth on mine.
Then the smoke came through.
I inhaled on a startled gasp.
It slid over my tongue like velvet—warm at first, then shockingly cold beneath.
Blood orange bloomed sharp and bitter, all crushed peel and metallic citrus, before dissolving into the rich, fungal dark of rain-soaked earth.
Beneath that came a note of sweetness—nectar gone wild, fermenting somewhere just beyond the edge of decay.
Life and rot.
All at once.
Heaton’s free hand came up—not grabbing, not caging. Only steadying. Two cold fingers angled beneath my jaw as if to keep me there for one breath longer.
The anxiety in my chest didn’t fade.
It unspooled.
The edges of the room softened. The anger I felt toward him melted into a distant, curious hum. The bond between us shifted, no longer a tight wire of conflict but a low, resonant chord.
Heaton pulled back, eyes dark and satisfied.
My lungs remembered themselves.
Badly.
I coughed, eyes watering, and he let out a quiet breath of laughter that was both amused and unbearably gentle.
The room tipped before I did.
Or maybe it was the other way around.
His hand shot to my waist, cool and steady, catching me just as I pitched sideways. Then, in one fluid motion, he lifted me. My legs dangled for a breathless second before he carried me back to the center of the bed and lowered me into the pillows.
“Whoa,” I blinked hard. “Do ghosts get dizzy, or is that just a me problem?”
He looked down at me, one hand still braced beside my shoulder, the other slow to leave my side.
“That,” he said, “is a you problem.”
The sheets were cool, the bed soft, but all I could feel was the lingering chill of his fingers at my jaw and the warm, hazy flow of Ghost Flower in my bloodstream.
He didn’t return to the desk.
The mattress shifted as he settled onto his side beside me, the cold of him a stark contrast to the herbal heat blooming under my skin. He propped his head on one hand and watched me with that unnerving focus.
“The static’s gone, then?”
“Gone,” I confirmed, wiggling my toes beneath the blanket to make sure I still could. “It’s all . . . quiet. For the first time in forever.”
The words slipped loose before I could stop them.
“It’s nice. You’re nice when you’re not being a complete jerk.”
The flower had burned away the part of my brain that cared about consequences, leaving nothing but raw, loopy honesty.
“Am I?”
“Mmm.”
My eyes drifted shut. The world felt soft, padded in velvet and blood-orange zest.
But even with my eyes shut, I could feel him.
A cold weight in the dark.
Honesty was easier than caution now, and the next question was one I would have buried in daylight.
“Do you ever look at me and wish you’d picked a different girl to save?” My voice became small. “Maybe the girl with dark hair and blue eyes?”
The air grew heavy.
Charged.
He shifted, the mattress dipping beside me. His knuckles brushed my cheek in a touch that felt like both a caress and a warning.
“Don’t do that,” he said, voice a low growl. “Don’t offer me ghosts when I chose you.”
My scrambled brain latched onto the mystery anyway, searching for solid ground within his history.
“The memory, Heaton. Who was she?”
He leaned closer, his face inches from mine, his scent filling my lungs.
“You’re so focused on a life I’ve already buried,” he let out a soft laugh, “when I’m much more interested in the parts of you that are still alive.”
His fingers found the line of my collarbone and traced it with agonizing slowness.
I tried to pull back, but the pillows swallowed me, and his silver gaze held me faster than any grip could.
“The bond is more than a leash, October. It’s a map.”
His touch drifted down my arm, leaving a trail of goosebumps like tiny electrical shocks.
“A complete sensory blueprint.”
His palm settled lightly against my ribs, over the center of the tether.
“I know what your body knows.”
My heartbeat went wild.
“And I know what it doesn’t.”
“That’s not fair.”
“This hour doesn’t play fair.” His eyes held mine. “It plays for keeps.”
I looked away first, unable to handle the silver fracture of his stare.
“You can’t keep using the bond as a cheat code in every argument.”
“It isn’t cheating,” he said, “if your body insists on doing half the talking for you.”
His hand slid down my ribs, over my waist, until his fingers found the curve of my hip.
I should have flinched away. I should have slapped his hand aside and told him to go haunt somebody else. Instead, my body betrayed me with a soft, welcoming heat that chased away the perpetual bite of him beneath his palm.
A wicked grin spread across his face.
He shifted closer, one long line of cold settling beside me, closing the last of the space I had been pretending still existed.
My hand came up and landed on his forearm. His skin was cold as a winter morning; the muscle underneath shifted once as his thumb made a slower pass over my hip.
My head felt full of warm water.
Or smoke.
Or him.
“Still think I’m being unfair?”
His gray eyes followed the pulse in my throat, the rise and fall of my chest, the flush he had pulled out of me and was now studying like evidence.
“I’ve been wondering,” he said softly, “what exactly you think you’re saving all this for.”
“I’m not saving anything.”
“You are.” His voice lowered. “Whether or not you mean to.”
A giggle bubbled up my throat. The hazy part of me wanted to argue, but the honest part was stronger.
“Maybe I’m waiting for the right person,” I mumbled, blinking hard to focus on his silver eyes. “The right time. You know? Like in the movies.”
A soft laugh escaped him.
“Right. The right person. The right time.”
He said the words with rough disbelief.
“I tied myself to a living girl with more nerve than self-preservation. Believe me, I was aware there could be complications.”
His gaze dragged over my face, then lower, as if taking inventory of every flushed inch of me.
“All that hope,” he said, as if it was something foul he’d scraped off his shoe. “All those messy little daydreams. I knew they could be a distraction.”
I bristled, a spark of defiance cutting through the haze.
“My daydreams are not up for discussion.”
He ran a hand through his dark hair, a gesture that looked genuinely exhausted.
“Fine,” he said. “Let’s be honest, then.”
He shifted higher on one elbow, his weight pressing me a fraction deeper into his side.
“It’s like listening to a radio stuck between stations. Static. Heat. Want. Frustration. You’re trying to pretend you’re not thinking about something while your body shouts it down the tether.”
His hand stayed at my hip, thumb resting still against the bare strip of skin beneath my nightshirt.
“We don’t have to tell a soul,” he whispered. “You get a little relief from all this—”
His fingers flexed once, indicating my body, my nerves, the whole humiliating mess of me.
“—and I get some peace in my head from the constant noise.”
My mind reeled.
He wasn’t teasing. He was proposing a transaction.
A clinical, soul-crushing solution to my messy, inconvenient emotions.
And the worst part—
some reckless, horrible part of me wanted to let him.
“Then, when the hour is up,” he continued, his voice dropping to a lethal whisper, “you can go back to your ‘right time’ and your ‘right person.’ Do whatever you want.”
I looked up at him, my vision swimming with blue-white embers.
“But this need you have?” His thumb pressed once, possessive and soft. “It’s distracting as hell.”
Any other version of me—the daylight version—would have been mortified.
But this version?
The one unspooled by the flower and the heavy indigo weight of Dead Time?
She was tired of waiting.
“You said you could fix it,” I whispered.
“I can.”
He pushed higher onto one elbow, his body a cage of shadows over mine. His hand stayed planted at my hip, anchoring me there while the rest of him leaned closer, slow enough to make every inch feel intentional.
“But this?” he whispered. “This isn’t a daydream, Madeline. It’s not clean. It’s not polite. It doesn’t care what story you thought you were saving yourself for.”
The room tilted around me.
He leaned in, his forehead resting against mine, his breath a ragged, cold ghost against my lips.
“I can take the edge off,” he breathed. “I can make the noise quiet. But that isn’t what you’re asking me for anymore, is it?”
My fingers tightened around his forearm.
“What am I asking for?”
His jaw flexed.
“Something you should ask for when the flower is out of your blood, and the bond isn’t speaking louder than you.” He looked away too late. “Something you might hate me for giving you right now.”
The words should have sobered me.
Instead, they sank into the haze like a match dropped into oil. Because he could. Because he wanted to. Because the only thing between us was the thin, trembling edge of his restraint.
“And if I didn’t hate you?”
Something dark moved through his eyes.
“You’re floating on smoke and petals, Madeline. Don’t ask me questions you can’t answer clearly.”
The bond screamed its response before I could form one.
Closer.
My hand fisted into his shirt.
And pulled.
His control fractured for one breath, and then he was over me, sinking into the space I had made for him. One hand braced beside my shoulder. The other locked at my waist, careful of my ribs even as his body settled between my thighs, cold and solid and impossible.
“Fuck.”
His eyes were black and bottomless.
“Careful, October.” His voice scraped against my mouth. “That’s how you start things you don’t get to take back.”
“I don’t want to take it back.”
The words came out too fast—too honest.
I felt the impact of them move through him—shock first, then hunger, then something darker and more dangerous than either, leashed so tightly it trembled.
His mouth hovered a fraction from mine, close enough that the next breath would have made the choice for us.
Heat tore through me, bright and violent, and the tether answered from both sides until I couldn’t tell which need was mine and which was his. My body arched before my mind could catch up, every nerve lit raw beneath the cold pressure of him.
And Heaton felt all of it.
His eyes snapped open, black bleeding back toward silver by force of will alone.
“No.”
The word was ragged.
Final.
My fingers tightened on his shirt. “Heaton—”
He caught my wrist and pinned it gently against his chest. His other hand stayed at my waist, but every line of him had gone rigid with restraint.
“Not like this.”
His eyes stayed on mine, silver now and devastating.
“Not during Dead Time.” His voice dropped, rough and low. “Not when the tether is this hungry. And not when I can’t tell how much of that yes belongs to you.”
The words hit like cold water, while the bond thrashed between us like a living thing.
Then—
CREAK.
A floorboard shifted in the hall.
Everything in Heaton went rigid.
For one suspended second, neither of us moved. We were still tangled together—his body pressed between my thighs, my nightshirt shoved indecently high, my hand fisted in the front of his shirt, his breath still cold against my mouth.
“Your roommate’s awake,” he exhaled, voice low with murderous disappointment.
The floorboard shifted again, louder this time, followed by the soft groan of a mattress down the hallway.
“What do we do?” I whispered.
A low, wrecked laugh left him.
“What do we do?” he repeated. “October, this was your idea.”
“My idea?”
His mouth brushed the corner of mine—accidental or not, I couldn’t tell.
“You pulled me down here.”
“You weren’t exactly resisting.”
The doorknob down the hall turned.
That sobered us.
Heaton lifted his head just enough to glance toward the door, then toward the clock.
“Short answers,” he said. “You were asleep. It’s believable, thanks to your little herbal adventure.”
He pulled away, drawing my nightshirt down with surprising care as he moved, the sudden chill of his absence already making me ache.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered.
He froze above me. “For what? Almost getting us caught?”
“For not being able to make it better.”
His expression shifted. Barely.
“The static,” I said, quieter now. “The noise in your head. I know I’m making it worse.”
For once, Heaton had no answer. The bond went still between us—not quiet. Not empty. Just stunned, like something inside him had stopped moving.
His hand loosened at my waist.
Not leaving.
Just forgetting, for one impossible second, what it had been holding.
Another floorboard creaked in the hall.
He didn’t look away.
“You really would have done it,” he said quietly.
“Done what?”
His gaze held mine.
“Anything. If you thought it would help.”
I didn’t have the energy to lie, and the flower wouldn’t let me even if I tried.
“We’re in this together, Heaton.” My voice barely carried. “Your head is my head. Your pain is mine.”
For a second, he just stared at me.
“God,” he breathed. “And you mean that.”
A shadow moved under the door.
His eyes flicked toward it, and I felt the exact moment the walls went back up. His hand slid from my hip, fingertips catching once at the curve of my waist before he let go.
When he looked at me again, whatever had opened in him was buried deep.
“Short answers,” he reminded me.
I nodded, my breath held hostage in my chest.
He drew back.
And as he did, he dissolved. A thin trail of smoke and cinders curled from his shoulders, bleeding into the indigo shadows like ink. For one breathtaking heartbeat, embers winked in the air—tiny, dying stars mourning his departure—before the dark swallowed them whole.
Just as the soft knock sounded at my door, his voice brushed my ear.
“Rain check, October.”
The bond pulsed low and heavy, a stubborn pressure that made my sides feel too tight.
He hadn’t answered my questions about the memory either. He’d just proven he could make me forget I’d asked altogether.