Chapter Sixteen #2
Hope is a decadent, disastrous thing. “If I weren’t a Reaper, and you weren’t a Guardian, what do you think—” I have to pause and take a breath. “What do you think would happen if we were ordinary?”
If there weren’t a thousand untold consequences hanging in the balance. If we weren’t destined to oppose each other at every turn. If he hadn’t been hurt and neither had I.
If he were just a man, and I were just a woman.
He turns to look at me.
“What do you think it would be like?” I ask. “If we could be people?”
Gabriel studies my face, his lips in a line. His silence is painfully loud.
“Oh,” I whisper. A short sound lodges in my chest. “Oh,” I say again.
He turns away with a grimace, dragging his hand roughly through his hair. Fisting the dark strands until his knuckles turn white.
“Darcy,” he whispers.
“Never mind,” I choke out. Embarrassment burns hot across my cheeks.
I want to scurry back through the lighthouse and hide in one of the narrow closets.
I want to fling myself over the railing and float back to shore.
I don’t know how I’m going to climb into a boat with this man.
I don’t know how I’m ever going to look at him again.
Gabriel stills me with his hand on my forearm, squeezing gently. The look on his face is faintly pleading, and I hate it.
“I don’t know,” he whispers. His eyes search mine. “I don’t know what I’d do, Darcy.”
It’s not the answer I want. I gently pull myself out of his grip, curling my arms around myself. “Yeah. Okay.”
I feel exposed. Stupid. I’ve been over here developing feelings while Gabriel has been scouting the chessboard.
Why did he bring me here? Why did he listen? Was all of this meant to distract me? Is he simply trying to expedite our deal?
“Darcy—”
“It’s okay,” I rush to say. My voice is high and tight. “I understand.”
But the truth is, I don’t. I don’t understand why he brought me all the way out here.
I don’t understand why he wanted to add something to my list. I don’t understand why I feel this way, and I don’t—I don’t understand why I can’t seem to shake it.
Since that very first night, I’ve felt drawn to him.
I’ve tried convincing myself it’s because I need his help, because he knows what I am and I can be my true self around him, but that’s not it at all.
I’ve been trying to earn his trust because I want it.
I’ve been chasing his attention because I want it. I want all of it.
His affection.
His care.
His choice.
I turn away from the sun inching up over the horizon and step back into the shadow of the massive lighthouse.
Gabriel is wrong. I’m just as alone as I’ve always been.
Whatever is happening between us is a figment of my overactive imagination.
As whimsical and meaningless as one of the items on my list. I am a means to an end for Gabriel and I’ve been naive, letting myself get twisted up in hope.
Misreading every action from him as something more than it is.
I’m looking for reassurance in all the wrong places, just like always.
Maybe when this assignment is done, I’ll disappear to a tropical island. Spend some time crossing off more list items. But I’ll do it by myself, this time. Because that’s what I am. Alone.
The sooner I come to terms with that, the better.
“I’m ready to go back now,” I tell him. The sky is turning a perfect, powdery blue, all the clouds swallowed up by the sun. The water starts to sparkle, sending tiny pinpricks of light in every direction.
It would be beautiful if I weren’t so determined to disappear.
“Darcy—”
“Please,” I beg, unwilling to hear any sort of explanation. I won’t be able to bear it. “I want to go back.”
Gabriel sighs, frustrated. But the chivalry wins out, and he moves past me to the door, holding it open and gesturing for me to slip past. “After you,” he says, his words clipped.
I duck under his arm, striding around the slowly rotating light, making for the narrow staircase. My salvation is at the bottom of this damned lighthouse. All I need to do is make it back to the boat, back to the dock, back to my house. One step at a time. No more looking ahead.
No more hoping for something different.
I start to descend the stairs. Somewhere behind me, Gabriel grinds out a rough curse.
Then his fingers curl around my bicep, as gentle as he can be when I’m moving in one direction and he’s trying to tug me in another.
It would be funny if it weren’t so devastating.
If I weren’t so damn desperate to get somewhere else.
He pulls me back and crowds me up against one of the windows, his breathing harsh, his face a dark scowl. He’s standing so close, and I’m—I’m looking right at him.
“We are not normal,” he says.
I almost laugh, but a weak-sounding warble comes out instead. “I know that.”
“We are—” He shakes his head roughly, as if his thoughts are coming too fast and he needs to silence them to select just one.
This is how it always is between us. Constantly crashing together, like the waves on the rocks beneath this lighthouse.
“You asked what I would do if we were—we will never be just people, Darcy.”
“I know that. We don’t have to do this. We can just—”
He raises his voice, talking right over me.
His eyes are wild, his cheeks flushed. “I can’t tell you what I’d do if I were someone else.
If I were—” A hot exhale that brushes against my skin.
“I haven’t been anything but this for so long.
Thousands of years, Darcy. But even knowing that this can’t be anything, I’m—” Another stilted, furious pause.
He’s vibrating, holding himself at an impossible edge.
“I can’t stop thinking of you,” he admits.
“Even when I want to. Even when I try to distract myself, I just—I can’t stop.
You are there, constantly. Every time I close my eyes.
Every time I turn my head. I see you in every room.
Every shadow, every corner, every almost and maybe.
In every fucking thing. You said you didn’t use your magic, but that’s what it feels like, Darcy.
It feels like you sliced right into me. Right here.
” He thumps his chest once. “Do you understand?”
I shake my head. I don’t, I don’t, I don’t. “Then why—”
“Because I can’t stop myself from wanting you.
I want you in my bar, chewing on my straws and giving me shit.
I want you in my bed, wrapped up in my sheets.
I want to make stupid fucking excuses to lick salt off your skin, and I want—I want to hear you laugh.
I want to see you happy. I want you to have whatever you want, and I want—” He releases a sigh and slumps closer, dropping his forehead to mine and closing his eyes like he can’t bear the thought of it.
“I want to be the one to give it to you.”
I squeeze my eyes shut and keep my hands at my sides. I don’t want to say anything. I don’t want to ruin it.
“You’re all I think about,” he whispers, broken.
“I want to fuck you and fight with you and watch you carve a pumpkin with a god-damned butter knife. I want to take you to the farmer’s market just so I can see your face light up at whatever mundane shit you want to try.
I want to get on my knees for you and I want you on your knees for me.
I’m fucking—I’m making and rearranging plans.
And I shouldn’t, because we are not people. ”
He bites out the last word like he’s mad about it. And I think I might be, too. Because I want all the things he’s talking about. I’ve been wanting them.
My legs wobble. I tip back against the window, letting it hold me up. Gabriel is solid and immovable in front of me, his breaths labored with his confession.
I blink my eyes open. He’s staring down at me, his expression haunted.
“I don’t know how to stop,” he whispers.
My fingers hesitantly climb the sides of his shirt and I fist my hands in the soft material. “I don’t want you to stop.”
“It should terrify you,” he warns. “How much I want you.”
“It doesn’t.”
If anything, it’s more powerful than any surge of magic I’ve felt. Just as intoxicating, too. It lights me up from the inside out, to know that I’m not the only one who has been holding on to desperate, aching hope.
“I tried to stop,” he whispers.
“I know you did. I did, too.”
His hand cups my face, his thumb brushing over my cheek before he anchors it under my ear. “It won’t end well.”
I nod. “I know it won’t.” Our decision to give in to our mutual attraction doesn’t change our circumstances.
But isn’t that why I came here? For a chance at something different?
For once, I’m not going to concern myself with the messy details of the ending.
I’m going to plant myself firmly in the middle. “But I don’t ca—”
He doesn’t let me finish. Gabriel swallows the rest of my sentence with his mouth against mine, kissing me at the very top of the light-house, golden light spilling boundless in every direction.