Chapter Seventeen
His mouth on hers might as well have been a brand.
A hard press at first—not really a kiss at all by any standard definition.
But as soon as she felt it…as soon as she held the whole lightning bolt of Griffin Testa between her hands, she knew that she did not—right now or maybe ever again—want standard.
She wanted this.
Him.
His thick hair under the light of an Edison bulb, his gaze moving over her whole face when she talked, his held-back sounds of satisfaction as he ate.
His bringing her here, to this street and this secret doorway, his body blocking hers from view.
His coal-black eyelashes and how they hung low over his eyes when he was looking down at her, looming over her, to say something as electric as There shouldn’t be anything amicable about losing you.
And now, this—his impulse, his leaning-in haste, his hands on either side of her neck, holding her with the lightest, most contradictory touch.
His mouth.
Moving now that the mark on her had been made: a tilt of his head and a tug of her top lip between his, and then it was as though the kiss broke open for them both, became something else.
It wasn’t just a bolt of lightning anymore—it was a huge, rolling thunderstorm, the kind that overwhelmed every single one of your senses.
Kissing him consumed her.
Her tongue slipped into his mouth first, a desperate initiation she couldn’t hold back after his relentless exploration of her lips—a kiss at each corner, gentle suction on the bottom curve, a return to that spot on the top, with a scrape of his teeth this time, like he was testing the texture.
She thought, Me, too, me, too; I want to feel everything, too, and when she tasted him with the tip of her tongue, the dark, chocolate-soufflé perfection of him, he held her tighter, his fingertips pressing through her hair and against the back of her neck, bringing her into him as he groaned in pleasure, letting her feel the low vibration of it against her mouth.
Letting her feel it everywhere.
It would be a lie to say that she thought only of him, because at first—at first, she thought of other kisses, too.
The one in the restaurant that started all this.
Then, Jamie—of course, Jamie, because Griffin had asked, had forced her to think about Jamie.
The maybe half dozen men she’d kissed since Jamie, too—matches on an app, all of them, in different cities she’d not really lived in for work.
She thought of them like this: What was that called, what I saw those people in the restaurant do, what I did myself with Jamie and those other guys whose names I can’t remember? What was the word for that?
Because it wasn’t this.
It wasn’t anything like this.
It was such a huge, disorienting feeling of having the whole word—the whole world—remade, that for a split second while he cupped her face and changed the angle again, she took advantage and started to ask.
“Have you ever—”
But all he said was “No,” and then he bit her—right on the sharpest angle of her jaw, the most erotic correction, before kissing her ear, her cheek, her lips again.
After that, she figured it didn’t matter what she was going to ask.
She figured his answer would be No no matter what.
After that, she couldn’t think of anyone else. She could only think of him, and herself, in matching black and melding into each other. A fae prince and a now immortal-feeling girl.
They kissed for so long that there were stages of it—the storm strengthening, receding, strengthening again.
Sometimes, it would turn too close to explosive: a drifting and then clutching hand, a rolling pelvis, a particularly out-of-control moment where one of her legs lifted, her thigh going to the outside of his, basically climbing him.
Each time, one of them would pull back, only enough to breathe into each other for a calming second before starting again.
Dimly, she realized that it was this way because neither of them were ready to take it to a second location, or maybe both of them were too fearful of breaking this spell.
This kissing, this conversation, this tussle, where their tongues fought for dominance, where one or the other of them used their teeth, where they coaxed with moans and scolded with hisses of breath and soothed with strokes of their hands.
Where they taught each other how to be kissed.
Eventually, new sensations assailed her: her hair catching in a splinter of the door she was pressed flat against, one of her petal sleeves tickling too low on her arm, possibly torn.
Her lips swollen-feeling, a little raw, her nipples aching, the space between her legs…
god, the space between her legs. Hot and wet and pulsing, hurting, and it felt so good, because that’s what he had said—he said it should hurt not to kiss her, and she wanted to stop only long enough to say, That’s how it hurts, not to do more than kiss you right now.
Then, a voice other than the one in her head cut through the haze.
A stream of French, followed by laughter and a few hoots, the sound of it both good-natured and mocking.
She could not hope to understand the words, not really, but she thought she caught embrasser, which maybe meant embrace, maybe meant embarrassed, but neither one was right for what she and Griffin were doing…
Wait.
What they had been doing.
Now that his mouth wasn’t on hers, the noise that intruded was more notable—the laughter, footsteps fairly close.
At first, he only turned his face—giving her his right side, the sidewalk his scars, his expression grim and distant.
He stood like that, statued in profile, until the footsteps faded, and the truth was, she couldn’t think of much—other than how much longer it would take for him to start kissing her again.
So when he started to step away, she reacted. Her hands grabbing his sides, trying to stop him, but he kept going, quicker now.
Away from her. His hands slid from where they’d been on her body—one high up on her rib cage, one in her hair. He held them strangely still for a moment, as though they were frozen in the shape of her, and then shoved them in his pockets as he took another step back.
Not so far that he wasn’t still blocking her from sight of the street, but far enough.
Far enough to feel like being hauled out of another world.
He did not look like himself.
Or he did, but not like the Griffin she’d seen tonight.
She tried for something light. Something that would bring him back to how they’d been before, to the memory of what they’d built over the course of today.
“Talk about being the show,” she said. The small smile on her lips felt unusual, what with her swollen lips, her chin raw from his stubble.
He didn’t smile back. No quirk, no curve.
Nothing.
He said, “Sorry.”
Not even an I’m preceding it.
A sorry, shorn.
“Sorry?”
His hands shifted in his pockets, curled into fists she knew well now: white-knuckled, impenetrable. Made of stone.
“That was—we got carried away.”
“Carried…away?”
She knew, in a distant way, that she was only repeating things, her mouth slowly forming around words that made no sense to her. She was thinking in a different language now, the one he’d taught her: nothing amicable about losing you, starved to death.
This street is mine.
“It was a mistake,” he said, and that one cut through.
She couldn’t bring herself to repeat it, but it got her to move, at least. A flick of her wrist, her watch lighting.
Twenty-five minutes since she’d last looked at it, in her hot, confusing frenzy to leave that restaurant, to stop looking at Griffin Testa’s mouth and imagining what it could do.
One kiss was a mistake, maybe.
Nearly twenty-five minutes of kissing?
She dropped her hand back to her side, staring at him. He shifted on his feet, looked away from her, and oh, god, it hurt. She could hardly understand how it hurt, could only let it gather in her, dark and spiky, and she wanted to get it out.
“It was maybe the wine,” he said.
“You had water,” she snapped, and that felt good, getting one of those spikes out and into him, watching his jaw tighten with its impact.
Not enough, though. He took one hand out of his pocket, moved it behind him, and then he had his phone out. The thumb that had stroked her neck, her earlobe, her lower lip—even as he kept kissing her—was now moving with brutal efficiency as he tapped and swiped across the cold, flat screen.
“Getting a car,” he said, as though he wanted to answer before she could ask.
But she was not going to ask. She was busy, trying to gather up all her spikes without cutting herself on them.
Because she knew, instinctively, that the car was not for both of them. That he meant for her to take it alone.
This was so…She was so embarrassed. So out of control and unlike herself: from that moment in the restaurant, maybe even before, all the way to now. Mind under matter, and the matter was him and what he’d managed to do to her in this doorway, on this street that was his.
In this other world.
She stepped out from beneath it. She wanted to wince from the reality check: All she could see now of that kiss was her own desperation during it. Her clutching hands, her rolling hips, her leg hitching over his.
“I’ll walk,” she said.
“No, you won’t.”
She started to pass by him, but he reached out—held her at her elbow, and she thought she heard a noise from him—another hiss, an exhalation, something—and it was enough to make her stop.
He dropped his hand immediately. Took a step away.
She should have kept going.
“Look,” he said, his voice low, a rasp in it now. “Today was good. We did good, for Michael and Emily.”
She absolutely could not look at him for this. She stared straight ahead, back toward the Boulevard Saint-Germain. Her street, her safety.
“That worked,” he continued. “You know, being friends.”
Oh, the spike of it. The stake, straight through the heart.
“Amicable,” she said, and hoped he would argue.
He did not.
He said, after a beat of silence, as though she hadn’t said the word that started all this, “And tomorrow is—the itinerary is full. So we should, you know. Do what we did—”
She started to walk again, even as she heard the sound of an engine pulling up.
“Stop,” he said, right on her heels. “Just—the car is here. Just get in the car.”
She turned back to him, so angry now. Saying those things to her, kissing her that way, embarrassing her with his suggestion of friendliness, of all fucking things, and now he wanted to give her commands.
Well, she wasn’t in his kingdom now. She was halfway back to her own. A place where she’d once been alone, and where she would happily be alone again.
But when she looked at him this time, everything spiky she wanted to say softened on her lips. Her I said I’ll walk; her How dare you; her I’m not doing what we did today ever again.
Because now that she was coming back to herself, she could see it: those wild eyes, the restless way his body moved, a dampness at his temples that she hadn’t felt when she’d put her hands in his hair. A tension around his eyes and along his neck.
“It isn’t a panic attack,” he said.
The rideshare driver, idling on the curb, tapped his horn, and Griffin turned his neck slowly.
“A minute,” he snapped, not even trying it in French this time.
She knew now that he usually did—determined, halting efforts, twelve-weeks-of-therapy efforts to prepare for this trip.
He always waited until someone spoke back to him in English to concede.
She looked at him. Mind over matter. Her better self said, It’s pain. What you are looking at is pain.
She’d suspected he had it. Had observed him enough to know that he had the sort of scars that felt alive to him, like a lot of physical medicine and rehabilitation patients who sustained and managed complicated scarring, or nerve injuries beneath burns.
But she hadn’t been thinking of it. Not tonight.
Not in that little world they’d been in.
Not in her wounded pride, her embarrassment.
So when he looked back at her, she remembered it all in a new way now: her drifting and clutching hands, her rolling hips, her leg hitching up.
Her grabbing at his sides, when he started to pull away.
“Did I hurt you?” she said.
“No.”
But it was the most dishonest No she’d ever heard. A violation of every Maybe I’ll tell you from today.
She could not let it go.
“Did I touch you in some way that—”
“No,” he said again, desperately emphatic, and still a lie.
She thought of his last desperate No, the honest one, the one he’d said with his mouth against her.
Her mind unspooled with a thousand images of the two of them together.
Not just kissing now. Naked and no reason to stop, his Nos an education for her. She would listen, learn what was okay.
“We could—” she began.
“Layla,” he said, his voice different than any way she’d ever heard it. No leaning in to that first syllable this time. He sounded so defeated that she couldn’t help but take a step toward him.
He backed away, his eyes flashing a warning.
“I am begging you,” he said, his mouth hardly moving as he spoke. Gritted it out. “Get in the car. Please.”
It was the Please that did it. The tacked-on, broken sound of it.
He was somewhere else now, remote and inaccessible to her.
Not in the world he’d brought her into for a while, not in the world they’d made together.
She could see it in the way he stepped back again as she passed, more distance.
He let her open the door herself, his hands never leaving his pockets.
He let her close it, too, when she was settled in the black-leather back seat.
He spoke to the driver, and not to her.
“I’ll watch the route,” he said, flat and menacing, and the driver nodded in understanding.
She thought, Do you speak fae prince? which was a very mind-under-matter thing to have in her head.
So when the driver pulled away from the curb, leaving Griffin behind, she brought herself back into the world of real things. Real words. She took out her phone, and opened the translation app.
To hurt, she typed, and got back the must-be-wrong blesser.
To starve, she tried, and got affamer.
To kiss, she put in, with shaky fingers, and didn’t much appreciate the irony of getting embrasser.
Embarrassed, she retaliated, and got a boring-sounding gênée.
Pain, she wrote, and mouthed the answer to herself: douleur.
Friend, she lied, watching it return what looked to her like a little fragment of something horrible: ami.
Word after worthless word, all the way back to the hotel.
And not once did she land on one that described how it felt to have had, and then lost, the touch of Griffin Testa.