Chapter 24 #2
“I can’t imagine ever having not loved you,” he says.
Nelle flips him onto his back. She kisses his jaw. His body arches upward into her touch, a need to feel her skin burn against his. Her tongue on his neck. Nelle kisses his throat, the curve of his chest, down his stomach. He sees her hair and the dark bedroom before his world splits into oblivion—
She doesn’t take him but kisses him. Featherlight, treating that part of him with the same adoration she has shown the rest of his body.
As she looks up at him from between his legs, her back arches, tan from the beach in southern France.
He glimpses the smooth curve of her ass. Blond hair draping his inner thighs.
Her voice is low. “I want you, James.”
“Fuck,” he whispers, pulling her up against him.
Chest to chest, he turns her onto her back and positions himself.
“I know you said you can’t get pregnant, but—”
She rolls her eyes. “Based on my predecessors, there’s only one way I can procreate, and it’s not this.”
“Right, but shouldn’t we be safe?”
“I can’t get pregnant, James.”
“But how do you know for sure if you’ve never tried?”
Nelle’s brows furrow. “Are we having sex or an interrogation? I know the laws of my existence.”
“You’re right,” he says, his mountain of worry dissolving like a sandhill. “I believe you.”
He dips down, his top lip brushing hers.
“I love you,” he says.
A leg folds around his ass, nudging him in.
He hesitates, teasing her wet entrance. This, he thinks, is the right moment.
She takes him slow at first, nails digging into his neck. Further in, a whimper.
He loves her wondrous spirit. The strength she grew to survive her childhood. Her brain, how it ticks and plots and argues and wishes. How she dreams.
Their stomachs connect in a touch of hot skin. Her other knee bends around his waist, locking him to her. Nelle’s jaw gleams as her head falls back to the pillow. Her hands lock around his neck.
James knows he won’t hold out for long, so he makes his second, his third, his fourth thrust intentional and slow. He tries to ground himself in the motion of his hips, but he is already spearheading into oblivion.
Nelle rocks against him. “Faster, James.”
Sheets hiss. Throats make involuntary pleasured noises, back and forth, until they blur into one. Sea, skyline. East, west. Five seconds or an hour, he doesn’t know. But he can feel the cliffside now, edging.
“I wish,” he says, breathless, “that we could stay this close forever.”
Eyes lidded, Nelle cries out. Her calves tremble as her claws sink into James’s shoulders. Her abdomen arches up, hot against his. He slows his pace, but it’s too late. He’s already gone . . .
Fireworks crackle through his body.
His brain, off. Darkness, hot pleasure, and Nelle.
Her fingers fall from his sweaty hair to his lips, lingering.
“I love you, too,” she says. The words hang, light as a glass ornament.
He slides out, utterly out of breath and amazed and in love and ready to duck between her legs and pleasure her again. His lust must read on his burning face, because Nelle’s hand tightens on his jaw.
“Can you hold me?” A tear spills down her cheek.
Hovering over her, he leans down to touch the tip of her nose with his. “Always.”
Nelle is giggling under the bedsheet with James like they are at a sleepover, flashlight holding them in a dome of light, when she hears a groan from the living room floor. Too loud to be an old-house noise. Too precise. She snaps her finger to her lips, slicing James’s whisper mid-word.
With a trembling hand, she pulls the bedsheet down. James cuts the flashlight.
In only his T-shirt, she grabs her journal and pen and slides off the mattress.
James stands, shirtless, in only his boxers. “What are you doing?”
Nelle writes for herself. “Checking on that noise.”
“I didn’t hear a noise.”
“Then why are you standing up?”
“Old houses make noises,” he says. “My parents’ house literally screams at night, I swear.”
Nelle shakes her head, a deep pit of dread gnawing at her stomach. “I’m serious, James. I need to make sure everything’s okay out there.”
“All right,” James says. “Let’s go.”
She glares at his sudden persistence to join. “Why don’t you stay and protect the bed?”
He glares back at her, placing his hand over hers on the doorknob.
“Move,” she says through gritted teeth. “Please don’t be stubborn right now. I can’t die, James. You can.”
“I want to go out first,” he says. “You can come right behind me.”
“What if it’s a bear?” She has seen videos, and she hates their enormous heads, their tree-rattling roars, their black-as-ink eyes. “I don’t want you to get mauled.”
“I promise it’s just the pipes. Or the fridge, maybe. Old fridges always make weird noises.”
Nelle gives up. He’s right, it’s probably nothing. “Fine, go ahead.”
He opens the door, sliding outside first. Nelle creeps on his heels, an inch behind him, so she sees the man in the living room as soon as James does. Sees his soulless, deranged smile and his pearl-handled pistol.
Wallace Quill, acclaimed author, disappointing son, and god-awful father, in all his glory.
“Having fun?” he asks. “Enjoyed fucking in my dead parents’ bed, did you?”
“Yeah, we did,” James says, clenching his fists.
What is he going to do, punch a bullet? Nelle wants to tell him to back down, to cool off, not to make Quill angry because that will only make him pull that trigger. But she’s scared it’s already too late. That he is already fuming.
Quill takes aim.
Nelle grabs James by the shoulders and shoves him back as hard as she can. As he stumbles, she darts to get out of the way herself.
When the gun goes off, it sounds like a wooden balloon popping. She hears the blast, then only silence and her muffled heartbeat.
She can’t see, she realizes. Or hear.
The back of her head rings. Her body floats in a dark pool. And she has this deep feeling within herself that things aren’t going well.
James drops down, Nelle in his arms. He can’t hear her cry, but he can tell by her contorted face that she is in terrible pain. The ragged bullet hole inches from her heart, the exposed purplish muscles above the bone, the ink streaming out in hot pumps . . .
He tries to remember what he learned in school, but his mind is blank. I’m no doctor.
Hands pressed above her heart, his only course of action is to use his cotton briefs to stem the bleeding.
Nothing matters, not his nakedness, not Quill standing across the room with a gun that is most likely still loaded.
All that matters is keeping Nelle alive.
She said she can’t die, but what if she’s wrong? Surely she has never bled like this.
James screams for Quill to get help. In his own ears, his voice is muffled, but he hopes that Quill feels it like a slap to the face.
The front door slams shut.
James steadies Nelle between his legs and does not dare let go of the fabric against her chest. Instead, he eases them both backward until his back meets the wall. He keeps one hand pressed firmly against her and uses the other to hold her face.
“Hang on, Nelle.” He can’t hear himself, but he trusts that the words are there.
“You have the world to see, an entire life to live. Maybe with me, if you want. We can go back to Paris. We can adopt kids one day. Or have cats instead. And it doesn’t matter where we live.
Wherever you want, Nelle. Wherever you want. ”
He presses his lips to her cold scalp, holds her to him, and talks to her until the front door opens again.