Chapter 34
“SHUT THE FUCK UP,” DEZ says, and pushes him.
“I know your instinct is to doubt—”
“Due to the fact that it’s insane?”
“If you choose to stay here until morning, Dez, you commit to spending the rest of the term preparing.”
“To become an angel? That’s impossible. I’m from Death Valley. I worked at the Dairy Barn, remember? Making something called Baked Potato Surprise. And it isn’t a pleasant surprise.”
“The arc of mortal lives is charming. Your origins can be so low, your destinies so high.”
“What exactly am I signing up for if I stay past sunrise?”
“Fifteen hundred films in six months,” Rafe says. “Nine films a day.”
It’s a preposterous number. A sick joke. “Why not a million?”
“Fifteen hundred is the daily requirement for the rest of us. The angels.”
“You each make fifteen hundred films a day?”
“We have to, to keep up.”
With the dying, he means.
“It took me a month to make two films,” Dez says.
“The first cut is the hardest,” he says.
“If you stay here, if you want to be a White Light like us, Dez, we can make it happen. I’ll be here to help.
After tonight, the whole film school facade falls away—no more lectures, no more clubs, no more kitchen shifts, no more bullshit.
Only the work, Dez, the filmmaking. Only what you’re already so good at—”
“How does it happen?”
“You mean ascension?”
“Yes.” She can’t believe she’s even entertaining this, but it’s one way to postpone her grief.
“We’re forbidden from sharing the specifics in advance,” Rafe says. “But I can say it’s extraordinary when an angel gets their wings.”
Dez tries to imagine this. Wings? It doesn’t seem possible, and even if it was …
“You’re wondering about the catch?”
She nods.
“The catch is relinquishing your life as you know it. If you were to ascend, you would lose ties to your family. You’ve already lost your brother, of course, but your mother wouldn’t see you anymore. Literally.”
“I doubt she wants to, after what happened.”
Rafe nods as if this might be true. “The same would go for everyone you used to know. Outside the barbelo, angels are invisible to mortal eyes.”
“But I saw you.”
“You’re the exception.”
“What does that mean?”
Rafe raises an eyebrow. “It means I’ve never seen a mind’s eye like yours before. It’s uncannily powerful. If we stick together, Dez, we’re going to have a leg up.”
“If I ascend, it’ll be like I died to the people in my life?”
He nods. “That’s the trade-off. But I can assure you, it’s worth it.”
Dez thinks of her home, Death Valley. She can’t imagine resuming the relationships she had with anyone there after what she did to Mo.
Not her mom, not Uncle Bob, not Silas. She can’t even imagine looking at herself in her bedroom mirror back home, where she used to dream of becoming a very different kind of filmmaker. One with far more creative agency.
But far less cosmic agency.
No, those old dreams died with Mo. She can’t go back.
Does it mean she’s staying … here?
A cold punch of loss hits Dez in the chest. It surprises her, and she tries to chase its source. What would she miss so much about her life before she came to Acheron that it would hit her like this now?
Asher.
It’s so pathetic she almost laughs aloud. Ridiculous to grieve someone who may not even remember her. But when she thinks of cutting ties with the life she used to have, this is the only painful hesitation. And she doesn’t know why, but it throbs.
“What if I can’t do that?” she says. “If I can’t give up my life before?”
“Any first-year student who wants out must visit Zeke before dawn,” Rafe says.
“He’ll administer the Dream Expulsion, erasing whole swaths of memories from the film of the mortal mind.
If that’s what you want, you can go home to your regular life tonight.
Your brother will still be gone, and I can’t promise you’ll stay out of jail, but these past few weeks?
Acheron? It will all feel like a quickly fading dream. ”
“That’s what Alice Quinn took?”
Rafe nods.
“What about what Moriah said,” she asks, “about those fallen bodies, the fragmented …”
“Fragmented resurrections. Frags for short.”
“That night, the last time you came to my room, you told me Charles Costello was your friend. Was that a lie?”
“I’ve never lied to you, Dez,” Rafe says. “I can’t. As your mentor.” He sits down heavily on the edge of her bed. “Charles was my friend in the way all your subjects will become your friends. If you stay.”
“You were working on his film?”
He nods.
“Moriah said the frags were in Acheron’s care. Where are they?”
“There’s a river up the mountain, behind Villains. A river so deep you can dive into it. We’re holding them under a bank of frozen water. The ice keeps them more comfortable. It’s not permanent, only until we find a solution.”
“Will you show me?”
He turns to look at her. “Will you stay?”
“I don’t know.”
She thinks again of what Yael said. To give Rafe what he deserves.
“I hope you’ll stay,” he says, so sincerely it takes her breath away.
“I thought you hated me.”
He cracks a smile, rises from the bed so that he’s facing her. “Can you understand now why I had to keep you at a distance?” He reaches out, tucks a strand of hair behind her ear with unexpected tenderness. “Angels and mortals … they can’t exactly …”
“Can’t exactly what?”
“They can’t exactly fuck.”
Dez laughs, actually laughs on the night she thought she’d never laugh again. And inside her, desire flickers into a flame.
“I’m serious,” Rafe says. He looks almost pained. And Dez realizes this is what desire looks like on him. He wants her and he’s fighting it.
Suddenly all she wants is for him to throw her onto the bed.
“Why can’t we?” she asks, her voice breathy and short.
The heat of his gaze thrills her as he says, “Because … your body can’t handle it. Because it’s that good. And if I killed you—”
“You think you can fuck me to death, Rafe? I dare you.”
He stares at her with so much longing and intensity Dez starts to wonder if these moments are her last. It would explain why kissing him is the most exquisite sexual pleasure she has ever known.
“Things are falling into place, aren’t they?” he asks.
She thinks of the night Yael dragged Simon and her away from Villains, because she didn’t trust Jet not to take things too far with Simon.
Because if they’d hooked up … it would have killed her friend?
Why would Jet have risked losing his protégé for one hit of pleasure?
Was he like her brother, that much in need of something so dangerous?
She thinks of the snakeskin she found in her bed the first night Rafe ever kissed her. Moriah had been sending them a signal then, a caution against what she must have known they wanted to do.
“Why kiss me, then, if it’s so dangerous?” she whispers.
He takes a step closer, threading an arm around her waist. “Because I can’t help myself.” His eyes are on her lips and the way he’s staring at them, hungry, is such a turn-on. “And we’re not seventeen, Dez—kissing me won’t kill you.”
“What would kill me, then?” she gasps, eager for him.
Gently, he grips the back of her hair and tips her face up to his. His eyes light into her.
“If I gave you everything,” he growls. “What I really want to give you. If I filled you up with all my glory, it’d be so good, you would die.”
“Then how—”
“You’d have to be an angel to survive it.”
Dez is hanging on every hot word out of Rafe’s mouth.
She’d have to be an angel to survive getting fucked by him?
Is that reason enough to stay at Acheron?
She laughs at her own absurdity. To give up her mortality, her existence as she knows it?
All so she can know what it’s like to have this man—this angel—inside of her?
She isn’t thinking clearly. She’s in shock, reeling from all the unbelievable things she’s heard tonight.
Rafe describing her mind’s eye as uncannily powerful.
She doesn’t even know what that means. And she doesn’t have to worry about any of this, because there’s no way she’ll make fifteen hundred films in six months.
No way she’s even staying here. No way she’ll ever be an angel.
Such a shame for her throbbing body.
“What about oral sex?” she asks before she realizes it. Not what you should say when your brother’s just died. Or maybe it’s the only thing you can say.
“Right now?” Rafe says, sounding game.
“Right now.”
He raises an eyebrow and grins. “I’ll roll those dice if you will.”
Then Dez is on the bed. He’s picked her up and tossed her backward, so her head is on the pillow. He’s taking off her stilettos, loosening the buckles, slipping off the thin black straps, bringing the bare arch of her foot to his mouth.
“Rafe,” she pants as his mouth traces her toes.
“You sure you want this?” he asks.
“Don’t you dare fucking stop.”
He watches her face as he kisses her feet, as he makes her writhe in pleasure. “You consume me, Desdemona.”
“I do?”
“You have no idea how much I want this. How much I’ve needed this.” His mouth trails up the inside of her leg, kissing her knee, then the tender soft flesh of her inner thigh. He drags the skirt of her silk dress up higher with his teeth, until he exposes her black thong.
“Rip them off me,” she begs.
“The heat of your pussy is so hot,” he says, kissing her through the thin fabric. “Now I need you to get very wet.”
“Past that point.”
He nips at the fabric, pulling it aside with his teeth. Dez’s mind swirls with grief and confusion and a desire that works to blot out everything else. Rafe is still kissing her, right by her pussy. What is she doing? She shouldn’t be—
“Hey,” he says softly. “You still with me?”
His eyes lock with hers and she grabs him by the shirt collar, bringing his mouth up to hers.
She pulls him close and sucks his lower lip.
The pleasure she feels each time they kiss surges through her, filling her body from head to toe.
She’s naked from the waist down, her dress hiked high over her hips, dangerously close to what she now knows is actual divine dick.
God, maybe she wouldn’t mind if it killed her. It wouldn’t be the worst way to go.
“I’m not going to do anything stupid,” he says, like he’s reading her mind. “I’m just going to make you come.”
“Smart,” she breathes.
Then his mouth leaves hers, tragically. But tonight, it’s not like the other times when he’s pulled away and left her aching.
This time, his mouth almost immediately finds her, eating her like he’s starved, like he’s been in prison for a thousand years, like she’s the best thing he’s ever had.
The pleasure of his tongue flat on her clit, then sucking, then playing with it so gently between his teeth makes her gasp and moan.
He props her legs around his neck so he can get closer, deeper.
So he can eat her like only an angel would know how to do.
Pleasure and need twine in her. She bows her back, bucking her hips against his mouth.
This makes him moan, the vibration of his throat pulsing against her clit.
She’s so hot, so wet in his mouth. Her palms find the bony notches on his shoulders where his wings come out.
She presses down, pushing him farther into her.
“I want to taste you for eternity,” he says, bringing his hand to her throbbing slit, pressing three fingers inside her—but slowly, inch by breathtaking inch. And she knows what he’s doing, giving her a taste of how he’d fill her.
“Fuck me, Rafe, I don’t care,” she begs.
“I thought you might say that,” he whispers, his breath against her most sensitive reaches. “But the thing is, I need you to stick around. So, I’m going to make you come with my mouth, and you’re going to like it very much. Sound good?”
“Please,” she breathes. “It won’t be enough.”
“We’ll see about that.”
“Are you,” she gasps, “ever going to fuck me?”
“That,” he breathes into her, “is up to you.”
“If I become an angel?” she pants.
“And not a second later,” he tells her, tracing circles with his tongue.
Dez’s eyes drift closed as his tongue probes her folds, as he licks and sucks and presses his mouth hard against her. She’s caught in a pleasure so deep she can’t imagine it getting any better.
And then it does.
A cresting abyss of absolute ecstasy that makes her start coming with his name on her lips.
“Rafe!”
“Come harder,” he says, and sucks her clit again.
“I can’t. It’s too good.”
“There’s more. Find it.”
She grinds against him as an inferno of pleasure rises in her, igniting every cell.
And he’s right. It’s happening. She didn’t think she could go deeper into pleasure, but Rafe is taking her there.
To the point where it feels like her entire body is soaring, like she’s falling to the bottom of the universe.
Where there’s nothing else in the world.
She’s still coming. Harder now, deeper and longer than seems humanly possible.
It only makes sense because the mouth on her is anything but human.
She grips his hair to hold him in place.
Just in case this feeling never ends, she needs to keep him right here where he belongs.
And then, slowly, blissfully, her orgasm ebbs to a profound, bone-numbing state of deep, pleasurable calm. Like she’s about to drift off into sleep. But she doesn’t want to, not before Rafe—
Kisses her.
“Mind reader,” she murmurs into his lips, wrapping her arms around his neck.
“That one was easy,” he says, and even though her eyes are closed, she can hear the smile in his voice. He folds her in his arms so they’re spooning. And for just a second, Dez lets herself feel absolutely good.
Grief is out there, pain is real, an unknowable war lies on the horizon, but right now, in Rafe’s arms, nothing matters but that he keeps holding her. Just like this.