But, knowing still made my heart break for her loss and I understood how she felt when she grabbed Romeo’s dagger and said, “O happy dagger! This is thy sheath,” and buried it inher chest.
“There rest, and let me die,”Juliet continued.
I watched her body fall on top of Romeo’s, tears streaming down my cheeks.
Warm hands covered mine bringing me back to reality. I looked down to where Ryan held my hand and saw how tight I was holding on to him. So tight my knucles turned white. It was quite dark in here, but I could still see them.
He lifted my hand up to his lips and kissed it.
“You okay?” he whispered.
“Yeah, it’s the scene. I always get like this.”
He looked me over. I knew he knew that was a lie, but he didn’t call me out on it.
On the drive back, I caught him looking at me several times.
I was going to be staying at his place tonight because Aria was sleeping over at a friend’s house.
When we got inside, he went straight into the sitting room. Instead of turning on the main light, he switched on the lamp and moved over to the fireplace to get a fire going. I joined him, sitting next to him and resting my head on his shoulder.
“Ryan 101: Ryan shuts down completely when he’s worried about something.” I slid my hand over the thick mass of muscle on his forearms.
“Brooke 101: Brooke leaves in ten days and she’ll go back to her life in LA.”
I lifted my head. “That’s not me. That’s something that’s scheduled to happen.”
He looked away from me and back to the fire as it started to get going. The solemn look on his face pulled at my heart, at my soul.
“It came too quickly.”
He didn’t want me to go. I could tell from just looking at him, but he would never ask me to stay because he knew everything I’d planned for my life in LA and my career.
My heart squeezed and that black hole felt so much bigger when I thought of the coming week, of leaving.
Ryan looked back to me and our gazes locked. There were a million things to say, but I didn’t want to say them.
I couldn’t tell him that I was scared to love him.
I moved toward him at the same time he reached for me. Falling into the hungry kiss he fed me. Right there by the fire, we kissed the clothes off each other, and I could feel him everywhere, all over me and inside me in a haze of…love.
It was different; his touch was different, and we were different. The passion that normally gripped us was so unreal it left me weak. This was more. It was beyond lust-filled desire to consume each other.
It was something that couldn’t be described with words. You had to feel it to understand the energy of the force that surrounded us and rippled from me to him, from him to me. It heightened when he slid into me, and then I swore time stood still. Everything in that moment stood still, and all I could see was him.
Ryan, making love to me.
Making love.
It was like that all night. We were like that all night.
We made love until we passed out from exhaustion. Ryan fell asleep from it.
But I couldn’t sleep.
I couldn’t sleep because I’d never made love to anyone before.
I’d never made love before because I’d never been in love before. Not before now.
