“Can you feel this?” He pressed his thumb at the corner of my mouth, gentle, firm.
“Yes.”
“How about this?”
He leaned in, filling the air between us, the space, the cold, the doubt. His mouth slanted, his palm and heel of hand guiding me to where he wanted me, my lips to his, open, willing, wanting.
I closed my eyes and melted into him, the only thought in my mind:yes. I wanted to feel him, to hold this building heat, the electric velvet sensation of his body sharing this space, this soft darkness with mine.
For a moment, I was alive. I was real. I was me.
And then the cold wind lifted, reaching out as if I had a hole in my center. The memory of Rossi’s words returned, hard and bright:That hole isn’t going to heal. It is going to grow. Until it cannot be stitched over, cannot be closed, cannot be filled. And then you will hunger. Hunger for anything to put in its place.
I had an emptiness where my soul had once been. Where my soul belonged.
That emptiness hurt.
I realized there, in my lover’s embrace, that it wasn’t that I couldn’t feel pain. It was that being separated from my soul meant I was in so much pain I could not process it, could not comprehend the enormity of it.
And so I had twisted away from that agony. Somehow, I’d disengaged from it so that the pain was masked behind layers and layers of numbness.
If I thought about that hole inside of me a second too long, I’d be screaming, frantic, lashing out to find anything to ease that pain. To replace what I’d lost.
Including using something as beautiful and good and strong as the man I loved.
Hunger flared in me. Hunger and one very clear thought: take Ryder’s soul, rip it out of him and use it to pack the wound inside of me that I could not endure.
No!
I pulled away, scrambled back, frantic in my need to get away from him, to save him from me–fromme.
“Whoa, hold on, hey, easy.” Ryder made a grab for me, but I was still moving. I flung myself away from him, my legs tangled in the blanket bunched at the foot of the bed.
“Don’t,” I begged, breathless, and as close to afraid as I’d been able to feel for what felt like hours, days, years. “Don’t. I can’t let you. Let me. Can’t hurt….” And then I over-corrected and fell off the bed.
Ouch.
Everything went still. I sprawled on my back, staring up at the ceiling. They had nice crown molding. Also, I’d hit my funny bone. My arm was prickling.
Footsteps on the hardwood came near me.
Ryder stopped next to me, stared down.
“Reflexes like a cat.”
“Thanks.”
“Want to tell me what that was all about?”
“I’m…it’s the soul thing. Rossi told me the longer I go without it, the more I’ll miss it. And eventually I’ll want something to replace it so bad, I’ll do bad things to get them.”
“Uh-huh.”
From that lackluster response, he so wasn’t understanding the problem. Of course the whole demon-and-soul thing was even newer to him than it was to me.
“You made me feel good,” I said.
“Funny. That’s what I was going for.”
