I hold his gaze, lift my chin, and put everything I have into my next words so he knows how serious I am. "But I know how your heart feels. And it feels right."
Cole freezes while his eyes are in flames. The fire blazing in them is so cold it should scare me, but all I can think about is the color.
Silver. Molten silver, constantly shifting.
His eyes…God, his eyes. I will never forget Cole’s eyes, no matter what comes.
"You have no idea," he whispers while his scent nearly steals my sanity. He smells of leather, tobacco, and campfire. Of whiskey, sweat, and blood. He smells like Cole, and I never want to smell anything else again.
When I answer him just as hushed, his gaze wanders down and lingers on my lips. "Doesn’t matter. It’s still true."
While speaking, I can no longer feel my body. I don’t even know if I’m still crying. There’s just Cole. Cole and his body that presses against mine, more and more and more, and for some reason, it’s still not enough.
"I don’t want to send you away." The words are barely audible, as if he were speaking to himself, but they give me courage. Courage and hope.
"And I don’t want to go," I breathe, pleading in my mind for him to relent. For him to see how much I need him. Because even though I didn’t realize it myself until just now, it’s true.
I need him to call me darling. Need his cursing. His hand holding mine. I need his rough voice close to my ear.Open your eyes, little darling.Only now they’re truly open and let me see all of him.Everything. And I need every spark of it. All the anger and the pain. The laughter and the worry. The lightheartedness, however rarely it bursts out. I need all of it because through him, I feel the life I have longed for so much. I needColebecause with him, I feel truly alive for the first time in my life.
Seconds pass—maybe it’s even minutes, hours, or eternities—until I suddenly feel his fingertips on my cheek. I shudder under his touch and close my eyes. Then he presses his forehead against mine so I can feel each of his heavy breaths.
"I shouldn’t do it." His soft voice reaches my ears while his lips almost graze mine, making me gasp as if I could inhale his words.
"What?"
"This."
His fingers slide into my hair with palpable control. Tilting my head back, his other hand wanders to my waist, pulling me to him. Closer and closer, until his heat becomes mine, until…
Cole places his lips on mine, and I burst into pieces.
He tastes of the whiskey he drank and of anger. Of lost hope and loneliness. Of everything and nothing.
He tastes of life.
His mouth is warm and soft as he holds me, keeps me with him, puts me back together. He kisses me as if I could break at any moment. As if the touch of his lips alone could shatter me into millions of pieces, over and over again.
But then, this restrained and soft kiss turns into something desperate, almost hard, and I kiss him back as if I knew what I was doing. But I don’t know anything. Yet I open my lips willingly as Cole slides the tip of his tongue over them. My arms wrap around his neck when he lifts me as if my body knows exactly what to do.
And then… Then he kisses me as if he were dying. He breathes me in, and I breathe him in, until I no longer know where my body ends and his begins. All I can feel is that I’m burning. The flames I saw in his eyes had spread to me, scorching me from the inside, extinguishing me until there’s nothing left of me. Still, I kiss him back until he moans my name as if that’s all that’s keeping him alive.Maybe it even is,I think, until…
Cole pulls away, looks at me with almost black eyes—breathing heavily, quivering, dying—and lets go of me. I stumble against the wall behind me, unable to hold on to him any longer because my body has long since stopped obeying me.
In the blink of an eye, his expression hardens. He doesn’t say a word. Instead, he turns away abruptly and leaves.
I can’t grasp what’s happening. A moment ago, he was kissing me, and now he’s gone. His lips were just on mine, but now, all that’s left is a memory. Seconds ago, he held me close, but where his hands were, there’s nothing but cold.
I sink to the floor, my legs no longer holding me, as he runs down the last steps and opens the heavy steel door a moment later.
"Cole?"
But the only answer I get is the loudbangof the door slamming shut. He left without saying another word. Without looking at me even once.
All I have left of him is the memory of the taste of his lips, and I realize that I’ve never felt as lonely as I did at that moment.
TWENTY-SEVEN
COLE
