My mouth parted, and I closed my eyes. My breath seized as he cupped the warmth of my neck, replaced it with his chill. His breath was like cinnamon, biting as he seduced my senses.
His voice dropped into a whisper, “Until you.” And I heard the crack in it, the chasm of hurt that crept around the curves of his syllables.
Until you. Two words that connected us.
Two words that created a space in which we were understood by one another.
No questions asked.
“I’m sorry,” he continued in my ear. “For not being there in the morning after—”
“It’s okay,” I cut him off, shaking my head. “You’re okay.” I bit my lip, laid my hand over his chest. He was here now. “That’s all that matters.”
Then he kissed me. Oh,god!and he was kissing me. I couldn’t hang on to a solid breath as his tongue moved against mine like an obsidian vortex, a desperate force demanding to accept him for all that he was, to accept this position we were in. I kissed him back, a push and pull and a fight and a scream.
I hear you, Julian.I already have!Secrets and promises exchanged between us like a pact. He cupped my face and pulled me onto my toes, and I was a wave carried on his current, on his lips.
He was kissing me, and I was flying …
“AHHHHHHH!”a scream erupted! and pierced my eardrums!
Like a reflex, Julian’s palm slapped over my eyes the same time his head snapped to the side. His chest was heaving against mine, his muscles twitching under his skin, ready to bolt—to run.
“SOMEONE, HELP!”
“I’m so sorry.” Pain etched in his words—pain, because he had to leave.
Three words that were so much bigger than three words.
They were a space between us.
No questions asked.
Then his hand fell from my face, and a rush of cold wind smacked my skin.
I didn’t have to open my eyes to know Julian was gone.
I was shocked by how the cold pierced his absence.
“FALLON, OH MY GOD, FALLON!”
My skin, my lips, everywhere he’d been, it felt strange from the rest of my body now. Not fully mine anymore. The feeling slipped away from me. Plummeted. Bailed and left the stratosphere.
“Are you hurt?!” Carrie Driscoll appeared before me, scanning over my features. “Don’t worry, help is coming,” she told me, and I wanted to say something. I wanted to tell her I didn’t need help, that he did nothing wrong! “Thank goodness I came just in time.”
Just in time, her words echoed.
Julian
I was running faster, harder, my legs threatening to buckle. I was running until my sight became hazy. My breathing echoed in my head, jolted my chest. Inhaling, exhaling, I was running, past the pain, toward the Norse woods, where I was loved and not feared.
And I didn’t stop there. I was running, my chest burning. I’d felt the betrayal of my witchery begging to be released—the jerk of my hands, the vibration in my veins. It pulled me, and it wasn’t even nightfall! I couldn’t understand it. My mask was gone, lost somewhere along the way. The temperatures were biting my face, sinking its nails into my eyes. I forced them open, dry and burning and running.
Then I collapsed somewhere in the heart of the Norse woods.
The canopy allowed little light to filter through. There was no sound aside from my starving lungs. My arms spread out at my sides, and I curled my hands into fists under the dark tresses of the trees, grasping to the velvet flesh of the forest ground, desperate to release this build-up.
I couldn’t feel my legs, yet I felt every morsel of inescapable torment. When I opened my eyes, the sun’s rays glittered off the reds and golds of the fall leaves—October’s kaleidoscope. One mad burst of flames around me, inside me.I’m on fire!
