“Like this,” he whispered, sweeping his palm over my skin, leaving a riot in his wake. Of colour. Of sensation. It was all the fucking same. “So for a little while, we can be just us.”
There was nous. There couldn’t be. But the flawed promise sucked me in. I let him smear paint all over me. Returned the favour with my heart in my fucking throat, ready to spill out of me and be trampled into the floor.
Into dust.
Magic fucking dust.
“Now what?”
My voice was hoarse. As dark and dangerous as Vik’s gaze had turned in the low light of the room.
He pointed to the glass wall, to the masses beyond it, moving to the sultry beat of the best EDM.
“Now we dance.”
I couldn’t fathom how the fuck that could work. But his hands on me had flicked a switch in my fucking soul, and I suddenly trusted him more than anything.
Idiot. He’s playing you.
The voice in my head, though... it wasn’t mine. It wasn’t anyone’s I gave a fuck about, and I blocked it out. Vik could strip me naked if he wanted and smear paint on my fucking balls. Still wasn’t going to let him die.
While I made peace with that, Viktor reached around me and unlocked the door, his gaze never leaving mine. “Can I ask you something?”
I shadowed his every move. “If you like.”
He didn’t. Not immediately, anyway. He preceded me into the corridor, towing me further into the belly of the pulsating building, and as the beat wrapped around us, the heat, I forgot about it, too lost in the paint-streaked expanse of his naked back. In the scars I’d painted orange and pink.
In the ones I hadn’t.
We came to another door. Another keypad. His thumb lit that shit up and the door opened, a wall of music spilling out, but no light. If anything, the space he led me to next was darker, but people were close. I felt them. I heard them. And fuck me, I wanted a cigarette.
Viktor kept going, hugging a rough textured wall. Minutes passed before he finally stopped and turned to me. “You are ready?”
“To what?”
“To move as if you have always been here.”
He didn’t wait to explain. Just grabbed my hand and pulled me from the dark into the bright and flashing lights of the club. Into a teeming mass of bodies that moved to the beat of a track so dense and moody it felt like a fucking hug.
The crowd swallowed us up. Vik led the way, but I kept my arms around him, shielding every inch of him I could, even as he tipped his head back to smile at me—reallysmile, shedding the tension he’d carried for who the fuck knew how long with every step he took.
He hadn’t been lying about dancing. He dragged me to a dark corner and moulded his body to mine. Instinctive.Dirty. Paint smearing our skin. And it didn’t escape my notice that he’d positioned me so I could see everything around us.
And you’d better believe I hawk-eyed every fucking movement until the happiness seeping from him got to me and I relaxed enough to take it all in.
The colour.
The lights.
The pure sultry chill emanating from every shape and size of every gender.
He built this.
It was my sole thought as we moved together. I didn’t even think about kissing him. About the hardness I felt with everypass of his body or the answering throb in my own. Instead, I soaked it all in and tried to fathom how his life had led him here.
Eventually, I let it all go. I smoked the joint he passed me and let the weed buzz carry me through the club, exploring every room, easing through the homogenous crush of flesh and body paint. It was a carnival like I’d never seen, but I couldn’t resist the pull to the darker rooms. The deeper beats.
I found my favourite. Smoked another joint while Vik drank water, watching me as much as I watched him.
