But tonight it’s back.
Tonight, I feel perfect. I feel beautiful and ethereal.
I feel like a fairy.
Hisfairy, as I dance around him.
As I twirl and leap and jump and lose myself in the music like I was made for it.
As he watches me with a certain kind of possession in his eyes, the same kind from two years ago.
I don’t want to, though.
I don’t want to feel perfect or on fire or ethereal.
I don’t want to feelhis.
But I do, and when the time comes for him to lift me and he puts his hands on my waist and gives me a boost after two long years, stars explode in my veins. The violins are so loud that they shatter the ceiling, the sky, and I throw my arms up in the air, my lungs swelling up with his scent of wildflowers and woods.
I’m so lost in it, in his grip, in the fact that my soft flesh gives so easily beneath his strong fingers, that it takes me a few seconds to realize that the music has stopped.
I don’t even know where the time went.
I don’t even know how it moved so fast and there’s pin-drop silence now.
Except for our breaths, panting and heavy.
I lower my arms then and put them on his shoulders, looking down.
As always, his eyes are already on me, a gunmetal gray so intense and liquid that I could drown in it. I could drown in the deep lake of his wolf eyes.
And I should save myself.
I should look away.
I shouldn’t admire his thick lashes, the strands of his dark brown hair that flutter over his forehead. The long strands that make me think that he needs a haircut.
I shouldn’t flex my fingers on his shoulders and knead the muscles. I shouldn’t marvel over how big they feel now, how strong and rock-like. Even more than before.
Like he’s been pumping iron for the past two years, building himself muscle by muscle, tendon by tendon.
And why wouldn’t he?
He’s an athlete. A soccer player.
Thebestsoccer player.
The one who won the championship two years ago. Who defeated my brother, the Angry Thorn, and became the reigning champion of Bardstown High, the Wild Mustang.
I bet people still remember him. They remember his victory. They remember his swagger, his style, his legend.
And if they remember him, they probably remember me too.
They probably remember what the Thorn Princess did in the name of love.
How she went crazy.
For him.
