He lifts his head and smiles. “Again.”
“No!” I turn and crab-crawl backward toward the bed and up onto it, but he crawls after me. His hand lands on my underwear, his fingers curling under the band and pulling it away from my skin. But the pain consumes him straight through the fabric, a glow creeping up his arm. I try to get away, to free him of this torment. Because I hate how much I love the depths of pain he’ll face to touch me. My underwear stretches between us, tighter and tighter until he finally lets go. It snaps back, and he rolls away, lying flat on his back on the bed.
The way he pants, the lingering pain around his eyes—it’s addictive. But I can’t be like my mother. “Stop hurting yourself!”
“Youstop hurting me,” he growls, then flips himself on top of me, grabbing my arms and pinning them above my head in a single motion. My body accepts his smashing weight in warm, decadent waves. But the pain hits him again. He squeezes through the torture, ten fingers digging far too deep into my muscles.
His face breaks into a perfect picture of agony. Damn. My mind. I try to control myself, searching through the floods of magic for a wall, a stop, an end to the gush of energy, but it flows stronger. Light shoots through the raised veins in his arms. He presses his forehead into mine before ripping himself away and going limp.
“Stop! Teach me how to control it. I’ll do anything.”
His head rises again, that dark aura around his sweaty, heaving body. “Anything?”
Chapter 11
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Yes, anything,” I assure him, positive I’m making a mistake.
“You’ll do what I say? You promise?” He leans on his elbow, propping his head up in his palm with a sneaky smile.
“What is with you and promises? And yes, what’s one more?”
He takes a profound breath, as if the memory of the last promise he demanded were a burden. “Lie back and close your eyes.”
“Why?” I position myself on the mattress, trying to calm the rhythm in my chest.
“Eyes,” he scolds, and I pinch them shut.
“I thought you liked them open,” I jest, not particularly thrilled with confinement in the dark of my mind.
His voice turns deep and quiet next to me. “That’s why I need them closed—they’re distracting. Now lie still. Back flat against the bed. Arms at your sides. Legs…”—he pauses, and I swear I feel his gaze raking over my body, down my naked legs—“just like that. Take a breath for me and let all the messed-up thoughts go.”
That, I cannot do. My thoughts never leave, but I let my body melt into the bed. His words are foreign to my ears, strange, slithering off his tongue. He’s not one to comfort, not like this. “Now you’re a meditation guide too?”
“I’m anything you fucking need until the end of time, now shut your sweet mouth until I tell you what I want to hear.”
And maybe that’s why I push him. To hear things like that. They make me forget everything else. “Maybe I need—”
“To shut up and let me help you? Yes. Youagreed to this.”
“I’m nervous,” I admit.
“I’m here,” he says, oblivious to how those two words hit me. “Look deep. Even if it hurts. Find that spark. It burns when you get too close. It leaves scars, but the heat feels too good to escape.”
“I don’t think that’s how most people feel about fire.” But I hunt for the white energy, the magic, rushing and rolling rampant through me with each touch. I’ll find it—and extinguish it.
“But you get it,” he says softly.
“I do.”
“Did you find the spark?”
“Maybe,” I lie. I can’t track it down, can’t separate it from the rest of me. Forget a spark. My whole mind is on fire.
His breath passes over my ear. “Now light it up.”
I pry one eye open. “I thought we were trying to putoutthe spark?”
