“I’ll have to text my dad.” My heart sinks. Dad doesn’t care if I’m gone all night on a crying spree, wandering in the forest, but he just might kill me if he knows I stayed overnight with a man. He’s sure to give me a backhanded slap or two at the very least.
Digging my hand into my bag, I find my phone and send him a text full of misspellings.Banshe eprsode. Back tomorvo.Hopefully he’ll think I’m staggering around, barely able to text him in between wails and sobs. He’ll still worry because he knows I was out with the church group, but at least he won’t guess the truth. Hopefully Edgarwon’t tell him anything about tonight’s events. I doubt he’d want to admit how completely he lost control of his singles’ event.
I stuff the phone back in my bag. “We’re good. Motel it is. But no more sex.”
“Sleep,” Heathcliff agrees. “And then quiet sex in the morning.”
I can’t help laughing. “Maybe. I think I was just overwrought and tired, and my banshee side was stressed out from nearly dying. Some rest should settle everything down.”
“Cool.”
He taps his fingers on the wheel, and I study his profile. The god who attacked us had plenty to say, and I know Heathcliff is probably mulling it over. “Juventas” sounds Roman, which would back up Heathcliff’s theory that he’s got Italian ancestry.
“Sooo…are we going to talk about what that means?” I venture. “You being the ‘son of Juventas’?”
“Not tonight.”
He doesn’t say anything else, so I postpone my curiosity and stare out the window, remembering what it felt like—that concussive supernova between us. It was fucking cosmic, and I don’t think it was just because I nearly died. I think it washim. Heathcliff. I let myself be whole and wide-open to him like I’ve never been with anyone else. That was the difference.
And that is the danger.
10
Heathcliff
A sharp bang jolts me out of sleep. I’m off the bed in a split second, heart racing, ripping the motel curtains aside.
Not gunfire. Just somebody’s beat-up car backfiring. I groan, rubbing my face. The adrenaline has already spread through my body, and I won’t be able to go back to sleep.
I turn around, expecting Cathy to blink at me from the bed, maybe laugh at me for being startled.
But she’s not in the bed. She’s crouched in the corner by the bedside table, naked, her hair wild and her eyes flashing. She’s tense, white-faced, like an animal caught in a trap.
This girl knows danger, up close and personal. She’s had to defend herself before.
I don’t think this part’s about the banshee. Maybe it’s post-traumatic stress from almost being drowned by a god—or maybe it’s something else.
“Just a car backfiring,” I say slowly. “It’s okay. It ain’t gonna hurt you, and neither am I.”
She’s not quite herself yet, still caught in that space betweensleeping and waking. She blinks, hisses a breath through her teeth.
On a hunch, I say, “Your dad’s not here. It’s just you and me.”
Bingo. The panic in her eyes eases immediately, and she rises from the crouch, her slender throat moving as she swallows. “Yeah, I know.”
I understand that feeling. The tension of living with someone you can’t trust not to hurt you.
I walk around the end of the bed, casual, calm. But I don’t touch her. I hold out my hand and let her come to me.
One tentative step, then another…and then she’s in my arms, pressing her bare body against mine. “Heathcliff,” she whispers, taut and hoarse.
“Yeah.” I kiss the top of her head. She feels so delicate and smooth against me, yet there’s strength in her too, like she’s made of steel cables as well as soft flesh. That’s what I love about her—she’s wild as the cold wind, sharp as broken shells on the beach, tough as the old Southern oaks. She’s like the Spanish moss on the trees—lacy and fragile from a distance but wiry and rough up close.
She sighs against me like I’m a safe place, when I’m anything but.
She’s gonna get herself killed someday, for real. She’ll wander across a road while she’s in banshee mode or her dad will hit her too hard, and I won’t be there to stop it.
The idea sends raw panic skating through my chest, knocks my heart into a frantic rhythm.
