Icicles replaced my joints as I stared at Gedeon.
The rat was ahe.
31
ZION
“Hey!” Ryder leaped back to avoid Sadira’s kick. Preemptively covering his crotch, he hissed, “We agreed—no dirty fighting.”
I snickered. “No rules” was the rule of today’s close-combat class. Gedeon could attest to that. While Sadira and I had teamed up to challenge Ryder, Ava, Amari, Kali, and Tarri—now a candidate for my catch-and-play team—Gedeon had decided to strip his shirt and drop to the ground to complete a string of push-ups.
The droplets of his sweat dripping off him and splashing onto the gravel, covering it in blotches of dark gray, had served as a sufficient distraction for me to earn a dozen bruises in the first two minutes alone.
Sadira ground her sneakers against the chalk-drawn ring we were in. “We didn’t.” As she rolled her shoulders, the heap of her long, countless ebony braids secured atop her head wobbled. “You asked for it, but we didn’t promise anything.”
“You’ve been spending too much time with Zion,” Ryder groused.
“Damn right.” I high-fived Sadira. You could always trust the woman to be on your side. Her love for games matched my own.
Ryder rubbed his forehead in exasperation, right over the first freckles popping up. The prolonged exposure to spring had coaxed his production of melanin to go into overdrive. “By the way, Conall and Damia left a message that they want to have a chat with you about your…” Retreating behind the chalk line, he gestured at Gedeon to take his place. “Temporary absence.”
Gedeon stepped into our circle. “I suspected as much.” Bending his knees, he widened his footing in preparation to challenge two opponents at once—me and Sadira.
Since the debacle last morning, he’d spent yesterday and today outside, wandering the streets of our compound, our squares and markets, meeting our people, and proving time and time again that he was alive.
Humans relied on sight as their primary sense and, evidently, if your eyeballs functioned in their dedicated sockets, all you had to do was see him to believe him.
Not that I was complaining. For the last two hours, the crowd of people filling our training rings had been gawking at Gedeon. They were as inconspicuous as the storm brewing in the cement-colored clouds invading the sky.
Of course, I’d also joined the throng in admiring my strawberry. He was too mouth-watering not to ogle. His torso gleamed in a sheet of perspiration?—
My head snapped aside. Air escaped my vertebrae, and sparks of white-hot pain flew up the nerves furled around the roots of my molars.
Blinking away the bout of disorientation, I shook my head to get rid of the last shreds of wooziness.
“Oh, come on, man.” Sadira threw her arms up. The sleeves of her oversized hoodie slid up to her elbows, revealing skin as black as the clothing itself. “Pay some attention. I don’t care if we’re up against Gedeon; you can’t just stand still and take hitsfrom him. We’re supposed to practice two-against-one, not one-fighting-and-another-drooling-at-their-opponent.”
Moving my jaw from side to side, savoring the feeble blasts of ache on the left side, I tracked how a bead of sweat formed on Gedeon’s forehead.
The clear drop left the protection of his hairline and slithered to the first faint wrinkle, a dip, a gorge, a trench it had to pass, and continued to the second one, then the last, navigating the uncharted terrain with ease.
My taste buds screamed for me to satisfy their thirst, to steal the salty droplet before it soaked into his eyebrow. I itched to roam the foreign lands of Gedeon’s face, all the way to his neck, the winding road of his pulsing artery, the pool in the hollow of his throat, the planes of his chest, the scars painting his abdomen, the hipbone beckoning me to journey south.
“I don’t think he heard you, Sadira. He’s…” Tarri’s musing dissolved, beat by beat. The vowels and consonants fruitlessly knocked on the bubble blocking out all noise, the membrane thick enough to keep everyone’s conversations at bay yet thin enough to fill the space with the echoes of Gedeon’s breathing.
A sting intensified on my bottom lip, flaring as I inspected the split flesh, the throbbing as dizzying as the knowledge Gedeon had drawn my blood.
“Zion…” Closing in, he tugged the waistband of my sweatpants, luring me closer with a brush of his knuckles against my pelvis. “What are you thinking about?” With our hips flush, his nose skimmed from my shoulder to behind my ear, his murmur so low my knees wobbled. “Is it me on your mind right now?”
I tilted my head aside, giving him a wordless response. He growled against my skin, and the satisfied rumble slithered into the marrow of my bones, claiming the throne and reigning over the red blood cells controlling my levels of oxygen.
Our surroundings swam around me, the deteriorating buildings rippling like waves of concrete, the blades of grass in the nearby field whooshing, as if swords cutting through the crisp air, the crowd of our people and friends merging into blobs of color, their chatter as indiscernible as my own thoughts.
Grasping my nape, Gedeon erased any inch of space between us. “Tell me your desires.” He nibbled the crook of my neck so gently I had to clutch his sides to keep myself upright. “But not of blood, not of playthings, not of free rein.”
My grip failed as his sweat harbored him from me, so I dug my nails into his muscles?—
He nipped the corner of my jaw.
