And then he pulls me in for a long, melting kiss.
21
THEO
Chloe is a ruin. Dripping wet hair, mud smeared all over her bare legs. She blinks up at me when I pull away from the kiss, her lips parted, and I swear I can see her heat radiating on the air.
I have a million questions. I felt it, the way she came as the waves splashed around her face. Felt the hot, rippling contractions of her cunt around my dick as surely as I felt her breath shudder and catch in her lungs. It sent a thunderous swell of pleasure into my belly, the idea of her dying while impaled on my cock, but it also gave me a hot, feverish panic. It wasn’t until I dragged her up?—
Until you saved her life
—That the panic subsided.
I don’t know what any of it means. But I also don’t want to ask her about it. Not now, in the dark. She can barely see me when I talk to her.
She settles against my chest, dampening my shirt. It’s like she feels safe with me, which is a strange realization, and not one I’m used to. But I also don’t feel a single whisper of the killing moon, and for that, I’m immensely grateful. She’s a kind of magic, I think.
I tug her sideways, guiding her in slow, stumbling steps over into the lake proper. She doesn’t resist, especially when I kneel and scoop up big handfuls of water and splash them over her mud-streaked legs, scrubbing the dirt away.
“God, I really got filthy, didn’t I?” She speaks it, her voice soft and shaky. I nod, even though I don’t think she can see, and keep cleaning her, running my hands along the muscular swell of her calves, the soft bend of her knees, the thick heat of her thighs. Her cunt is still exposed, and the lingering scent of both of our arousal is heavy in the air. It makes the back of my jaw ache.
“Thank you,” she says softly when she realizes what I’m doing. I keep working, scrubbing the dirt away from her legs and her plump, gorgeous ass. Every touch sends a kind of electricity up through my fingers, and my thoughts fill with the images of what we just did. It’s like when I kill, how all the blood and screams fill my head for days. But this time, it’s thoughts of her pleasure.
I stand up, peel my shirt off, and use it to clean the lingering traces of mud away from her face. She lets me, her eyes searching for me in the dark. For the first time in a very long time, I wish I could speak. I don’t like how the darkness silences me.
But at the same time, Chloe seems to understand. I don’t sense any confusion. I don’t sense fear. I do sense shame, I think, dark and simmering just below the surface. A kind of tension, like she’s afraid I’m going to ask about the source of that shame. And something else. A steady, glowing warmth, like a good campfire. It’s the kind of thing humans feel right before I make myself known.
“How’s Oliver?” she asks.
I look at her, wondering how much she can see. “Still asleep,” I sign, and Chloe squints a little, then sighs.
“Still asleep?” she asks. “Tap me once for yes or twice for no. I’m sorry, but I can barely see.”
I grin at that. My clever girl, finding a way to cut through the darkness keeping me gagged. I tap her once.
Her shoulders soften a little. “Did he ever wake up?” she asks. “While we were…”
Her voice trails off. I tap her once again. Oliver is safe and snug in his tent.
A guest, not a trespasser. Just like her.
When I’m satisfied she’s clean enough, I pluck her shorts out from where I tossed them into a bank of river reeds and hand them to her. I feel her blush more than I see it. “Thanks,” she mumbles. “This was—this was fun.”
I reach over and tap her once.
She laughs, and it’s such a pretty sound, like the starlight reflecting on the lake. I want to ask if we can do it again, but I know there’s no point. Not in the darkness.
I take her hand in mine, though, relishing the silkiness of her skin. I’ve never held a woman’s hand before, not even in those years in New York, where I experimented with sex for the first time. That she doesn’t pull away, that she lets me lead her back to the campsite along the beach, makes my heart feel too big for my rib cage.
We walk without speaking, although my Chloe isn’t silent. I can hear her body: her quickened blood, her soft breath, the turmoil of her emotions. Beneath it is the peaceful trail of Oliver’s scent, leading us back to camp.
Eventually, I have to lead her into the forest, and I step in front of her to push the branches away. I can smell the tiny cuts on her skin from where the trees lashed her open while she was running from me. That bloody scent—that was how I was able to follow her in the dark, like I do all my prey. Well, the blood, and her arousal.
We’re almost to the camp when Chloe stops, tugging back on my still-damp T-shirt. “Wait,” she says. “I want to ask you something. You can just tap your response, okay?”
I turn to her. In the woods, there’s no starlight to offer any illumination, and I see her the way I see all things in the dark, in a kind of grey-scale. She looks like a ghost.
She takes a deep breath, loud as a gunshot.
