“God.” He leans forward until his head rests on my shoulder, his nose brushing the curve where my shoulder meets my neck. He pauses there, suspended in that almost-touch, and the anticipation of it is beyond pleasure. “Do you have any idea what you do to me?”
“Trust me,” I say. “It’s extremely mutual.”
The way he’s holding me makes my entire body feel carbonated. I’m dizzy with the impossibility that this is actually happening.
“I need…” He cuts himself off with a sharp inhale.
I trace a slow circle on his upper arm, feeling the muscle jump under my fingertips. “What do you need?”
“I need you to not disappear,” he murmurs against my hair, and the words hit somewhere behind my ribs. “I need this to be real.”
I bury my nose into his chest, inhaling the smell of him baked into the leather, masked by the tang of blood and sweat from the past few days. “Me too.”
On the wall behind us, one emergency dome light flickers to life, bathing everything in a dim red glow. The gleam catches the angles of Nico’s face, turning his pale skin shadowy and making the blood on his split lip look black.
He’s being so careful with me, it’s almost painful. I need him to know he doesn’t have to be.
I push my hand into his hair. The moan that escapes him goes straight through me like liquid heat.
“Eden,” he breathes my name.
I cup the back of his head. “Yes, Nico?”
I try not to think about the fever radiating from him, how unusually warm he is in this freezing room. All I can focus on is how beautiful he is. Even bleeding and beaten, and in this terrible red light, he’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.
I lower my hand to hold his cheek. He drops his head into my palm, and his eyes flutter closed.
“You have no idea how hard it was to pretend I didn’t want you,” he mumbles, lids heavy as he blinks up at me. “I’ve never felt this out of control.”
“I don’t need you in control,” I say. “I just need you.”
His eyes open fully, and he’s looking at me with so much softness, so much vulnerability.
“You’re really not scared?” he asks.
“There’s nothing about you that scares me,” I say. “Can you stop trying to scare me off already?”
I can feel the restraint trembling through his muscles. His eyes track my face like he’s preparing for it to disappear, and he wants to remember it.
“Are you sure you want this?” The question comes out carefully, but I can hear the desperate hope underneath.
“I don’t know where Donny gets off calling you a good profiler, because your emotional intelligence is about as sharp as the Game Master’s,” I joke.
He laughs, rough and low. I love his laugh. It’s the kind of sound that could cure any disease I’ll ever have, or at least make me capable of ignoring that I’m missing half my hand and bleeding out in an abandoned building.
He goes to cradle my face, his fingers hovering just millimeters from my skin. I can feel them quivering in the red-tinged space between us. I want him to touch me so badly. I want to grip his wrists and bring his hands against my face myself, but I let him reach slowly. His hands are so big they engulf my head. The pad of his thumb traces over my cheekbone. I worry about the damage to his fingers—I can see a slight tremor in them—but they’re moving.
He gathers my hair between his fingers, tugging just enough that my head tilts back. A whimper escapes me. With anyone else, I’d be embarrassed to sound so needy, would have swallowed it down, but I want him to hear it. I want him to know exactly what he does to me.
His smile stretches into the biggest, most boyish grin I’ve ever seen on his face. He looks just like he did in his yearbook photo from before he was possessed. Seeing him look so happy and unguarded obliterates me.
“I’m obsessed with your smile,” I say, and I’m smiling too, so widely my face hurts. “I wish I could’ve seen it more.”
“I only smile like this around you,” he says, and the confession makes my heart stumble. “I wish I could see youbetter.” He traces my bottom lip, and I watch his eyes follow the movement of his thumb. “I want to draw you so badly.”
The meaning behind his words takes a few seconds to settle, and when it does, his eyes change. I shove the grief down hard because hewillget to draw me. We’re getting out of here together.
I need to stop him before he disappears into whatever dark place he’s headed. I reach for him with both arms like I can physically pull him back to me.
