A loud splash sounds to my right and my scream intensifies, certain something else in the water is after me.
Then I see Tage’s head break the surface, sloshing the hair from his face like a wet dog shaking off water. Of course, that is where the similarity ends. He’s all beauty and feral power as he looks around wildly, gaze sharp, jaw hard, muscles flexing and straining. “What?” he demands. “What is it?”
I give up on getting myself out of the pool and propel toward him instead. “Something touched my foot!”
His arm easily loops around my waist as he swims in place. Immediately my legs coil around him.
He peers down into the dark waters as though he can see into its depths.
I plaster myself against him, my hands gripping fistfuls of his tunic.
“It’s probably a fish.”
“There are fish in here?” I demand, twisting my head to look around me.
His gaze, as dark and fathomless as the pool we swim in, lifts to mine. “Yes.”
“Oh.”
He could have mentioned that sooner. Instead, I’d imagined some underwater creature, like the ones that inhabit the Dark Channel, devouring the live bait cast from ships passing between Penterra and Acton. The live bait, of course, is of the human variety. It is a well-known fact that prisoners sentenced to death are boarded onto these ships and used as fodder in the waters of the Dark Channel. Such is the brutal world I left behind. Perhaps not so very different from this one.
I look from his water-speckled face to my hands clinging to him, knuckles white and bloodless. The sight is mesmerizing: me touching someone, making contact,feelingand being felt in return. It’s still so new, so incredible.
It’s been too long...and never like this. Never so charged and intense. Never in a way that makes me feel this strange achiness.
There isn’t even room for air between us. The warm water surrounding us heightens everything, reaching me everywhere, a fluid tongue licking, sliding, lapping...missing nothing, no part of me secret or hidden.
I’m unable to catch my breath.
My lungs feel too tight, the air impossible to pull in and push out. I’m suddenly excruciatingly aware that I’m naked. A definite role reversal. Usually, he’s the one without clothes. A wild bit of laughter bubbles up inside me at that irony.Ishould be shrinking away, my modesty in full outrage, instead...I lean into him.
His big hands hold me up, his palms broad against my back, slippery on my skin, each finger a burning imprint.
The lick of heat I felt in my belly last night returns in full force, and I acknowledge it with grim acceptance.
Just because I’ve been invisible for nearly half my life doesn’t mean I’m ignorant. I recognize the desire humming through me, the need pumping hard in my veins.
My very existence as an observer has, in fact, wholly prepared me to recognize whatthisis, toknowwithoutknowing.
Last night I had been an idiot, blind and in denial, too afraid to know what was unfolding between us.
“Are you...well?” he asks.
I don’t know if the question is spurred from my inability to breathe or the fact that I’m shaking so badly in his arms.
“I...Y-yes.” I nod jerkily and then gasp when one of his hands slips lower, rounding the curve of my hip. With my legs wrapped around him my heat, my core, presses snugly into him, his wet garments our only barrier.
I study his face, tracking the droplets of warm water that almost lovingly bead over his skin, running down the planes of his face slowly and dropping off the hard cut of his jaw, splashing soundlessly to the surface of the pool. I envy the water’s total freedom to roam wherever it wishes.
He stares back at me, his dark gaze unreadable, and I’m certain this is just me—myinability to balance my reactions,myoverwhelming physical response to him,myawakening from a decade-long slumber, the sight and sensation of him food to my famine, rain in the long drought of my life.
He’s not human. I try to get that to stick in my mind, to matter, but it just falls free like a feather from a bird, tumbling through air without a care.
I try to convince myself whatever happened in his den last night was due to convenience. A woman in his midst—in his bed—when there’s a decided dearth. Aside from Danhy, it’s just me.
Although his words last night could not have been any clearer.
I mean kissing you, Arden. I mean fucking you.
