Page 136 of The Sixth Fraction

“Is that why my neck keeps hurting, recently?” He’s smiling. He glances over my shoulder, and says, “Could level things out, if you want.”

I have a feeling I know where this is going, but my heart leaps anyway. He wraps an arm around my waist and picks me up, with a suddenness and an ease that makes me yelp, and then sets me down on a stack of mats. We’re at eye level, this way, face-to-face.

I kiss him again, and it’s not a question at all.

My lips part, and I sigh into his mouth. Whatever propriety was holding him back seems to snap like an overstretched rubber band. He keeps kissing me, and the hand that was on my knee slides up my thigh. He pulls me closer, and I wrap my leg around him.

I try to control myself. To keep my hands where they are, to slow myself down. But my entire life has been about control. Control what I say, how I look. Control how much skin shows, how much hair escapes its knot. What I look at, what I ask, what I know. Abnegation locked me inside myself. I think you’re trying to make yourself smaller to fit into its little box, my mother said, and she was right. A life of disappearing is no life.

So I stop trying to make myself smaller. I flatten my palms against his chest, touching, feeling. I feel him shiver as my hands slide up to his shoulders and down his arms. I feel the ridges of his muscles, all standing at attention.

He tears his mouth away from mine with a harsh breath, and for a moment I worry that I hurt him, or that he’s going to stop. But he just kisses my throat, his teeth lightly scoring my skin. Goose bumps rise up on my arms, and a desperate need fills my body. So I fumble for the hem of his shirt, and put my hands under it.

He makes a low, desperate sound that moves through me like electricity.

God, is all I can think, as I touch warm, firm skin. As I feel his body shifting. I’ve never touched someone like this, never really wanted to, but I’m hungry for his skin, hungry for the feeling of him. I pull his shirt up, and he parts from me just for a moment to tug it over his head.

His mouth is on mine, and I can feel his pounding heart against my fingers, like this is affecting him as much as it’s affecting me. But as my hands run over his bare shoulders, urgency gives way to curiosity. I pull away, and look down at him.

There’s a patch of ink on his side, over his rib cage. I brush my fingers over it—flames again, I think, but not the same stylized ones that are on his back. These are more realistic, more careful in their rendering. I glance up at him.

“First tattoo,” he says.

“Any special meaning?”

“I got them here because I knew it would hurt,” he says, covering my hand with his own to hold my fingers against his rib cage. He gives a humorless laugh. “That’s messed up, isn’t it? To want pain you can control, instead of, I don’t know—no pain?”

“You’re not messed up,” I say.

I kiss him again, this time slowly, carefully.

“And now everyone’s going to know,” he says, and he tips his head forward to rest against my shoulder.

“What do you mean?”

“Jeanine Matthews came to see me today.” His hand convulses where it holds mine, still right against the flames on his side. “Her excuse was that she needed to update the computer. But I think the real reason might have been to test me. To see me go through a fear simulation.”

I feel cold.

“Which one?” I ask him.

He looks up, his expression flat. “You know which one.”

I remember holding my arm up to intercept the belt, and I feel even colder.

He pulls back and puts his shirt back on. But he doesn’t move away from me.

“And now,” he says, and his next swallow is labored. “And now, she’ll release a report naming names, now that she has confirmation of a real Abnegation scandal. And Eric, who’s been blackmailing me to keep me in line ever since he figured out who I really am, will tell the Dauntless that I’m the one the report is about.”

He looks at his feet. I drop down from the stack of mats to stand in front of him. We’re wearing the same boots—same color, same eyelets, same lacing along the welt—but in different sizes.

“Maybe it won’t be as bad as you think,” I say.

He scowls up at me, so I add, “I just think it’s him who should be ashamed of this, not you.”

As soon as I say it I can hear how naive it is. That it would be nice if the survivors of violence and cruelty weren’t subjected to mockery, and perpetrators were. But that’s just not how the world works. There are some people who see other people’s suffering as an opportunity, and there always will be.

“I chose this place as a haven,” he says, his dark eyes burning. “And the haven is gone.”