Page 92 of Damiana | AllFreeNovel

He didn’t answer. He just looked back at me, hungry.

“Damian, you just taught me how to stop a panic attack. How to stare terror right in the face. What are you scared to tell me?”

“That I don’t deserve you.”

“Don’t I get to decide if that’s true?”

“You do,” he said, resolute. “But not tonight. Not when all I can think about is what’s ahead of us.”

“I understand,” I said, and despite wanting nothing more than him naked against me, undoing me, I did. I understood he’d rather ache beside me than give them more to poison.

“I’ll stay if you want me to. If you don’t want to be alone.”

“It’s not that I don’t want to be alone. All I want is to be next to you,” I said, because the distinction mattered.

“Okay,” he said softly, against my ear.

I fell asleep wrapped in him. He’d stayed dressed, not trusting his own exposed skin, I guessed. I drifted in and out of sleep, waking so hungry for him it gathered like pain, like a little swell in my chest. In the middle of the night, when he was fast asleep, he spoke my name. I wished I knew exactly what he’d dreamed.

Chapter Twenty-Five

Sunday morning came in lazy and sunlit. I woke up curled next to Damian, his arm still around me. For a few minutes, I watched him sleep, his chest rising and falling.

We drank coffee in the kitchen, still ruffled and bleary from sleep. I told Damian the full story of what happened in the cave, now that a night of being held by him had softened the edges of it.

He folded his fingers between mine across the table with a look that told me he knew exactly what it felt like to be that afraid.

My phone buzzed by my coffee mug. The group chat was lighting up.

Priya: getting kind of scared

Priya: the voice notes are getting weird. last one was 11 minutes. he said he can “feel when I’m pulling away” and it “does something to him”

Priya: he won’t shut up about the retreat

Priya: what do I do

Priya: I said I was tired and wanted a quiet weekend and he said “you don’t need quiet, you need me, you always do this when you’re slipping”