Skin of the Night: Book One of The Night series

by Claire D. Bennett

  “Th-then what’s the problem?” I stammered. I was growing increasingly nervous. My hands had started to shake a little.

  “I don’t know. I’m still trying to figure it out,” he quietly replied and looked away from me again. My appetite swiftly vanished, and my heart clenched. I could barely breathe. This wasn’t normal. I could feel him slipping through my fingers, and I hated it.

  “You’re still trying to figure out why you’re angry with me?” I inquired, perplexed. “You don’t know?”

  He grimaced and then frowned angrily to himself. “No. I don’t know, Cara.”

  My breath hitched. “I don’t get it. I didn’t mean for you to get trapped in that situation, and I’m sorry he insulted you. You didn’t deserve it at all. I also never meant for you to find out, so I’m sorry you learnt the truth in such a horrible way. If I could go back, I would’ve—”

  “Cara, it’s not that!” he snapped, unusually impatient. “It’s the fact that you’ve fucked him that’s bothering me!”

  His brutal declaration struck me like a cannonball to the chest, making me jerk into the back of my seat. Pale-faced and with lips parted, I watched him in utter confusion and despair. “Because it’s him?” I dared to ask.

  He tossed his slice of pizza back into the box and leaned backwards. “Yes. No. I don’t know.”

  What did he mean he didn’t know? “Aaron,” I said softly. “Please, we need to talk about this. I’m getting scared.” In my lap, my fingers toyed with each other, betraying how anxious I was.

  “Cara, was he the lad you mentioned? That man who had wanted you to give him a chance a while back?”

  I gulped. “Yes,” I revealed, upset.

  His eyes maintained a distance from my gaze while he nodded to himself. “I thought as much. When did you first sleep together?”

  I hadn’t expected this interrogation, and it was taking me aback. Unsure of how to proceed, I eventually decided upon transparency. “In April.”

  Evidently unimpressed, his brow arched again. “That time you went for drinks with Livy?”

  I released a painful breath. “Yes.”

  He nodded. “So, when he walked in on us, you’d already slept with him.”

  Shielding my face with my hands, I nodded.

  “That makes a lot of sense,” he murmured. “I always had a weird feeling about him.”

  “Aaron, it’s part of our agreement not to tell each other about things like this.”

  “I know.” He stood from his seat and started pacing round the room while rubbing his neck. “Cara, I think you should know something. During the three years we’ve spent together, I’ve only slept with one other girl.”

  My lips closed so that I could swallow the lump in my throat. What the hell? Where was he going with this? How was that relevant?

  “O-okay?”

  He turned towards me and nodded repeatedly. “Yes, that’s right. One. It happened about three months into our arrangement, and afterwards, I felt like vomiting. I felt bloody disgusting, and that feeling has prevented me from doing it again ever since. And it wasn’t the girl, Cara. She was perfectly sweet. It was because of you.”

  Tears started welling in my eyes as my fear increased. “M-me?” I stammered again and studied him blankly.

  “Yes, you,” he moaned and rubbed his face.

  “I see,” I mumbled and looked away. “I’m sorry to hear that, Aaron. I haven’t meant to stand in your way.”

  “Cara!” he yelled, exasperated, and I flinched at the volume. “Please, don’t make this any harder for me than it needs to be.”

  I rushed to save a tear that had spilled over. He’d never shouted at me like this before. It was shocking me. “I just don’t understand how this is relevant,” I mumbled, upset. But I was starting to. I just didn’t want to believe it.

  Despairing, he moaned and shook his head. “Cara, the three years we’ve been sleeping together, I’ve essentially been monogamous. I haven’t minded the idea of you with other men before because I haven’t really known that it was happening. And, every time we’ve met, you’ve been so attuned to me that I’ve found it hard to believe that you could have been like you are with me with someone else. But I can’t… I can’t overlook this. I can’t ignore it. I can’t pretend like I don’t know this happened the way I could with others, because I’ve seen him, and I know it’s happened, and I can’t get the images out of my head!”

  I recoiled at his last shout and covered my face with my hands again. Was this truly happening?

  “And what makes it even worse,” he continued, agitated, “is the fact that he’s your fucking boss! You’ll be seeing him every day for the next three months, and from the look and sound of him on Saturday, he harbours no intention whatsoever of letting you go! I can’t stand that, Cara. I can’t stand knowing he’ll be trying to get between your legs, day after day, and I especially can’t stand it when you’ve fucked him before! You’re obviously attracted to him! And whatever happened between you on Friday, I don’t want to know, but the two of you are clearly unfinished business!”

  I pressed my lips together to prevent a sob from spilling. Beside me, I heard Aaron sigh before he dropped down onto the sofa. Minutes of silence elapsed between us. We were both processing.

  “I don’t think I can do this anymore. I’m sorry,” he eventually stated, voice calm and defeated, and the sound led a crack to form in my chest. “The way I see it,” he continued, “we can either upgrade this to an actual relationship, exclusive at that, or we’ll have to settle with being platonic. And, if you decide on the latter, you should know I’ll require some time to move on, so we shouldn’t be in touch for a while.”

  I started sniffing and nearly choked on my row of stifled sobs. My entire body quivered. I couldn’t believe this was happening. He was giving me an ultimatum, and I hadn’t seen it coming for the life of me. To make matters worse, I didn’t return his feelings. I had wondered a few times in the past if what we shared was actually love, but meeting William had disproved it. Aaron had never given me butterflies, he’d never made my heart soar in my chest, and he’d never made me crave him the way I craved William.

  But there was still love. Just not the romantic variety, and that was why this agonised me so. I’d have to break his heart, and it would break mine to have to do it.

  I sensed him watching me for a long while before he sighed again. “Right. You don’t need to say it. If you wanted to be with me, you would’ve said it by now, so just get out, Cara. Please.”

  I shook my head from side to side, disbelieving of reality. This wasn’t what I had expected. It felt like I was about to implode from all the emotions that clawed at my chest. I’d never felt so despicable. How could I have been this blind? I’d never noticed his feelings for me, but then Aaron had always been good at maintaining his composure.

  It was obvious that my obliviousness had cost me one of my dearest friends, and I worried our friendship had been broken beyond repair. I’d never seen him like this, and the revelation that he’d been in love with me this entire time made me question whether we’d ever truly been friends at all.

  “Cara,” he pleaded. “I don’t want to be mean, but I’d really appreciate it if you left. Looking at you right now is making me want to cling to you, and that’s not good for me in the long run. I’m running out of strength here.”

  While sniffing, I pushed my seat out and headed straight for the hall without looking at him. I couldn’t bring myself to say a single word. I was much too rattled, and I worried it would just unleash my inconsolable sobs.

  So, without a word, I closed the door after myself and left into the night.

  A NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR

  Hello, there.

  Thank you for making it all the way to the back of the book. I don’t take it for granted. Still, the text you have just completed is
the result of two, nearly three, years of meticulous work, which in turn roots back to about a decade’s worth of obsessive writing overall. I’ll leave it up to you to decide whether that means I haven’t learnt much.

  Regardless, it would mean the world to me if you would consider leaving an honest review of your thoughts on Skin of the Night. Abandoned sleep, a couple of tears, and so many belly-laughs are behind this whole story, so it’s always lovely to hear how it’s been received by others. It will also help me prove to my parents that writing is something I can actually do, and I’d love to impress them as they are my greatest heroes – not that they ever doubted my abilities.

  During my relatively young life, I’ve never viewed my writing with ambition. I was raised to prioritise routes that were less prone to risk, and I am thankful for that. While it’s important to chase your dreams, it is my humble opinion that it is also important to be rational about it. So, I spent three years studying business administration before I went on to start my LLB. The goal is still to become a practising lawyer with an LLM to my name, but I doubt I’ll ever be able to quit writing in my spare time (if such a thing even exists in my life).

  You may wonder why I published this book if I was never ambitious about my writing. The answer is quite simple, but it’s also long, which you probably expected when considering the length of my book (I promise I don’t talk as much as I write).

  Anyway, before I began publishing my works online, I thought it was virtually impossible to make it as an author. For that reason, I discarded the idea altogether. However, I kept writing because, as I said, I simply cannot stop. You see, before Skin of the Night, I had never written a story intended to be read by anyone other than me.

  What changed? Well, a friend of mine (yes, I’ve actually got a few, so I guess I’m not entirely disagreeable) encouraged me to share some work online since I was writing anyway, just to test it out. At this time, I had complete trilogies collecting dust in my hard drive – dust and water, since my water bottle emptied itself in my bag one day. Just another day in the life of an ordinary human, I suppose. Nevertheless, I thought, alright, why not give it a go? It’s not like I’ll have anything to lose.

  In what I remember as a blink of an eye, readers streamed to my story online, encouraging me to continue while they held me accountable so that I would complete what I had started.

  I should probably say that I still don’t, and will never, write chiefly for anyone other than myself. Still, I was pleasantly surprised to see that my works had resonated with some people out there.

  Unfortunately, it wasn’t all a walk on sunshine. My works were soon subjected to plagiarism by several different authors on the sites where I had shared my work. It was quite a devastating experience – hard to describe. I believe a good word would be ‘invaded’. Indeed, it felt like I had been invaded, violated, and robbed of a part of my identity.

  This was really the pivotal moment in terms of my writing. It dawned on me that if I don’t publish my works myself, someone else – who does have ambition – can use my content to advance their writing career. Naturally, that wasn’t something I would allow.

  So, here I am, at your mercy.

  I have no idea at all of where this journey will take me, but I do know this: I could not have done it without my fantastic readers, and I could not have done it without getting plagiarised. So, I suppose I should look on the bright side of life (that’s a Monty Python reference, yes).

  Anyway, I hope you’ll visit my writing in the sequel, Into the Night. In the meantime, I would absolutely love it if you reviewed this book. Also, if you’d like to get in touch, I love interacting with my readers on my social media platforms, particularly on Instagram, so please don’t hesitate to follow and reach out to me. My username on Instagram is @claired.bennett. I hope to see you there!

  Thanks so much for your time and attention. I hope I made it worthwhile. If not, I am sorry, but at least I gave it my best shot.

  ABOUT THE COVER

  First of all, I made the cover myself, although the artwork itself is not mine to take credit for, but rather an artist named Caracolla (I know, how uncanny is that? Cara-colla? I was meant to find this artist). I discovered their work online after having searched for what felt like an eternity – definitely months. It was a battle to find something that was aligned with my own ideas but, the moment I saw it, I knew it was the perfect fit.

  I wanted a non-cliché approach to the night theme. I could always have used an actual night sky or made one myself, but the idea just didn’t resonate with me. It was too straightforward, and I personally enjoy a more thought-provoking concept. So, instead, I opted for an abstract take on the theme.

  If you take a look, you can see the blue crashing against the shore. The shore is light, representing the day. It’s supposed to imply that the night is emerging to consume the day, which Cara states in the book that she wants for William to do.

  “I wanted him to consume me the way the skin of the night consumed the light of day to reveal infinity. Like the night sky, I hoped his devotion would be infinite. There in the dark, I could strip to my core without fear of judgement, for eternity.”

  The light shade of blue is the colour of William’s eyes. As we’ve been made aware of, he has irises reminiscent of “a serene ocean surrounding a warm paradise”, which is why this particular cover, in my opinion, fits so perfectly as it’s the night reflected in the ocean – or that’s how I see it, at least.

  The deeper shade looks like it’s the universe breaking through – think loads of galaxies, or even just the pattern of the Milky Way. I wanted it to be artful, so the gold scattered across is not actually stars, but is instead supposed to imitate them.

  The titles in The Night series are progressive, meaning they go deeper and deeper as the story evolves. In Skin of the Night, we are meeting William’s surface, hence why I wanted to make a point of representing his eyes through the cover by having it simulate an ocean and the night sky in one.

  For the font, I decided to make it seem written in “skin”. It’s supposed to represent William’s handprint, as we all know he surely leaves his print on Cara in more ways than one. He is also the Night, so it seemed optimal to use this for the font.

  As I was making the spine and backside, I flipped the artwork. So, if you spread the book apart in the middle and look at it from above, you might notice that the darker blue/black resembles a bird with spread wings. My “logo” is an owl with its wings spread, so I thought this was a cool little detail.

  Overall, this abstract theme is something I will be continuing with for all the remaining books, though with different patterns and colours. As they are published, you might notice that there is another theme behind the covers too, but one which you cannot uncover (wordplay, hehe) by seeing only the first one. It’s not an IQ test though, haha. It’s just not very obvious, either.

  Clue: which colour do you think it will be?

  (Check out more of Caracolla’s art at: https://www.instagram.com/caracolla.art/).

  SEQUEL: INTO THE NIGHT

  Want to read the next instalment? Find out where you can purchase the sequel Into the Night by clicking here!