A deft, long finger pressed firmly against my lips, cutting me off mid-sentence. “Shh,” Chase said across the table to me. “Not right now we’re not and not for the rest of the night. Given the reason for us being on this boat I know it might be hard, but try to imagine that we’re normal. Just like everybody else aboard. You could never be vanilla, even if we really were, and to be honest neither could I so let’s pretend we’re chocolate. Simple and uncomplicated and nothing out of the ordinary but rich and decadent all the same. And to be clear I do care. I admit never having cared before but nothing I feel for you can be described by the words casual or fling. You’re my girlfriend. I’ve never had one of those before so that alone should tell you how I feel about you. But in case it doesn’t, you drive me insane. When I’m not around you, I spend every second thinking about the next time I’ll be near you. When you’re not in front of my eyes, the mesmerizing deep brown of yours flecked with amber is all I can see. I want to get lost in them and never find my way out. I want to get lost in the fiery, passionate brilliance that is you. Hell, I’m already lost in it and I don’t ever want to be rescued.”
Somewhere in the back of my mind I heard the sound of a horn again and then felt the motion of the boat beginning to move away from the dock. But those things seemed too far off in the distance to pay any real attention to. They were overshadowed by the enormity of Chase and his words and the lulling feel of his finger brushing back and forth against my bottom lip. Then he removed it and his lips claimed mine as every barrier I’d erected against the things he made me feel came crashing down. I let them turn to dust around me and in that moment, if only for that moment, I could and would pretend. He was nothing more than a guy and I was nothing more than a girl. We were normal and a very normal future played itself out in my head as he continued to kiss me and I kissed him back just as fiercely.
A husband with eyes the color of sapphires; two brothers: a younger and an older one—thick as thieves, and definitely a dog. An antebellum home with a wraparound porch and a white picket fence. Warmth, laughter, and not a shred of tarnished memories filling the inside of it.
I reveled in the magic of the fantasy for the duration of the night.
“I don’t want to go back to the city. I want to keep pretending,” I confided in Chase as we walked down the boarding ramp hand in hand.
“I don’t either. Ever. It’s a hell of a fantasy that I wish I could give to you forever. It eats at me that I can’t. But the speed boat has a sleeping quarters and it’s a twenty four hour rental. What do you say to at least making it last for the rest of the night? We can drive back to the city in the morning.”
I didn’t even need to think about my answer.
We slid into bed at the same time. Chase reached out and tucked me into his side, resting his hand on the swell of my hip. I rested my head on his bare chest.
We hadn’t planned on staying at the lake over night, a problem more so for him than for me. He could sleep comfortably in his boxers but all I had was the dress I wore to the party and the swimsuit and coverup I had on earlier in the day. Luckily Chase kept a small duffel bag with a change of spare clothes in his car. Which is how I find myself in a t-shirt of his for the second time. The smug appreciative grin on his face when I changed into it said he wasn’t complaining about it and truthfully neither was I. As cliche and cheesy as it sounded I felt relaxed and at home in it.
We lay with his arm circling my waist and my head on his chest for a while. The only sounds in the room were our easy breathing and the rhythm of our hearts. I listened to his beat in a hypnotizing staccato. I didn’t want to fall asleep. If I did, when I opened my eyes again it would be morning and the illusion would be over all too soon. It was an illusion I found myself desperately wishing was real and it was in that moment of raw yearning that I decided to take things further than they’d ever gone before between us.
I knew he would never initiate it in fear of pushing me too far into something I’d regret and run in the opposite direction of after the fact. And he had been correct right up until the point he’d barreled through every last one of the barriers I’d constructed around myself.
Now my pulse beat with a fervid, frighteningly feverish, need to hang on to the magic of the moment we’d created and suspend it in time. I tipped my head back to look at him. I was slightly taken aback to see him staring at me with an intensity I couldn’t possibly even begin to put into words. It made my heart beat erratically in my chest. I pulled his shirt over my head with shaky fingers, leaving myself clad in nothing but the black satin panties underneath that matched the bra I’d shed to sleep comfortably.
“I don’t want to go to sleep just yet. I don’t want the night to end so soon.” My words were breathy and unsteady but my stare held strong.
“Are you sure?” He asked me in a strained voice.
It was my turn to smile devilishly. “Yes, I’m sure,” I said kissing his chest and then along his jaw. “You can stop trying to be decent. I don’t want you to be.”
He pulled me on top of him and down roughly against him and kissed me. Then just as abruptly broke it off. “I don’t have a condom.” His voice sounded even more strained than before.
I touched my lips back to his. “It’s okay,” I said against them. “My sex life has been non existent but I’m on the pill… Just in case.”
“I’m clean,” he murmured back, but hesitantly, against my lips.
The concern endeared him to me all the more. His grip on my waist tightened but I knew he was still trying to be decent. I knew his hands tightened to shift me off of him instead of beneath him. Before he could do it I sealed my mouth over his and kissed him fervently, like a woman starved. His grip relaxed and he kissed me just as ardently back. His hands ran up my sides then down my back and came to cup the upper swell of my ass. I ran my own hands over his steel biceps and down his broad chest and rock hard abs, reveling in the feel of silken skin pulled tight over corded muscle. I shifted so that my core lined up directly with his hardened length and rocked against him.
He made a half groan, half grunt sound deep in his chest and then he was shifting his weight and I was rolling under him and his lips were ravishing mine and his hands were everywhere at once. My body felt as if it’d caught fire and I was burning up with a need for the little clothing that remained between us to be off. I wanted to feel all of his flesh against all of mine.
Chase pulled away from my lips and kissed his way down my throat. He braced himself up on one hand that he placed beside my head and palmed my left breast with the other. His tongue darted out of his mouth licking its hardened tip teasingly. I moaned and arched into him. He grinned up at me with a cheshire cat smile then paid the same homage to its counterpart. I unashamedly whimpered when he moved on from my breasts and his tongue left a scorching trail down my belly, dipping into the crease of my navel and eliciting a shudder from me as it traveled. I lifted my hips off the bed to assist him in getting the thin layer of material that was in his way out of it more quickly. His hands gripped my ankles and spread my legs, laying be bare for his gaze to drink in.
“Fuck Alex. You’re beautiful.” His words were whispered and reverent and an exact echo of themselves.
Memories of Fusion and the dim booth and him positioned between my legs as he was now rocked through me and made my back come off the bed in a hard arch in delicious anticipation of what was to come.
He looked up at me and a familiar wicked smile ghosted across his lips. “What do you want? I need to hear you say it, Alex. Speak the words.”
“You. I want you. To touch me. To taste me. Please. Shit. Now.” My throaty voice sounded foreign to my ears and if I were in my right mind I would have been horrified by the fact that I was damn near begging but I was beyond rational thought.
Chase kept his eyes locked with mine as he parted my folds and worked one finger then two then a third one inside of me. I writhed beneath the onslaught and my hips repeatedly jerked off the
bed in time with the thrusting of his fingers. He held my gaze the entire time and I couldn’t imagine anything more erotic. The mounting pressure became unbearable when he replaced his fingers with his tongue, first moving it in lazy circles and then thrusting it too in and out of me in an unforgiving and relentless rhythm. I cried out and came apart around him when his tongue sought out then swept over the most sensitive part of my core.
He brought his face level with him and kissed me thoroughly and hard, but swiftly while rubbing fingers back and forth against the slickness between my legs before slipping them deep within it.
“God Alex you’re so wet,” He groaned. “I want to fuck you hard and deep and mercilessly. Remember when I told you that?”
His fingers pushed out then thrust back in and all I could do was bite down on my bottom lip and nod my head. I was beyond forming intelligible words.
“And remember when I told you I wanted to know what it feels like to have you writhing and moaning in ecstasy beneath me? That I wanted to make you come so hard that you see stars and scream my name?”
He thrust his fingers even deeper into me. I exhaled a sharp breath and nodded my head yes again.
“Good. Because I’m going to do everything I’ve wanted to since I first laid eyes on you and more now Alex.”
He didn’t give me an opportunity to respond. All I had the time to do was shiver in anticipation before his hands gripped my waist and he was positioning himself between my legs then surging inside of me. He buried himself to the hilt in one, powerful thrust. I screamed out his name and tightened my legs around him as my arms tightened around his back.
“Again Alex.” He torturously eased out of me then slammed home again.
“Chase!” I arched, bringing my hips up to meet his thrust.Urging him on. Urging him harder, deeper, faster. Urging him to stop playing games and to give me what I craved so desperately.
It was all of the encouragement he needed. He tightened his grip on my waist and when he pulled out then thrust inside of me again he stayed buried there. He quickened his pace and his movements became everything he vowed they’d be. Hard. Deep. Merciless. I wreathed beneath him, repeating his name on an unending loop until he fell out of rhythm and his movements became erratic and uncontrolled. We came at the same time, him just as hard as me. I screamed his name, leaving my throat raw, at the same time he shouted mine.
Afterwards, we lay on our sides facing each other with our limbs entangled. His arms locked around me in a tight cocoon while mine circled his torso. His lips brushed across my forehead in the most tender of ways making my heart constrict inside my chest.
It should have been constricting with giddiness and happiness, which it was, but it also tightened with cold fear and harsh reality. As much as I really, really, really did not want the illusion to end. It would. That dark place within me whispered that not only would it end, it would more than likely shatter into a million pieces I wouldn’t possibly be able to piece back together. Not this time. Not with Chase. The contractions of my heart became painful and I felt like the oxygen was being sucked out of the room. I sucked in several deep breaths but I couldn’t get enough air into them quick enough.
“Hey, what’s wrong?” Chase gently gripped my chin between his thumb and index finger, preventing me from turning my head so he wouldn’t see the tear that escaped down my cheek. “Alex. Talk to me.” I hated that I was the cause of the anguish that leached into his voice. But even still I couldn’t make the words come. “I’m sorry if I…If you—,”
“No,” I rushed to cut him off. What he assumed was wrong with me couldn’t be farther from the truth. “It’s not that. That was perfect. This is perfect. You’re perfect. And all of that is the problem.”
“I don’t understand.” His voice was soft and his eyes shone with a pain he didn’t bother to try and mask.
“This is nice. Today was amazing and tonight was even more so. But it won’t last. It can’t.” I tried to pull away from him but he held me firm.
Understanding dawned on his face. “It can.” I saw in his eyes that he wholly believed the words he spoke.
It would be up to me to make him understand. To make him let me go when I went to pull away again. The thought and my resolve to do so is what forced the words that failed me before out of their dark cell, from under the mountain and pass my lips. “No, it can’t. As much as we would like to pretend or even be normal, we’re not. And nothing will change that. Just like nothing will change the fact that people close to me die because of me and nothing will change the feeling I can’t shake about the breaking of the fifth seal the prophecy refers.”
When Chase began to counter my words I cut him off. “No, let me speak. Please. I promise after you hear me out whatever it is you were about to say will change.”
The emotion that flickered in his eyes made it clear he didn’t like my request just like the way his jaw tightly clenched together communicated the same thing. But he obliged and allowed me to finish.
“My parents aren’t the only ones that have died because of me. The memory is even more strangling than the one I have of my parents’ deaths because when my parents were killed I was eight and couldn’t do anything to stop it but when Deacon and Danielle were killed I was eighteen and could have if only I’d been less naive.” I closed my eyes for a minute against the suffocatingly sharp pain of the memory before continuing. “Deacon and Danielle were twins. They were my age and my partners. Normally members of the Atlanta sect pair off in two’s but as twins go they were inseparable and insisted on me being their partner too. We met when we were all thirteen during our first year of training. They were the only people in my class that didn’t look at me with pity because of what happened to my parents or with disdain because my father left The Society when I was born and I didn’t grow up in it like Nephilim children ordinarily do. They were easygoing and down to Earth and just fun to be around. They were always laughing or joking or smiling about something. I think that’s why I gravitated towards them. It’s the same reason I gravitated towards Whitney after I went to live with my grandparents. It’s also one of the reasons I found myself attracted to you. They were spots of happiness in my otherwise sad existence. They pulled me out of my despair. Even made me completely forget about sometimes. Their optimism and upbeat personalities were infectious. It’s exactly what I wanted for myself. Between the twins and Whitney, I was able to keep my head above water and live a relatively pleasant existence. Then we turned eighteen and I met Darius my freshman year of college. We had a freshman english class together. He was my first boyfriend. My only boyfriend other than you. He asked me out and Deacon and Danielle pushed me to say yes. A first date turned into a second date and then a third and a fourth until we had been dating for seven months and I was in love with him. We had sex. Once. It was my first time. The next day I felt guilty about the secret I’d been keeping from him for months and confided in him about me being a Nephilim. Me and Whitney’s relationship was all the better for it and I figured mine and Darius’ would be too. I knew something was off about his response. He didn’t question it or even seem too shocked about it. I wrote it off as him having an open mind and caring about me enough to readily accept it and for it not to be a big deal. The day after that, after our english class, he asked me about my friends. If any of them were Nephilim too. I told him Deacon and Danielle were. Me and the twins had our first patrol alone that night without a senior member of The Society shadowing us. Darius texted me and asked me where I was. I told him. He asked me if I was alone and I told him who I was with and that it was our first time out by ourselves. He said if I finished early we should stop by his place. He had a townhouse off campus. He was having a party and it would probably be going on well into the night. The twins asked me what we were texting about and I told them. We made it a point to end our patrol early. When we got to his place it was him and four other people there. Three guys and one girl. I figured out they were daemons before the twins did. Dar
ius’ eyes did the thing that I sometimes saw Daemons’ eyes do when we were out on patrol with a senior member. His pupils flickered to all black. I knew what he was the moment I saw it happened, but I hesitated. I told myself I couldn’t have seen what I saw. I rationalized that I’d been dating him for seven months and would have seen it before then. I told myself I couldn’t be that stupid or that easily fooled. I was a Nephilim. It was my job to track Daemons down and kill them. Darius saw the realization in my eyes and he and the other four Daemons moved before I could act and Deacon and Danielle didn’t realize what they found themselves pinned against a wall retrained on each side by two Daemons. Darius alone restrained me and damn it I should have been able to outmuscle him, but as hard as I strained against him I couldn’t. I used to carry a curved blade identical to the one Bennett brandished in the ring that day. Darius yanked it out of its sheath inside my jacket and held it to my throat. He gave the twins a choice. They could die or I could die. I shrieked at him to kill me. He told me he hadn’t asked for my choice he’d asked for theirs. I screamed at him to kill me anyway even as Deacon and Danielle both said without hesitation to kill them. I screamed over their decision. Told him to listen to me and not them. He didn’t. He tossed the blade to the female Daemon pressing Deacon’s right shoulder into the wall. I screamed for her to kill me instead of him as she used it to slice his throat open and then let his body slump to the ground. She passed it to one of the Daemons holding Danielle and I pleaded for them to take my life instead. As one of the male Daemons pressed the curved blade to her throat I cried for them to slit mine and not hers. Darius laughed. They all did as it cut into her flesh and left an angry red mark across her neck. The four Daemons left and then it was just Darius and me and my friends’ bodies. I couldn’t see through the tears by then and I’d closed my eyes against the horror in front of me. While they were closed I remember praying to God that it was all some sick dream. That I’d wake up in my bed and it would just be some awful nightmare. It wasn’t. When the sting of the curved blade biting into the flesh beneath my ribs that Darius had one arm banded across to restrain me forced my eyes open I still saw the twins’ lifeless bodies and the guy I loved, the guy I’d just lost my virginity to two days ago was still bruisingly restraining me against him. When I felt him pressing into me from behind I wanted to vomit. I fought his hold on me but he was too strong and I was too weak. I didn’t care what happened to me after that. I wanted to die. I deserved to die. I shrieked at him to kill me too. He laughed at me and told me no. It was the same laugh that had made me smile countless times over and the same laugh that first made me say yes to going out on a date with him. The laugh that made me fall in love with him. He kissed me hard on the mouth, biting down on my lip with enough force to draw blood. It left bile rising at the back of my throat. Then he told me he’d rather leave me to a fate worse than death. He plunged the curved blade into my stomach and left it there. The last thing I remember before blacking out from the pain is that it felt like my insides were on fire and if he didn’t mean to kill me then he must mean to torture me and the blade lodged in my stomach was only the beginning. I remember thinking it was no less a fate than I deserved. When I regained consciousness, he was gone. Bennett stood over me healing me while the other Nephilim he’d brought with him collected the twins’ bodies. When we hadn’t checked in as scheduled, he’d tracked my cell phone to the location of the apartment. I had regained consciousness but my mind was in no way functioning properly. After Bennett healed me, I sat in a corner numb and near catatonic while he and the crew he’d brought cleaned away any trace of what had happened. I was unable to form words and they assumed Daemons had cornered us outside of the apartment building and had forced us inside. I never corrected the misassumption. I was too ashamed to tell them the truth. That I hadn’t known my boyfriend was a Daemon and I’d told him my friends were his mortal enemy and then had literally walked them into the trap he’d sat like lambs for slaughter. So like I told you in the car on the way back from Savannah my actions led to my parents’ deaths and that broke the second seal. I may not be directly responsible but it is still my fault they are dead. My actions led to my friends’ deaths and that broke the third seal. And I am one hundred percent directly responsible for their deaths. My actions led to you almost dying and I can’t shake the feeling that that is what broke the fourth seal. I don’t know what exactly will break the fifth but we both know from the prophecy that it will again be something that I do. A stupid choice that I make and I am telling you that you will die as a consequence. That’s what happens to people around me. They die because of me. My death is inevitable. It’s foretold. Yours doesn’t have to be too. Today and tonight were the best twenty four hours of my life and I thank you for the gift of them, but this thing between us we have to both walk away from. And now you know why and should want to as well.”
Craved: A Chosen Ones Novel Page 25