Opal

“Shh.” He kissed me gently. “Nothing will happen to me or anyone.”

I balled my hands around his shirt, holding him, as if I could somehow stop the worst-case scenario from coming to fruition just by keeping him close. Silly, I knew, but holding him there kept the most horrific of fears at bay.

That I would walk out of Mount Weather, but Daemon wouldn’t.

“What happens if we do succeed tomorrow night?”

“You mean when we do?” His leg brushed over mine, settling in between. “We go back to school on Monday-boring, I know. Then we hopefully pass our classes, which we will. Then we graduate. And then we have all summer

”

His weight did wicked things to my thoughts, but panic loomed too close. “Daedalus will come looking for Beth and Chris.”

“And they won’t find them.” His lips pressed against my temple and then the curve of my brow. “That is, if they get close enough.”

My stomach churned. “Daemon

”

“It’ll be okay. Don’t worry.”

I wanted to believe. More like I needed to.

“Let’s not think about tomorrow,” he whispered, his lips grazing my cheek and then my jaw. “Let’s not think about next week or the next night. It’s just us right now and nothing else.”

Heart racing, I tipped my head back and closed my eyes. It seemed impossible to forget all that was coming, but as his hand traveled over my knee and up under the hem of my dress, it really was only us and nothing else.

Armentrout, Je

Opal ( A Lux Novel)

Chapter 36

Like the last time we made our trip to Mount Weather, I spent the bulk of Sunday with my mom. We went to a late breakfast and I filled her in on all the prom details. She was misty-eyed when I told her about Daemon’s surprise by the lake. Heck, I got misty-eyed and my chest fluttered as I told her.

Daemon and I had stayed out there until the stars had faded from the night and the sky had turned dark blue. It had been simply perfect and the things we’d done in those late hours still made my toes curl.

“You’re in love,” Mom said, chasing a piece of cantaloupe across her plate with her fork. “That’s not a question. I can see it in your eyes.”

Red swept across my cheeks. “Yeah, I am.”

She smiled. “You grew up too fast, baby.”

Didn’t always feel that way, especially this morning when I couldn’t find my other flip-flop and I’d been, like, two seconds from kicking a fit.

Then her voice lowered so that the packed church crowd couldn’t hear. “You’re being careful, right?”

Oddly, I wasn’t embarrassed by the change in conversation. Maybe it had to do with the “naked baby Katy stripping off her diapers” comment yesterday. Either way, I was glad that she asked-that she cared enough. My mom may be busy working like most single parents, but she wasn’t on the absentee list.

“Mom, I’d always be careful with that kind of stuff.” I took a sip of my soda. “I don’t want any baby Katys ru

Her eyes widened with shock and then they watered again. Oh, dear

“You have grown up,” she said, placing her hand over mine. “And I’m proud of you.”

Hearing that felt good, because on the whole parent side of things, I wasn’t sure what she could feel proud of. Sure, I went to school, stayed out of trouble-mostly-and got good grades. But I’d failed on the college thing so far, and I knew that bothered her. And everything else that I struggled and dealt with, she didn’t know.

But she was still proud of me, and I didn’t want to do anything to let her down.

When we arrived back home, Daemon stopped over for a little while and it took everything in me to keep Mom away from the photo albums before she went to grab a few hours of sleep, leaving Daemon and me to our own devices, which would sound like a really fun thing, but I was strung too tightly as the hours crept by.

Once I’d changed into the black sweats, Daemon asked for the opal. I handed it over.

“Don’t look at me like that,” he said, sitting across from me on my bed. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a thin, white string. “Instead of keeping it in your pocket, I thought I could make a necklace out of it.”

“Oh. Good idea.”

I watched him wrap the chord around the piece of opal, adjusting it so there was enough string left on either side to fit comfortably around my neck. I sat still why he tied it and slipped the stone under my shirt. It rested slightly above the piece of obsidian I wore.

“Thank you,” I said, even though I still thought we should’ve risked shattering it.

He gri

“Huh?”

“Tomorrow-I think we should make it a half day.”

Making plans to skip afternoon classes tomorrow wasn’t on my priorities list and I was about to point that out when I realized what he was doing. Distracting me from the possibility there might not be a tomorrow that I wanted to see, keeping things normal and, in a way, hopeful.

I lifted my lashes and our eyes held. The green hue of his burned extraordinarily bright and then turned white as I rose to my knees, cupped his face, and kissed him-really kissed him like he was the very air I was thirsting for.

“What was that for?” he asked when I sat back. “Not that I’m complaining.”

I shrugged. “Just because. And to answer your question, I think we should definitely skip and play truant for the day.”

Daemon moved so fast that one second he was sitting and the next he was over me, his arms like bands of steel on either side of my head and I was on my back, staring up at him.

“Did I tell you I have a soft spot for bad girls?” he murmured. His form blurred at the edges, a soft white as if someone had taken a paintbrush and smudged an outline around him. A lock of hair fell forward, into those astonishing diamond-like eyes.

I couldn’t find my breath. “Truancy does it for you?”

When he lowered his body, it thrummed with a low charge and where our bodies met, sparks flew. “ You do it for me.”

“Always?” I whispered.

His lips grazed mine. “Always.”

Daemon left sometime later to meet up with Matthew and Dawson. The three of them wanted to run through things again, and Matthew, being the anal-retentive pla

I stayed back, hovering around my mom like a small child as she got ready. Feeling exceptionally needy, I even followed her outside and watched her back out of the driveway in her Prius.

Alone, my gaze went to the flowerbed skirting the porch. The faded mulch needed replacing and it could use a good weeding.

Stepping off the porch, I went to the small rose bushes and started pulling off the dead petals. I’d heard once that it could help the flowers bloom again. Wasn’t sure if that was correct or not, but the monotony of carefully picking out the leaves eased my nerves.

Tomorrow, Daemon and I would skip out at lunch.

Next weekend, I would convince my mom I needed to do an overhaul on the flowerbed.

At the begi

Sometime that month, I would get serious about filling out the paperwork for University of Colorado and I would drop that bomb on my mom.

In July, I would spend every day with Daemon swimming in the lake and getting a Jersey Shore tan.

By the end of summer, things would be normal between Dee and me.

And come fall, I’d move on from all of this. Things wouldn’t ever be mundane. I wasn’t fully human anymore. My boyfriend-the guy I loved-was an alien. And there may become a point where, like Dawson and Blake, Daemon and I would have to disappear.

But there was going to be a tomorrow, a next week, month, summer, and fall.

“Only you would be out gardening right now.”

I whipped around at the sound of Blake’s voice. He leaned against my car, dressed in all black, ready for tonight.