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“Hurry,” I pleaded.
“Slowly,” he said.
NOAH
I THRILL AT HER RISING, aching, swelling sound as I draw out every torturous kiss. Her muscles tighten and tremble and she grasps the sheets and I glance up, needing to see her face.
She is wild. And I have never seen anything more outrageously beautiful in my life.
But then she threads her hands into my hair and pulls.
MARA
AS I DREW HIM UP against me, into me, there was a pinch of scarlet.
“Are you all right?” he asked, his voice gentle in a way I’d never heard.
I breathed “Yes” as the color softened and faded. I pulled him closer.
NOAH
I SLIDE MY HANDS UP her back, and her ankles lock around my waist and she takes me in with those fathomless eyes. We are co
Mara kisses me and it is sugar on my tongue and champagne in my blood; I want to drown in her taste and scent and sound. Hers is the body electric; she is the high I’d been chasing but never caught until now.
MARA
NIPPING. PULLING. TEASING. TASTING. HIS strokes were slow, intricate, as they blended and feathered and blushed me into something radiant. The colors glossed and glazed into something bold and bright.
NOAH
EVERY TOUCH COMPOSES A NEW, unheard measure; I am hypnotized by the texture and timbre of her notes as they trill and turn and beat and slide. The sheets are our world, and in them she is finite and infinite, beautiful and sublime, bound in my arms and boundless at once.
I move and her scale lengthens, stretches, rhapsodic and gorgeously violent as her eyes grow dark and threaten to close.
“Stay with me,” I nearly growl, trying to bite back my desperation, my fear that she’ll slip away. I never want to stop looking at her from here. “Stay.”
They flutter open—she’s still here, still her. “I need to hear you,” she begs in that voice, and I can’t refuse her¸ not anything, not now, not ever. But the words that come aren’t enough for this. For her. So I speak in a language she doesn’t know.
Je t’aime. Aujourd’hui. Ce soir. Demain. Pour toujours. Si je vivais mille ans, je t’appartiendrais pour tous. Si je vivais mille vies, je te ferais mie
I love you. Today. Tonight. Tomorrow. Forever. If I were to live a thousand years, I would belong to you for all of them. If I were to live a thousand lives, I would want to make you mine in each one.
MARA
THE WORLD DISTILLED TO ONLY the sound of us as we both stretched out on the edge of the world.
The colors shone, burned through. Sie
NOAH
BLISS.
The echo of her pleasure hits my blood and takes me with her. Mara is unstrung, unbound, unleashed in my arms.
Finally.
MARA
AFTER, I LAY AGAINST HIM. Our heartbeats synchronized, and I twined around him like moss on a limb. I was soft in his grasp and he was so solid and warm and real against my cheek. My smile wouldn’t fade, but the colors began to. Violet to cobalt, then indigo, then black.
NOAH
THERE IS NO SILENCE, BUT the timbre of her sound does change. Grace notes, sweet and blue, sweeping, sliding, falling. I know what they mean.
“Stay,” I whisper into her damp, curling hair, as if it’s the only word I know. “Stay with me.”
But her eyes flutter and shut.
I can’t close mine. Mara falls asleep to “Hallelujah.”
EPILOGUE
DAWN CREEPS IN THROUGH THE curtains, staining the backs of my eyelids red. I blink once, twice in the near darkness, then stretch. I inhale the scent of Noah’s shampoo and smile as I reach over in bed to pull him closer. My hand closes around a piece of paper, though, not his hair.
I prop myself up on my elbow and yawn, sca
Couldn’t sleep, went for a run. Back soon. Prepare yourself.
xxxxxx
N
A smile spreads across my lips, so wide it hurts. I’m overpowered by love for him, for this boy who knows exactly what I am, exactly who I am, and loves me anyway, despite it. Because of it. I couldn’t wait for him to get back so I could tell him. Show him. A week had passed, but it could have been a year—I would never get enough.
And I don’t have to. We have all the time in the world.