When I swing my eyes open, Vincenzo is punching the phone out of someone’s hand and Alex is hiding my face with his body. A few other students take pictures like this is the most interesting thing to happen all year, and I know they’ll be somewhere online before the evening is up.
“Fucking idiots,” Alex mutters, dragging me toward the bar.
But I don’t need a drink. I don’t need more eyes on me, more pictures of me traveling around the university’s depressing hallways. I need to getout. I yank myself from his grip, instead making a jog for the small wooden door to our right.
The rain is hammering down outside the castle, running down Sorrowsong’s rusty pipes and pattering through the dense tree line in front of me. I tip my head back, letting the icy droplets snatch my breath away in a desperate attempt to wash the sticky, hot desire from my body.
I hear the door clatter shut. My stomach sinks into the wet earth at my feet. “Just go.”
“No.”
“I—” My reply fizzles out on my tongue. “What?”
“No,” he breathes, as thunder rumbles above us. “I’m saying no, Ophelia.”
“We don’t get a happy ending.”
“Sayswho?”
“The universe!” I shout back, over the storm that whips my hair around my face. I turn away, anything to not have to see the look in his eyes. “Do you see the way they stare in there? We’re a car crash.”
A warm hand shoots out to grab my biceps before I can walk into the woods, away from him. “That’s bullshit, Ophelia.”
I spin to face him, snatching my arm from his grip. All I’ve given him so far is anger, but when my voice cuts through the howling of the wind, what I hear in it is the hurt and the insecurity that he put there on that miserable January morning. “You left me!”
“I know.”
“I never want you to have to choose again. I never want you to be split in two again. I never want to feel the way I did when you left again.”
“It won’t happen again.”
“How can you know that?”
He pulls me to him, sheltering me from the rain. His voice is softer now, barely audible over the howling wind. “Because every day that you’re not mine is knocking another year off my life.”
I rest my forehead against the soaking fabric of his shirt, feeling the thundering heart beneath. I’d do anything to protect that heart. “It’s not just what happened last month. It’s everything. It’s what your father did to me. It’s the distance between us. I am a student, Alex. You’re a CEO. We are worlds apart. I’ll hardly see you for the next few years. I can’t get on a plane to see you, and I can’t ask you to spend time away from the girls.”
I feel his cheek rest on the top of my head, the two of us standing outside Sorrowsong’s lichen-covered walls in the driving rain.I wish that being in his arms didn’t feel like coming home. “I’ll still see you.”
A couple times a year, if we’re lucky.
His hands slip beneath the low back of my dress, over my frozen skin. His shaky exhale warms the top of my head, voice ragged with desperation when it splinters our silence. “I need you. I can’t live without you.”
I sigh into the curve of his neck, a warm, dry haven in the violent storm. “Alex.We’re young. We don’t know what we need. We don’t know anything about anything.”
“Is that what this feels like to you?” he asks, hands sliding down to my hips, pressing my body against his. “A young, foolish fling?”
No.This feels like the beginning and end of the world. The unbridled hope of a sunrise and the regret and closure of the sun sinking behind the horizon. It feels like he’s holding the needle and thread to stitch up my broken heart. If I let him in and he pulled away again, the thread would rip through the delicate flesh and leave me to bleed out on the floor.
But my judgement is clouded by lust, emboldened by the whisky I can still taste on my tongue. Desire is a potent drug, and Alex seems to inject me with it. He plants his soft lips at the point where my pulse drums in my neck and gently sucks, sending my head dropping back involuntarily. His hand slips down the low back of my dress. The thunder covers any noise he makes, but I feel the rumble of it in his throat. “Please.”
I walk him toward the wet stone wall behind us, legs wobbling.
“Give me until midnight. Three hours. Just give me three hours.”
Three hours. One hundred and eighty minutes to remind my lonely heart of what it feels like to be loved again.
I don’t know how anyone could be strong enough to resist.
