Page 16 of You Give Me Fever

Clara gasped against his shoulder, leaning her hot forehead against it and squeezing her eyes shut.

“Stop that,” she said with no conviction behind her words. “It’s - n-not like before… It’s not a dream…”

“I was never a dream,” he said, continuing to draw little figure eights against her sensitive places. “You can have this. No one will take it from you. It’s okay to relax.”

The threat of tears kept fighting with those other urges that brewed and bubbled under her, fear and sorrow and hope and shame against need—thick, hot, heavy, and strong. Was it just need? Or was the sealed cabinet that housed her heart beginning to unlock?

She grabbed his arm with both hands, hiding her face against it and crying out softly as his fingers circled her little pearl. It was a different version of the lightheadedness her fever had caused—she felt the same rolling waves, the same tingling in her limbs, but everything zeroed in on the furnace between her thighs where he was doing things she’d never known about until mere days ago.

Digging in with her nails—digging into shadow that felt more real and solid by the minute—she gasped and sighed and cursed until her breath halted completely and she was rocked to her core by a blinding climax.

She fell back against him and hardly felt it when he took up the cloth again and began washing her aching skin.

Chapter

Seven

YOU’RE BEGINNING TO FASCINATE ME, AND I RESENT THAT IN ANY MAN

Only when the cool air hit her skin did Clara realize she had drifted off in the bathtub. He was still with her, this strange, careful, infuriating, and exciting shadow thing, and he was lifting her from the tub and into a warm towel in his arms. With the fog in her mind cleared a bit after her temperature went down, she finally realized she didn’t know a thing about him.

“What’s your name?” she asked as he carried her back into her bedroom, leaving her clothes on the floor where he had torn them from her.

The question took him by surprise. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d been asked such a thing. For the briefest of moments, he struggled with the answer—another name wanted to bubble up to the surface, but it didn’t quite get there.

“Shiver,” he said, attempting a smile she probably couldn’t see.

Clara wrinkled up her nose, trying not to laugh. The expression made Shiver’s throat clench with adoration.

“I’ve never met a Shiver before,” she said. Her voice was small and weak, but far warmer than the start of their last conversation.

“You’re my first Clara,” he said, just to cover the awkwardness of sharing himself with her. He had no idea how she might take him, but as soon as the words were out of his mouth, he realized how much he liked calling her his.

Shiver laid her down in her bed, slipping the wet towel from under her and covering her in blankets. He avoided her inscrutable gaze, instead finding something very interesting in the embroidery of her quilt.

“Are you…” Clara wasn’t sure how to ask everything she wanted to ask. She had no trouble being rude to him when they quarreled, but she couldn’t do so now. “Are you a ghost?”

Shiver smiled again, and Clara could indeed see it. His features were beginning to stand out more, no longer an ink spill on ebony but almost a dark blue with a prominent nose and angular jaw.

“Have you met any ghosts?”

“Thought I did once,” she admitted.”Some sort of… dog, almost. But not exactly a dog. I probably imagined it.”

“You probably did not,” said Shiver, tucking the blankets around her a little tighter, as if to shield her from the spectral canine. In fact, there was nothing on her land scarier than he. “I’m not a ghost. I’m more of a… well, a demon.”

In the end, he couldn’t come up with a nicer word for it. He knew perfectly well what he was, just as he knew she would scream and banish him from the house and never let him touch her again.

Instead, Clara just lifted an eyebrow and smirked at him.

“I don’t think I believe in demons,” she said.

Shiver let out a scoff that was half offense and half amusement.

“Well, we believe in you, my dear,” he said.

She rolled her eyes. “Do you mean to tell me you’re a real demon, pitchfork and fire and all that? It’s not exactly what I thought you would look like.”

“We look like a lot of different things. I’ve been like this as long as I can remember.” Except that wasn’t entirely true. Something was tugging at him from the corners of his mind, something he hadn’t dared look at closer. The scent of lemons, the salty sea air —something was scratching at his skull, asking to be let in.