Page 197 of Breathe Like Hell

“No, it—It means touched by an angel. And she’s different because of it. She can smell our kapnos. She can anchor you. Obviously, she can become pregnant with an angelic child. There are other things to it, but that’s mostly what will affect her now.”

“Touched by an angel when? And what other things?”

“Well, she could become—” Micah cut himself off at the faint sound of his bedroom door opening. Dakota’s footsteps were quiet and light down the upstairs hallway, bare feet soft on the carpet. My chest tightened, pulse kicking harder in anticipation of seeing her. The shower was still on.

“Become what?”

“Stop talking.”

She appeared in the entrance to the kitchen, soaking wet and in a towel, her hair dripping all over the floor.

“My razor is broken,” she said.

“Do you want to use mine?” Micah asked, closing his laptop, his face more obscured by the darkness without its glow, navy blue shrouding the kitchen.

“Do you have any other kind of razor? Beside that one?” She shifted her weight from foot to foot, sucking her wet bottom lip into her mouth.

“No. But I could do it for you, if you want.”

Dakota contemplated this, shivering, more water dripping off her long hair onto the ground.

“Okay,” she agreed, then started back towards the steamy upstairs bathroom, both Micah and I trailing behind her. If he was going to see her in the shower, so was I.

In the bathroom, Dakota hung up her wet towel then hopped back into the shower, allowing the hot water to melt away her coldness. My cock twitched in my shorts, and I grabbed it over the fabric to adjust. Her skin was pinking up from the heat, glistening soft under the water.

She didn’t look different, but I suspected she would soon, if she remained pregnant.

I imagined it in my head, the way her body would change as she grew life inside of her.

Micah got his razor out, then began to unscrew the base so he could exchange the blade for a fresh one. The silver metal glinted in the light, sharp between his fingertips. I thought about cuts on his arms, on his thighs, on his stomach, blood dripping off his elbows, none of the scars ever staying. In a way, I envied his relationship with pain. It felt cleaner than mine. Purposeful.

He methodically removed the old blade, then took a new one from the box in his drawer and replaced it. Dakota was nervously watching him through the glass.

If he accidentally cut her, she wouldn’t heal quickly.

I remembered the scar on the bottom of her foot, from when she’d stepped on glass on the beach running away from me. When I’d held her under the water for the very first time, baptizing her in my darkness, showing her how addictive drowning could feel. She’d pretended to hate me then, but that was never the truth.

Micah took off his clothes and opened the shower door, stepping in with her.

Okay, fuck that.

I undressed and joined them. Dakota seemed equally irritated by both of us, and the amount of breathing room in the steam-filled shower had decreased significantly.

“You know, neither of you needed to come in here. I could just stick my leg out of the shower,” she reasoned, her breathing getting a little quicker. There wasn’t enough room in the small space for our bodies to not be touching her, so she was surrounded. A mixture of my and Micah’s kapnos fogged the air, breathing darkness into the heat.

“It’ll be easier like this,” Micah reassured her, then lowered himself to one knee, motioning for her to put her leg up on his other one.

“Please be very careful,” she warned, trembling slightly.

“I’ll be very careful.”

Dakota leaned back against me to stabilize herself as she set her foot on Micah’s knee, then handed him her vanilla-scented shaving cream.

He was careful, dragging the razor up the side of her calf, intently focused on the movement of the blade. His fingers wrapped around her ankle, holding her steady as he shaved one leg, then the other.

“Done?” Dakota asked, looking down at him.

“Sort of.”