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“I want to go back into the living room. ”
“I don’t think it’s a good idea. ”
At this point, as much as I loved him, I didn’t care what he thought. This might be a spell, or a side effect of being in the fae realm, but whatever it was was letting me feel the heat of sunlight on my bare skin for the first time in twenty-three years, and I wasn’t going to give it up for anything. Even if I had to force my way through him.
I dodged to the side, but not quickly enough. He grabbed my arm and tugged me back towards him. His hold was rough, and when he pulled me, it hurt. Desmond was strong—he was an alpha-level werewolf after all—but I was stronger. He shouldn’t have been able to yank me that hard. And it shouldn’t have hurt.
He must have seen the pain in my response because he immediately dropped my hand and got to his feet. “Are you okay? I didn’t mean to—”
The gears in my brain were spinning like a locomotive about to jump the tracks. I could stand in the sun. A minor wound wasn’t healing. My pulse kept jumping around like a rabbit on crack. And Desmond had been able to hurt me. I thought about the previous night too. How I hadn’t been able to smell or hear things I normally should have.
My heart hammered. “Take me outside,” I told him.
“That’s the worst idea I’ve ever—”
“Desmond, please. I need to go outside. ” Before he could come up with a reason not to take me, I scooped my wrinkled jeans off the floor and wriggled myself into them. “Now. ” Without waiting for him I turned back to the door and was out in the hall and halfway through the living room before he caught up, a pair of his old jeans barely covering his ass. He fought with the zipper—carefully, since he wasn’t wearing underwear—and trailed me up the short stairs and out into the bright May morning. At least I thought it was May still.
I halted so abruptly outside my apartment he had to brace his hands on my waist to stop his own forward momentum.
“Desmond, you’d tell me if this was a dream, right?”
“I don’t know what I’d do if this was your dream, but I’m not a hundred percent sure I’m not still asleep. ”
We both stood barefoot on the sidewalk, him staring at me and me wincing at the piercing blueness of the sky and how fucking shiny everything was. Light cut like a blade off any smooth surface it touched, coming back to hurt me. But I’d never felt a pain so delicious as that of the sun.
My skin felt glorious, like I was surrounded by bathtub water. It was nothing like the heat of a summer night. I knew what it was to be uncomfortable in my own skin because of how oppressive the air temperature was. This was nothing like that.
While I basked in the glory of daylight, ignoring the looks we were getting from passing pedestrians, I considered Aubrey’s words to me. He’d said he would take something that was mine alone to give. My greatest weapon.
I was gripped by an overwhelming panic, my hands shaking so hard I thought they’d never stop. I finally had an idea of what those words could mean, and what my greatest weapon was. But I was at a total loss for how to prove my new hypothesis.
“Do I smell different to you?” I asked, grasping at the only thing I could think of on the spot.
“Different how?”
I turned to him and took one of his hands in both of mine, gazing at him imploringly. “Smell me. I need to know if I smell different. ”
He tucked his face into the curve of my neck, the intimacy of the gesture giving me an unexpected thrill. When he withdrew, his expression showed confusion. “I…don’t know if I’m just thinking it’s something when it’s nothing. ”
“I’m different. ”
“Yes. ”
“How?”
Desmond cupped my face in his free hand and stroked his thumb across my cheek. I didn’t know what to make of the look in his eyes or the funny little smile on his lips. “You don’t smell like death anymore. And you don’t smell like wolf either. ”
I swallowed hard. “How do I smell?”
“Human. ”
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Desmond and I sat across from each other in a booth at the back of a brunch-only diner in Midtown. The checkered black-and-white floor and butter-yellow walls all screamed 1950s throwback, but I was loving it. I’d been walking past it for years and had felt embittered I wasn’t able to go in. Brunch is a luxury I had never been able to participate in.
Until now.
I had four plates in front of me: one with homemade Norwegian waffles topped with raspberry preserves and whipped cream; one with buttermilk biscuits smothered in a white sausage gravy; a third had a stack of blueberry pancakes doused in layers of butter and maple syrup; and the last held a bacon, bacon and bacon omelet. The waitress had stopped visiting to refill my coffee and left a whole carafe on the table with us instead.
