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At my back, Theo stirs. I feel the moment his consciousness returns to him, and the moment when his body stiffens with tension afterward. His weariness radiates off of him so powerfully that I can almost taste the sour, metallic tang of it on my tongue.
Tick. Tick. Tick.
The little analogue alarm clock on the nightstand marks the seconds that pass with no consideration for how badly I want time to stand still. As soon as Theo says something, I’ll have to face whatever comes next. The peace will be shattered, and there will be questions, followed by more stories far too fantastical to be believed, and all of that is beyond me.
At last, Theo pulls in a long breath, his frame relaxing into the bed, the rigidity that locked up his body falling away like it never even existed.
I should say something. I have to say something. Theo gets there before I can, though. “Sleep some more, Voss. You’re still tired.” He pauses. His hand, resting on my side, shifts, his fingers working slow, reassuring circles over me, where my shirt has ridden up in the night, exposing a sliver of bare skin. “It’s okay.” His warm breath stirs my hair. “You’re still here. You’re still you.”
Three hours later, he isn’t behind me when I wake. I can tell immediately—the cold, empty space behind me makes me shiver. I feel violently, unbearably alone, until I realize that he’s sitting in the chair by the window.
His eyes are beautiful, wolfish, alert, and wild, watching me with an intensity sharp enough to cut.
His hair is a mess, the dark waves ruffled and springing all over the place. Those three freckles, arranged in a near perfect triangle beneath his right eye, stand out starkly against his washed-out skin. In the cool morning light filtering through the window, he sits shirtless, chin propped up on his elbow, wearing nothing but his boxers, looking like he hasn’t slept in millennia. The tattoos marking his chest, his neck, his side and his arms are extensive; I haven’t really acknowledged justhowinked he is.
He blinks at me, not saying anything, waiting for me to speak, perhaps, but I just lay on my side, looking at him the same way he’s looking at me, trying to make sense of how I’m feeling right now.
After a long moment where we do nothing but stare at each other, he murmurs, “Stop doing that.”
“What?”
“Looking at me like youwantme. I’m trying to give you some space. I’d love nothing more than to climb back in that bed and fuck the living shit out of you, but you couldn’t handle it right now.”
“I couldn’t?”’
His head rocks from left to right. “Not the wayIwanna fuck you. I’m too stressed out to be gentle.”
A flash of heat ignites in my stomach, unexpected, making me suck in a breath. My mind is a tangle of emotions and feelings right now. I found out I had parents last night, only to discover that they’re now both dead in the same conversation, for fuck’s sake. There are a million other things I should be thinking about, but as always when I’m around him, Theo absorbs my mental bandwidth like a black hole absorbs light.
I want him. I want him to fuck me roughly, the way he just implied he would. I want bruises on my body, and teeth marks on my skin, and I want him to put them there—
“Stop,” he says, his voice a warning. “I can read you like a book, Voss, and those impure thoughts you’re having right now? They’re making my dick hard.”
“I’m rather enjoying them.”
“No. You’re too scared to face what’s going on so you’rehidingbehind them.”
Rude! How dare he call me out on my avoidance tactics. I gun him down with a spiteful glare, but eventually, the steady, even liquid depths of his gaze makes me look away. I pull myself up so that I’m leaning against the pillows. My head thrums. “They’re the reason why you’re always wearing long sleeved shirts, then?” I say.
“Hmm?” The rough quality of his voice makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand to attention.
“The tattoos.” I eye the intricate designs on his arms: wings, fanning out over the back of his left tricep. A ship, and a book, and a crest. His left arm is a maze of ink—patterns and blocks of text that I can’t discern properly from where I lay on the bed. The sun in the center of his chest is beautiful. Down his side, I can only see‘Sorrell’and the beginning of‘Amelia’beneath it, because of the way he’s sitting in the chair, but the knowledge that the other names exist there, one after the other, evidence of my impermanence in the world, makes me avert my gaze. “Are…are some of the other tattoos related to me?” I ask.
His eyes become distant. “They’reallabout you, Sorrell. Every last one.” He glances over his shoulder, out of the window, frowning at the grey world beyond the glass. He doesn’t just have a couple of tattoos. He has so many that they blend into one another, one merging into the next. It’s hard to even imagine unravelling them. “All apart from this one.” He taps a little four-leaf clover on his right arm. “That one was for someone else.”
“What do they all mean?”
Theo shakes his head. “They’re just tattoos. They’re not going anywhere. There are other, more important questions you wanna ask.”
There are. There are a million and one questions I want answers to, but I don’t even know where to begin. I throw my arms over my face and blot out the world, trying to calm my racing pulse, already knowing that my attempts to hide will be futile. Thereisno hiding from this.
“You wanna know who else knows about all of this,” Theo says softly. “The accident. Your memory loss. Your…personality shifts.”
My stomach drops. I do want to know that, and Theo knows that’s the case because we’ve done this before. He’s had to explain this before. How many times have we been through this exactly?
“Tell me,” I whisper.
“Sebastian knows. Ashley. Beth.”
