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“I warned you.”
He did. And I believed him. “It just feels so strange,” I tell him. “Everything. All of the time. It never seems to stop.” There’s only one way to lift this miasma of confusion I live in, but I keep that to myself. Theo doesn’t want to hear it. He wants us to go back to Toussaint and roll with the punches. Let nature run its course and see if my brain heals itself on its own. No other option seems to satisfy him. As far as he’s concerned, too many risks have already been taken, and this final risk is just too much. I understood how he felt before, and now, having properly met Dr. Brighton, I can see why he has no interest in letting her root around inside my head with a scalpel.
“Let’s go out and get some food,” Theo says, grinning. “And when we get back… I vote we do something to get you out of your head.” He teases a light touch down the side of my neck, and my body responds to him, as it always does.
My bones feel heavy, my heart too light to be contained within my chest.
This boy.
Thisman.
He’s the answer to a question I wouldn’t even begin to know how to ask.
He’s a balm to my tattered soul, the medicine that makes me complete. And Iamcomplete with him, even without the surgery. Dr. Brighton’s knives won’t change that. He is the stars in the night sky. The oxygen in my lungs. He is every beautiful and vital thing in the world for me. Without him, my soul is a cracked, shriveled thing that cannot exist.
The light flooding in through the floor-to-ceiling windows is lovely as honey, so different from the lonely, mournful light of the Pacific North-West. It gilds his face, plucking every spun filament of gold from the liquid amber of his eyes and making them burn. Theo is a breaking storm at Toussaint. Here, he’s the first light of dawn. No matter where he is in the world, it’s as if Mother Nature seeks him out and vows to make him glorious.
I cup his cheek in my hand, smiling at him, my worries already fading away to smoke. “You’re all I need to get me out of my head,” I tell him.
He turns his head, leaning into my hand, so that he can kiss my palm. His eyes bore into mine, his gaze so potent that it makes me shiver. “Yeah?” he asks, his voice soft. It’s amazing how he can lace just one word with so much suggestion. “’Cause I’m starving in every way imaginable, Voss. But there’s one hunger I always want to cater to first, before anything else.” My heart trips over itself, squeezing frantically, when he proceeds to lick my palm. The sight of him trailing the tip of his tongue upward, over the heel of my hand, up the inside of my wrist, his eyes still locked with mine… Holy fuck, what is happening right now? How he can turn me on so dramatically, so immediately is a mystery to me.
I was sinking low into a bog of self-pity a moment ago. Now, all I can do is burn.
“Theo,” I breathe. “God, you’re going to break me.”
Slowly, he shakes his head, and the sunlight catches on the curls and flicks of his hair, warming the black a little. “Nothing can break you, Sorrell Voss.”
Out of nowhere, a flash of a memory comes to me, painfully in focus and so unexpected that it takes my breath away.
Theo, walking down in a hallway somewhere, laughing. Judging from the crazy, colorful carpet and all of the numbered doors, we’re in a hotel. He’s wearing nothing but board shorts and flip flops. He has only a couple of tattoos—the outline of the sun currently marks his chest, and his right arm is covered with his sleeve. His whole face is commandeered by pure joy. The sound of his laughter echoes from the walls, loud and boisterous, and my body floods with the warmest, most beautiful heat.
“Careful, Voss. You’re treading on thin ice,” he tells me.
“Oh, am I?” I laugh, too. The giddiness of the feeling makes my eyes prick. “How are you going to punish me if I don’t give you what you want?”
He charges me, and I turn and run, squealing at the top of my lungs. I don’t get very far; he catches me, swooping me up into his arms, pretending to bite my neck like a savage, so that I scream even louder. “I’m going to finger you under the table at dinner, while you’re trying to make small talk with Lani. She’ll be whittering on about One Direction or some shit, and you’ll be trying not to moan while I make you come.”
“You wouldn’t dare!”
He grazes my neck with his teeth again, this time nipping at me so a flash of pain fires down between my legs. “Try me.”
“Theo! Put me down!”
“Say it.”
“No!”
He bites me harder. “Say it.”
“I won’t!”
I go limp when he sets me down and spins me around, shoving me up against the wall, kissing my neck instead of biting it this time.Fuck. Oh fuck, oh fuck, oh fuck.He runs the tip of his nose along the line of my jaw, breathing heavily. “Say it, Kid,” he growls, roughly cupping my breast through my bikini top.
“You drive me crazy,” I pant.
He pinches my nipple. “Try again.”
“You make me comesofucking hard.”
