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Chapter 15
NIKLAS
Understanding emotions was always something foreign to me. I could never quite figure them out, could never pinpoint what they were or what they meant, what repercussions they could have or what brought them forth. Body language though, that was different. I could read a person like a fucking book. This always helped me in my professional career, it was the only way I could connect to people, but at a personal level… I never cared much to connect outside my own family. Even with my one and only girlfriend… no matter what I did, that relationship was dominated by logic and doomed to fail from the beginning.
Once in a while, I remember the overheard discussion my parents had about my teacher’s suggestion to get me tested. So many things make sense, I made the connections myself, yet it doesn’t matter. I am who I am, and it all forged me into the person I became. I revel in it. I could not give a fuck whether there’s a diagnosis tied to me or not, because my lack of emotion towards certain situations was exactly what I needed, especially in business. I was ruthless and it brought me to where I am today.
Sounds and touch are the senses that truly make sense to me. I’m sensitive to them, to the point of pain when it comes to sound; however, it’s probably the only way for me to actually feel emotion, not just to know it exists, but actually feel someone else’s emotion.
Touch was what always helped me when it came to women. I had trouble reading them, their actual words, so I always followed their body. The temperature under my palm, the softness of the flesh, the pulse of fear, the pulse of arousal or anticipation. How the skin grows cold when the pulse increases due to fear… how arousal makes it soft and hot.
Now, with Suki, as I listened to the story she didn’t even realize she was speaking out loud, as she cried tears of mourning and relief into my chest, as I hold her upper arms in my big hands and watch as her soul is getting pieced back together, I realize she’s different. She always was.
I can understand the various sentiments in her story, I can taste the emotion that spills out of her tear ducts, I can read the earth-shattering emotion that burns in her eyes right now— Vindictive Hunger.
My demons howl.
My monster roars.
I smile.
For the first time ever, I can see emotions, I can see them in her and she… she is doomed because of it. There is no escape for her now. Not after she birthed this in me, the ability to feel her emotions, to taste them, to be hungry for them.
My perpetual attraction to screams has always been because I could feel the pain in them, I could feel the emotion traveling through their bodies. Sounds in general, the sensitivity I have towards them is all tied to the fact that the emotions vibrate through them. I can see the undulation of the soundwaves and pinpoint their roughness, softness… everything that makes them what they are.
And touch… the pulse… the warmth… the combination of both, I can feel the moment before they begin to tremble, either from fear or desire or both at the same time.
I fed on these senses, on sound and touch, fed on them because they were the only things that could ever make me understand, that could make me feel them. And I craved the screams because I couldn’t feel any other way, never by simply looking at them.
But this moment here… this has been the first time I have ever seen it, actually seen it. The way her pupils dilated, how the bright green turned a shade deeper, the broken look in her eyes, the pain in them was screaming at me and that’s when it happened… her emotions became part of me. And when she transitioned from pain to vengeance, the green of her eyes sparkled with golden flakes from the fire inside of her, her skin looked tighter, her breaths calmed and became deeper, and she screamed in hunger from inside me. I could feel it all, traveling through her until it reached me, clutched my fucking soul and squeezed tight until I burst open for her.
Is that the meaning of it all? Have I never been able to understand emotions because I couldn’t feel them myself? Beyond anger or indifference, I never felt anything else. But Suki… Suki bled her emotions onto me and they fucking melded together in our fire.
I could feel her pain and only one desire flooded me—annihilation.
I could feel her strength, and it makes me want to fucking kiss her until her lips are swollen and bruised and now...
I can feel her determination, and I want to follow her into battle.
SUKI
Time stops yet again, and here I am, trapped in that ocean-blue gaze with the mid-morning sun kissing my skin. Even the birds stopped singing. The river stopped flowing. The trees are moving without making a sound.
And suddenly they all do. All at once. Invading my senses, charging me with their potent wilderness. My gaze breaks from his, and it travels to his wild, dirty blond hair swept on the right side of his head, exposing the buzz cut on the left side, to his thick brows that shade his fearless eyes, his strong straight nose, then to that long, thick, wiry beard that makes my fingers itch to run through it.
I want to touch him, his face, I want to run my fingers through his hair, trace his eyebrows with my thumbs, down around his eyes, around his cheeks. I want to hold his beard-covered jaw in my small hands, but I don’t… it means too much. I can see it in his eyes, there is understanding in them, a sense of camaraderie, but his need to capture and conquer is still there and I am still very much its target.
I might feel determined and ready to take on Adrien, but this man right here, Niklas… he’s a whole different kind of monster and there will be nothing left of me if he truly catches me. He will protect my soul, I know he will, but he will break me—my restraints, my barriers, my walls, my rules—he will break my goddamn heart without even thinking of it, without intention. He will rip it out of my chest with his bare hands and devour it in front of me, piece by piece, until it is all gone and there will be no chance for it to be restored by any other man but him. He still very much terrifies me.
I can feel it already, the battle he is having with my mind. It is a game of his own creation, one that I have been playing too, but only he knows the rules.
One of his hands drops from my upper arms and covers the healed mark of the branding iron, holding my thigh, squeezing ever so slightly. The heat from his palm is searing a different kind of fire on my skin. It feels like he wants to brand me himself, burning away the painful memories of my former captor.
How will my new one brand me?
“What do you want from me, Niklas?” I whisper, but I know he hears me. I feel the almost unnoticeable twitch in his palm on my thigh, I see his pupils shrinking.
“At this moment, I want to make sure you don’t confuse me with something I am not and never will be.”
