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“I always want you. I just can’t have you.”
“Why?” His mouth hovers close to mine, the warm mist of our breaths mingling. “What walls or locks or guards are keeping you prisoner right now? Who would even know?”
“I would know,” I whisper.
“Theodora. If you can look into my eyes and tell me you don’t want me, that you would rather I never touch you again, then say it. Say it, and I’ll respect your decision. The only thing I care about is what you want.”
I open my mouth to speak, but nothing comes out. My mind, shattered in fragments, is a confusion of clashing thoughts and memories.
My father’s hard face as he asks me,Do you know what a whore is, Theodora?
Camille, in Year 10, rushing out of the classroom where I caught her with a boy, shameful and unrepentant all at once.
Zachary, the night of the Halloween party, telling me he loved me before ever telling me he loved me.
Every night I’ve ever spent in my bed with my eyes closed and Zachary in my mind and my fingers moving between my legs, the sudden flood of pleasure and shame.
Zachary’s fingers on my pulse as he asked me if I was a robot in the library, and his mouth hot and hungry on mine.
The constant aching in my chest, the crushing loneliness, the black despair that settles on me whenever I think about leaving Spearcrest and moving to Russia.
For the first time in a long time, tears burn in my eyes, startling me back to reality. Real tears, rare as black opals. I close the sliver of distance between Zachary and press my lips to his.
Wemissthecountdownto the new year, and by the time the sky explodes with fireworks, we’re already kissing anyway. Deep, hungry, aching kisses, like we might die if we stop—like we might die if we keep going.
Zach pulls me onto his lap, and I lace my arms around his neck, and I kiss him from above, like a goddess and her mortal. His mouth is unbearably soft, and a ragged sigh escapes from his throat when I give in to the temptation of biting into the cushion of his lower lip.
His hands slip under my layers of clothing, his fingers finding and gripping my waist, thumbs brushing over the ridges of my ribcage. I arch into him, rolling my hips against the hardness of him, exulting in the proof of his desire, the proof that he wants me as much as I want him.
He might have bid me to take all my clothes off, and I might have done it. I might have let him take me right there and then, underneath the fireworks and indifferent stars.
Except that it starts snowing. Negligible snowflakes at first, fluttering hesitantly to melt against our skin, then more insistently, until we are forced to part with sighs of frustration.
We drive back through a thick downpour of heavy snowflakes and run into Zach’s house, laughing and breathless.
We stomp our boots to free them of snow and kick them off, leaving them right there on the atrium floor. Zach pulls my coat off my shoulders and lets it drop on the floor, pulling me away when I try to pick it up. He catches my mouth in a kiss as he wrestles his own coat off, and then we run up the central staircase, my hand in his.
He doesn’t lead me to my room. Instead, he leads me down another corridor, our steps swallowed by the antique carpet below our feet until we reach a door, which Zach wrenches open and pulls me through.
I don’t even have time to take a look at his bedroom before he slams his door shut and hauls me up into his arms. I meet him kiss for hungry kiss, wondering why I’ve deprived myself for so long.
Zach sets me down on his bed, and we finally pull apart as he props himself up on his elbows to gaze down at me. His eyelids are heavy, his brown eyes dark with desire. He’s not smiling—his face has that expression I know so well.
Earnest. Ardent. Devoted.
Like a saint before a god.
“Don’t look at me like that,” I whisper, struck by the intensity of his gaze.
“How could I not?” he breathes. “How could I not, Theodora? When my every dream has been of this? Of you? Of having my beautiful nemesis right here in my bed?”
He catches my lips in a kiss, then kisses his way across my cheek to my ear.
“Do you know the dreams I’ve had in this very bed, Theodora?” His voice is a husky murmur. “Dreams of the things I longed to do with you—toyou? Dreams of your mouth and your body and the thousand different ways I might bring you pleasure?”
I squirm underneath him. “Zach—stop.”
His mouth moves from my ear to my throat. He covers my neck with wet, lingering kisses and stops against the hollow of my throat. He looks up, a feverish look in his eyes.
