Page 29 of Cruel Destinies

Chapter 11

Arya

Hot! I was so deliciously hot all over!

There were a dozen reasons that I should have pulled away, should have stopped kissing him, but right now, with his tongue tangling, playing my mouth like a fiddle, I didn’t give a fuck about any of them.

All I knew was that I wanted more. More of his large, warm hands pulling me closer as I sat on his lap, feeling the hard ridge of his desire beneath my thigh. More of his fingers caressing my ears and jawline as they combed through my hair. More of his lips opening and closing over mine in a perfect rhythm that made my head spin and my insides ache.

I didn’t care that he’d been in this very greenhouse with Cora who knew how many times. I’d messed around with Kendall, too, and I was sure Cora was just as big a mistake to Tobias as Kendall was to me.

I didn’t care that Tobias would probably go silent on me again after this. We both wanted this. And if history was any indication, it would only be a matter of time before he came back after he had time to process the emotions I obviouslymade him feel.

He had a reputation around campus for being a playboy, not for yo-yoing every girl he slept with. Nope, that erratic behavior was reserved for me, as far as I’d heard. Infuriating as it was, it meant he had real feelings for me and didn’t know how to deal with them.

We had a deeper connection. What I felt for Tobias was inescapable—I’d tried time and again and still ended up pining for him. And clearly, he felt the same way. I just had to be a little patient while he grew out of his Peter Pan phase.

Fueled by my frustration, I squeezed his shoulders a little too hard, and he jerked beneath me, pulling away to hiss between his teeth.

“Sorry,” I said, rubbing his shoulder soothingly to make up for it.

“No, it’s my damn leg.” He winced.

I widened my eyes and grimaced, immediately—and gently—climbing off his lap. “Oh shit, I’m so sorry. I shouldn’t have—”

He chuckled. “It’s okay. I kinda started it.”

“You usually do,” I teased.

“Ouch. I deserve that.”

We both laughed.

“Let me heal you before I cause any further damage,” I suggested, wiping my kiss-swollen lips.

“Yeah,” he said, straightening his leg. “I’d really appreciate not having to bother Ms. Heather again.”

I nodded and knelt in front of his injured leg. He rolled up his pants to expose his calf and twisted his leg so I could inspect it. A strange paint-splatter-shaped purple bruise stained the skin.

At the sight of it, I grimaced and sucked in a breath between my teeth. “Damn! That looks awful.”

Seeing him battered once more put me right back into the headspace of the night he almost died, twisting my heart into a painful knot. I didn’t like seeing him in any kind of pain—even if I had only seconds ago tried to inflict some by squeezing his shoulder too hard.

“Eh, it’s not so bad.” He shrugged, puffing out his chest.

I frowned sideways at him.

His shoulders slumped under my dubious gaze. “It could be worse.”

“Let’s be glad it isn’t,” I said, silently enjoying chastising him.

I pulled my tablet out of my laptop bag. “Ms. Heather updated my tablet with the x-ray app the harpies use. I haven’t had the chance to test it out yet.”

I tapped the icon that looked like a ribcage, and the app opened.

TAP TO SCAN AFFLICTED REGION, read the message on the screen.

I held the tablet so that the camera was aimed at Tobias’s bruise and tapped the screen. A faint red glow slowly blanketed across the screen, and after it had crossed a few seconds later, a high-definition x-ray image of Tobias’s calf appeared. His bones were outlined in yellow, his veins and arteries in branch-like red lines, and the outline of his skin was a faint white. Dark red globs congealed toward the base of the bone, where there was a small fracture, tiny splinters of yellow peppering the surrounding area.

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