Page 25 of Hollowed

He looked at the ceiling.

“Because you didn’t run.”

I swallowed.

“You thought I would?”

“They all do.Eventually.”

I didn’t ask who they were.

I didn’t want to know.

He closed his eyes again.

“Do you want me to go?” he asked.

“No.”

“Then sleep.”

I did.

Eventually.

Not because I was safe.

Because I had never been so watched.

And the watching made me feel real.

I woke in silence, but it didn’t feel empty.

It pressed into me.

Like a second skin, invisible and dense, steeped in breath I hadn’t taken yet. I didn’t open my eyes right away. I didn’t need to. The weight of his presence was thicker than heat, thicker than stone, thicker than need. I could feel it at my back—constant, unmoving, held like a vow.

He hadn’t left.

I could feel the tension in the air around us. Not because he touched me—he didn’t—but because his restraint was a living thing. I could taste it.

Ash. Salt. Sweat.Him.

My body still ached from the night before, but it was a sacred ache. My body throbbed not with pain, but memory. Every breath dragged across the raw, holy place he’d carved into me. Not with violence. With reverence. With possession.

And I missed him inside me.

That thought hit me so suddenly I gasped. Quiet. Shame-laced. But true.

I missed the way his hips pressed into mine, the way his breath broke across my shoulder. I missed the press of his teeth, the scrape of his voice against my ear. I missed being filled.

I missed being kept.

My thighs pressed together and I let them. Let the friction spark against my slick, let the want rise in me again like a tide that refused to recede. I wanted him. Even now. Even still.

And that scared me.

Because I wasn’t afraid of the ache.

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