Page 63 of The Nightmare Before Kissmas
“I did not tell you to get you to fix this,” Hex says. Is it a whisper? I barely hear him speak, and I sit on my heels to look up at him.
His profile is washed gray-white in starlight, the other side sheathed in darkness, his lips softly parted. His arms are still crossed, but his fingers are arched and tense against his elbows, the lines of his body taken from lax resignation to something razor-edged and alert. It makes me so aware of the fact that I’m on my knees before him that a bolt of effervescent lightning spiderwebs from my head down to my gut and pins me in place.
“The deal Halloween has with your father is under control,” he says, his usual detached tone marred by hesitation. “If you are unaware of the details, all the better, honestly. You don’t need to be involved. You don’t need to fix anything.”
“But we’re better than this,” I tell him. “Christmas is better than this. And I will not let my father ruin Halloween. I won’t let himtouchyou, ever again. I promise.”
I make jokes. I’m a smartass. I don’t talk like this, with weight, but every second of a life spent being the comedic relief has been saving up sincerity for him.
Hex’s arms drop from around his chest, rip down like some invisible force jerked him open.
He’s quiet for a long, agonizing moment, his face unreadable.
“Trying to decide if a promise from the disreputable Christmas Prince has merit?” I ask, and I smile, but this has smothered any joy I could have clung to—
Hex falls to the ground in front of me.
Something deep beneath my belly button wrenches, hard.
I surge up to match him, balancing on my knees. There’s maybe two inches of space between us, and my breath comes in a pinched gasp, disbelief and apology and unworthiness all lassoing around my neck so I hold there, strung in place.
He smells like sweet oranges with a hit of something spicy, a living version of this cocktail Renee made one year, a cinnamon bourbon old-fashioned with brûléed oranges. Burnt sugar and heat from the spice and sunshine brightness in the citrus, it makes my mouth water, but I am stationary. I exist in this moment to be at his will, the spark of his exhale on my tongue.
“I do not expect you to fix this,” he tells me again.
I almost promise I will. I almost promise him everything. I’m jerked back and forth between reality and wishes and I’m getting intoxicated on the way the air tastes like him.
“It ismyjob to protect my Holiday and the people who depend on it”—he’s talking faster; he’s unhinging, and I feel like I’m privy to something holy in watching him lose control—“and it isyourjobto protect yours. I can take care of myself. Do not risk your responsibilities for me.”
I can’t promise that.
But he doesn’t make me.
“I can take care of myself,” he repeats, and I finally clock what that softness in his tone is: he’s nervous.
The reverberations of a moan rattle in my chest moments before it splinters the air. It silences him.
A sway forward, a plunge, and he kisses me—again.
All it takes is him closing that distance and the lightest swell of his mouth against mine, and I grab the back of his neck and devour him. I’ve been starving, for a year and a half, I’ve been living in a suspended state of hunger, all normal appetite wrecked by one single drunken kiss. And it was sodumb,wasn’t it? To be obsessed withone kiss; so I’d ignored it and carried on because he was gone, he was basically a figment of a drunken dream, and I’d never get that kiss again. I’d have to learn to live without it. Without him. To be okay going back to grays and beiges when I now knew that the world could exist in magenta and aquamarine and violent auburn.
But he’shere.His lips are on mine again, no alcohol fog, no uncertainty about who initiated it or who wants it. I’m ravenous and he is my only satisfaction, his lips separating for my tongue, the taste of him minty and hemmed in that spicy-orange smell and it is vital,vitalthat I re-memorize every divot of his lips. And I’m absolutely shredded in two, half curling with desire; half knowing I’m well and truly fucked.
One kiss from him damn near shattered me, and that was when I was able to play it off as something I’d built up in my head. But now that I know his lips feel as perfect as I’d been imagining, that all of this is as effortlessly cataclysmic as I’d hoped and feared?
Scalded. Ruined. Eviscerated.
I make a completely unselfconscious whine of greed and with it almost comes a tidal wave of stuff that’s theatrically poetic but batshit to say to someone I hardly know. Things like,I’ve missed you, I know that’s insane, we’re barely friendsandTell me you’ve thought about me afraction as often as I’ve thought about you, even just onceandPlease, please,begging for way more than I have any right to.
I get some grip on myself and peel back enough to fill his mouth with, “You taste as good as I remember.”
A little gasp escapes him, but in the second where his shock might give way to discomfort—was that still too forward? Probably, fuck—he echoes that greedy whine,echoesit, a resonant warble high in his throat.
He pushes into me and bites at my tongue and I mewl in his mouth, hand clenching at the base of his hair, riding the motion of his chest forming against mine. I grab onto the ridges of his spine, arching over him, feeling the bow of his ribs as I bend him backwards, and I think I could lay us out on the floor, I think he’d let me. But the mere thought of that has me so painfully aware of the way our hip bones align, the hard connection where each inch of our bodies touches, that I have to break the kiss and gasp for air.
I rock my forehead to his, noting his fingers twisted in the front of my sweater, knuckles white in the low light, pale, pale skin against the silvery black of his rings.
He didn’t tell me what it is my dad has over him and his Holiday. I start to ask him again, but I don’t want it here, in the air with us both on our knees, so I nip at his mouth and feel, see, taste the way he smiles. He runs one hand up my arm, across my shoulder, and touches my neck. That millimeter of skin on skin makes me forget my damn name.
