Page 35 of Prima
Her anger condenses into horror.Make you a permanent part of my life in absentia. Devote myself to this sacred memory of ‘us’ day after day, year after year.The words that she threw at him in mockery, except it was not mockery, but fear.
She is afraid she might end up doing just that.
“I’m going to forget you,” she declares.
The ocean caresses the sand, the sound as gentle as a lullaby. The breeze is sweet and pure. And the stars, all those stupid stars, more than she’s ever seen in a single night, shine so gaudily, supremely indifferent to the fate of those they illuminate from half a galaxy away.
In the tranquility of the night, his silence is as loud as a klaxon.
He leans in and cups her face. All the starlight pools in his deep, solemn eyes; he gazes upon her as if she, too, has traveled fifty thousand light-years to reach him.
His hand slides across her cheek. Her skin burns, she barely feels his calluses. He kisses her, not on her lips, but two centimeters to the side, his lips cool against the heat of her cheek. And then he mirrors a kiss to the same spot on the other side of her face.
“You have beautiful dimples.”
She can hear her heart cracking, can see the veins of fissures spreading across its formerly invulnerable surface.
“I’m going to forget you,” she repeats stubbornly.
He runs one hand down her hair, lifts it up, as if to feel its weight, only to lean down and kiss her on her exposed collarbone. She gasps, scalded by that moment of contact.
“When the sun shines on your shoulders, there is a little puddle of shadow here. And here”—he kisses her above her other clavicle—“and here.”
He sets his lips against the dip at the base of her throat.
For a moment her many years of training leap to the fore—he is at her throat. But it’s not her life he imperils, is it?
She grips him by the front of his Coast Watch t-shirt and yanks him up so that they are eye-to-eye. “I’m going to forget you—and you won’t even know the difference.”
He places his hands on her arms and kisses her, lightly, gently, like a breeze brushing across the petals of a flower.
“I’ll do everything in my power to remember you,” he murmurs, “even though that, too, may not make any difference in the end.”
Her much-fractured heart topples into an abyss, along with all her slightly smug plans for an orderly, well-governed future.
She grips his face and smashes her teeth into his, kissing him, bruising him, marking this moment of forever pain.
They tumble onto the blanket. She climbs atop him and slides her hand beneath his t-shirt. He turns completely still, all tense, ridged muscles under her touch. She spread her fingers greedily, loving the suppleness of his skin, the tight strength of his frame.
Hating that every sensation is seared into her mind.
“This is a hate-fuck,” she hisses. “Do you know what that is?”
He sucks in a breath—she has reached lower and wrapped her hand, through the fabric of his trousers, around his erection. “What happened to fun-fucking me?”
What happened?Youhappened.
Impatiently, she lifts his shirt off and scrapes her too-short nails against his chest. “I should tattoo my name here so you’ll at least wonder what happened to you.”
He runs a hand along her arm, then down the ridge of her spine, his touch warm and light. “You shouldtellme your name first.”
“What’s the point? You’ll only forget it.”
“So I can say it a thousand times before it escapes me.”
“No.” She does not want to remember him whispering her name over and over again. She doesn’t even want to imagine it.
She grips his waistband.
