Page 53 of Riot House
“How am I looking at you?” This is sheer insolence on my part. I know precisely how I’m looking at her, and I’m not planning on dialing it down one iota. I want to devour her. Claim her. Bind her to me any way that I can. And if she can read that in the burning fire in my eyes, then so fucking be it. I’m not ashamed of how I’m feeling, and I sure as fuck won’t be hiding it from her, either.
“Just…behave,” she warns. “You promised.”
“Alright, fine. Have it your way. Ask me another question.” I wait with bated breath, tension building between my shoulder blades as I anticipate what she’s going to say next. It’s thrilling, this exchange, to know that the things she’s asking me here and now represent moments in the past when she sat alone in her thoughts andwonderedthings about me.
Elodie takes three deep mouthfuls from her glass of wine. “Okay. Why did Dashiell treat Carina so badly? Was it some kind of bet between you guys?”
“Dashiell likes to break his toys when they become too important to him.”
She wrinkles her nose in disgust. “So, what? He did something to humiliate her and cause her pain because he liked her too much?That’sthe excuse you’re arming him with?”
“I’m not arming him with shit. And it’s not an excuse. I’m giving you the facts. Dash reacts badly to situations where he finds his power diminished in any way. And liking Carina made him weak. He saw that weakness as a perceived threat, and so he rooted it out with his bare hands and crushed it before it could hurt him.”
The attic falls silent, the dusty old space breathing around us as Elodie studies my face. Her eyes rove over my brow, down the line of my nose. Her clear blue eyes hover over my mouth for a split second before they snap up to meet my own gaze. She looks like she’s stewing on something, words piling up in a traffic jam on the tip of her tongue.
“I know what you wanna know,” I whisper.
“Oh? Then please go ahead. Enlighten me with an answer, if you’re suddenly so all-powerful and all-knowing.”
My breath catches in my throat—the strangest, most alien sensation. Something I haven’t experienced in a very long time. “You want to know if that’s howmymind works. You want to know if that’s what I’ll do to you, if you let me in. But you can’t allow yourself to ask me that, because asking is admission that you’re thinking about it. Letting me in. And that terrifies you.”
“Jesus, Wren, I’m—”
No. I won’t let her dispute it. It’s so fucking obvious. I’m sick of biding my time, waiting for her to relinquish herself to me. In one quick, predatory lunge, I rise up onto my knees, lean across the blanket, and I cup her face in both of my hands. I don’t kiss her. Not yet. It’s almost impossible, but I hold myself back. “My toys have never been important to me, Little E,” I whisper. “I don’t throw them away because I’m afraid of what they’ll do to me, or because I’m bored of them. I discard them because they never live up to my expectations. But you…” Her eyelids shutter. “You’re not a toy. I have no expectations of you. How can I when you’re constantly surprising me and throwing me off my fucking guard. If you let me—”
Panic flares in her eyes. She’s staring at my mouth again, complete terror radiating off her in waves. “Wren—”
“If you let me,”I repeat. “I’ll surprise you too. Just you wait and see.”
She closes her eyes, a single tear streaking down her cheek. Out of nowhere, it’s as though she’s coming apart in my hands. “Please. Please. Please,” she whispers.
Numbed all the way down to my bones, I let go of her, a bitter, acrid taste spreading across my tongue. I wasn’t trying to scare her. I wasn’t trying to break her. I—for fuck’s sake—I lean away, ready to do something monumental that I haven’t done in years—apologize—when she shakes her head and hurls herself forward, throwing herself at my chest. “Please,” she repeats. This time it sounds like she’s begging me todosomething rather than to get the hell away from her. The desperation on her face makes my blood roar inside my head, clouding my vision and making my pulse soar.
“All right. Okay. I’ve got you.” She’s in my arms, then. I crush her to me so hard that even I can’t breathe. My lips meet hers, and the kiss is nothing like it was supposed to be. Yeah, I’ve planned this. With the same meticulous attention to detail I put into all of my actions. I was supposed to tease her, my mouth hovering over hers, my tongue skating over her swollen lower lips, my hands in her hair, making her breath come quick until she was frantic and couldn’t stand for there to be any space between us a second more. There’s no patience to this kiss, though. No teasing to be had by me or by her. Only need, and want, and a form of panic that kindles in us both and spreads like wildfire. How easily this could all end in disaster. How quickly I could lose myself, and how effortlessly I could break her.
I feel it in her, as she must feel it in me.
We’re both so afraid of the ending before we’ve even truly arrived at the beginning, but there’s nothing either of us can do to stop this thing now. It’s gained too much fucking steam, and neither of us know where the brakes are.
Elodie’s heart is racing; I can feel her pulse slamming up against my chest, and she’s so alive and vital and fuckingrealthat I can’t actually believe that this is happening. She kisses me back, her hands reaching up and winding into my hair, and my blood turns to nitroglycerin in my veins. One small spark is all it will take and I’ll go up like a motherfucking H-bomb. She pulls back, nothing more than a split second to suck in a desperate breath, and my world splinters apart.
I was supposed to be puppeting this charade. There was an order in which this was all supposed to go, andat no pointwas I supposed to lose my goddamn mind.
When was the last time I felt something like this?
When have Ieverfelt something like this?
Elodie makes a soft, whimpering sound as she brings her lips back up to meet mine, her fingers grasping tightly onto a thick tangle of my hair, and everything stills and blurs.
She tastes like sunlight and honey.
She smells like the last time I can remember being fucking happy.
In my arms, her small frame feels like the most important, valuable thing I’ve ever held.
Ripping my mouth away, I duck down, kissing the column of her throat, burying myself in the crook of her neck, and she begins to shake so violently that I have to press my forehead against her cheek in order to stop myself from going further.
“Wren. Wren. Oh my god…”She pants my name, breathless, still arching her back and pressing herself up against me in a way that makes it very hard to think straight. “What the fuck are we doing? Whatisthis?” she moans.
