Page 90 of These Monstrous Ties
For a moment, we only stare at each other.
“What are you doing?” I finally ask, trying to calm the butterflies that are swirling like they’re swept up in a tornado in my stomach.
Lucifer smiles.
“I’m coming with you, Lilith.”
I shake my head, my gut twisting. I put my hands in my pockets. “No,” I say forcefully. When I’m done with this, I’m leaving. I had bought a bus ticket to New York. It had taken every penny of the money Jeremiah had let me play with, and I know he’ll be able to track it, too. But I don’t care. I have to get out of here. And maybe I’ll stop somewhere else along the way. Start a new life in a place no one knows my name. My face. My life.
But I can’t do that with Lucifer. We talked after the night of the party. We kissed, but nothing more than that. Mayhem went back to ignoring me, Atlas really the only one bothering to speak to me besides Lucifer. Lucifer and Mayhem kept a cold distance, but I know they’ll get over it.
But it didn’t change anything. Lucifer said we’d get through anything. But the only way we can do that is without one another. He has a legacy here. I have a life somewhere else. Or I’m going to.
“You can’t,” I say to him.
He steps closer to me, over the threshold of the bathroom. I think of the scars on our legs, the one that must still be on his. I think of his Unsaint’s tattoo. I think of his blood on my tongue. Of tasting him. Of craving him. And then hating him the next morning, believing my brother’s lies. Believing Lucifer had forsaken Lilith, after he promised he wouldn’t.
I think of how he might have been the devil, but he was my savior, too. For that one night.
My legs feel weak. I want to tell him to stop coming closer to me. To leave me alone. To forget my face. To accept that he’ll never see me again. I want to say all of that, but he’s staring at me, his chin tilted down, with such hunger in his blue eyes that I can’t speak at all.
My body is betraying my mind. Again. I want to stop it. But as I had been that night one year ago, I’m powerless against this beautiful, broken boy.
He takes another step. We’re almost touching. We’re close enough to. But neither of us reaches for the other. I smell him, still. Cigarettes and pine. A scent I never could have imagined would nearly rip my heart out.
But we’re never going to feel what we did then. A year ago. The optimism. The reckless lust. The wild hope.
We’re never going to feel it again…and yet…when he closes what little space is between us and reaches out to me, his arms going around my back, I know I still do.
I still feel it.
In all my misery, in all this disgust I feel with my own body, I feel it. When he touches me, I light up. I want to melt into him. I want to burn with him. We can burn the whole world if we want. We can burn up hell if we have to. We can destroy everything we touch, and we can do it together, without burning each other.
A small sound escapes my lips, something somewhere between a moan and a whimper, and his fingers dig into my back, pulling me closer to him. His head is angled down, his eyes on my mouth, but he waits. He waits until I come to him.
And I do.
Our mouths crash together, much like they had that first night a year ago. We’re a tangle of anger and despair and brokenness. Our kiss is possessive, urgent, desperate. His teeth drag against my lips and I moan into his mouth. He pulls me even closer, pressing my body against the length of his. And when he bites my lip, I bite back. We draw each other’s blood, and I relish in the iron feel of it on my tongue. Iron and tobacco and mint. I want it all. The dirtiness. The rawness.
I want it.
I want this.
I push him, and we stumble out of the bathroom. I shove him against the wall just above the stairs, my hands on his chest. He’s nearly panting, I can feel the inhales and exhales under my hands. I don’t hear anyone else in this house, although I know the boys are here.
His eyes search mine. Like he’s waiting for me to pull back. Like he’s waiting for me to not want this.
I want it.
I tug up his hoodie and he pulls it off in one fluid motion. He unzips mine and that hits the floor, too. I run my hands down his biceps, his arms bare. He wears nothing beneath that hoodie. The skeleton paint ends at his throat, and I lean in, licking a line from his chest, up past that vein on his neck, all the way to where the paint starts.
Damn the fucking paint.
We’re going to fuck it up anyway.
He tugs on my tank top, and I lift my arms in submission, letting him pull it off of me, scattering my bangs into my eyes. He laughs and brushes them back, and then he reaches around for the clasp of my bra.
But he doesn’t unhook it.
