Page 13 of Mistletoe & Mayhem
In my head, that should make me feel invincible, triumphant. Instead, I just feel tired and a little bit ashamed.
“Did you?” she asks, like it’s a dare.
I think of the cold London flats and the FSU girls with sharp teeth and short memories. The answers would only make things worse. “No one worth my time.”
She nods. Her breath is heavy and a little sweet—she’s been chewing wintergreen gum, which is so her it’s almost painful. I want her to slap me, or kiss me, or both. The space between us is an exposed wire, shorting out all the lights in my brain.
Then she kisses me– it’s swift, brutal, direct. I taste wine, gun oil, and a metal tang that could be blood or just the ghost of what we used to be. I respond like a man crawling out of a six-foot trench: greedy, half-mad, gasping at the world above ground.
She’s the one who breaks away first. Her mouth is slanted, her tongue running along her teeth as if she’s unsure whether to devour me or start laughing.
“Is that what you wanted?” I ask.
She shakes her head no, then yes, then no again. “I don’t know what I want. But I know what I missed.” Her hand finds my wrist, and she pulls, not gently. The force of her grip is pure muscle memory.
We leave the kitchen in a frenzy. The gun is lying abandoned on the counter, and the thought that we could both just as easily die as fuck tonight makes me smile in a way that feels closer to the truth than anything in years.
The stairs are dark and narrow, and the carpet is threadbare, but she climbs them two at a time and never once looks back. I follow her, desperate and dumb, and when we get to the top landing, she turns and pushes me, not hard, just enough that Istumble backwards into the bedroom, where the only light is a single lamp on my nightstand and the New York skyline pulsing through the window.
She closes the door behind us. The click is final.
She’s on me before I register it, her hands in my shirt, the buttons scattering across the hardwood like loose teeth. She tugs until the fabric splits, then palms my chest—my skin is hot and flushed, lit up like a crime scene under blue lights. Her mouth goes for my neck, my jaw; I taste her everywhere, every inch of her, and I realize I’ve been holding my breath since she stepped through my front door.
I grab her, lift her, slam her into the wall. She wraps her legs around my hips and bites my ear, gentle and savage all at once. Every part of her is so familiar it hurts: the way her thighs flex, the clean angles of her shoulders, the tiny scar on her left eyebrow from that time in Philadelphia. If there is a heaven, it feels like this; if there is a hell, it will be the memory of this hour, playing forever.
She strips off her jacket and her top in one motion, exposing skin pale as a confession. Her breasts are small, but her taut nipples look like they could cut glass. There’s an inked crown of thorns on her ribs–it’s new and bitterly beautiful. I want to worship every inch of her. I settle for holding her face and kissing her until she’s trembling.
“Tell me you want me,” she rasps, a demand and a plea all wrapped up together.
I do.
She unbuckles my jeans, the leather belt making a soft whip sound as it comes free. My boxers catch on my erection as she yanks them down. Before I can register the cool air on my skin, she pivots us toward the bed with surprising strength. We land in a tangle of limbs, laughing breathlessly as our bodies recognize each other. Her skin is winter-pale against the darksheets, except where flush blooms across her chest. I trace a new knife scar along her ribs, memorizing its texture. When my mouth finds her collarbone, the salt there tastes like home. I work my way down, past the softness of her stomach, until I’m between her thighs. Her sharp intake of breath when my tongue finds her center is the only encouragement I need. I lose myself in her taste—sweet and musky and unmistakably Laura—as she arches against my mouth. My tongue traces slow circles, then quickens as her thighs begin to tremble. She cries out, her body tensing and shuddering against me, hands fisting in my hair so tight it hurts. As the last waves of her pleasure subside, I scramble upward, positioning my thighs between her legs, her skin still flushed and slick beneath me.
We move together, ache together, collapse and rebuild ourselves in the space between each gasp. She is relentless, and I am famished. I thrust into her with a rhythm that builds like a storm, each movement deeper than the last. Neither of us lets up. I bury my face in her hair and find her earlobe, bite it softly; she laughs, or maybe sobs, hard to tell anymore. Her body arches beneath mine, her nails digging crescents into my shoulders as she tightens around me, trembling and crying out as she comes undone. I follow moments later, spilling into her with a primal groan, watching through half-lidded eyes as evidence of our reunion glistens on her inner thigh when I finally pull away.
She collapses next to me, throat working, chest heaving, and stares up at the ceiling as if searching for constellations in the peeling paint. Sweat beads her brow; her mascara’s smeared into orbital bruising, her lips raw. She looks ruined, and I adore her for it.
We lay like that for a while. Neither of us speaks, but the silence is alive now, coiling and breathing between us. I reachout and lace my fingers through hers. This time, she doesn’t pull away.
After an eternity, she turns on her side and presses her forehead to mine. “You have to run,” she whispers.
“No,” I whisper back. “Not without you.”
She considers this. “If I go with you, I have to kill my father. Or he’ll never stop.”
She says it like an observation, not a threat. Logic, not rage. I should be terrified, or at least repulsed, but all I feel is the deep, relentless heat of her next to me, the iron certainty that this is what the universe owed us all along: one final, full-bore escape. I see in my head the two of us on a train, on a ferry, burning down every bridge behind us and never looking back.
“You want to?” I ask.
She nods, and a single, savage smile splits her face. “I’ve dreamed of it since I was sixteen. Some nights I rehearse the shot.”
I kiss her again, slower this time, letting the moment play out as long as it can. “We can leave in the morning,” I say, “or tonight. Either way, I’m with you.”
She closes her eyes, breathes in deep, and for the first time since she walked into my apartment, she lets herself look vulnerable. “Tonight,” she mutters, “I want to remember. I want to forget. I want to die and be born a hundred times with you. I love you, Laura.”
“I love you, too,” she answers without hesitation.
I almost tell her I love her again, but instead I pull her in, wrap her up, and let the world fade out at the edges as we spin and spiral and fall again. The city howls outside, but in my bedroom it’s just us, our bodies, our ghosts, and the soft metallic hush of a future neither of us can name, only chase.
