Page 31 of Holly & Hemlock
It isn’t a question, and I don’t answer.
The game winds down. The world outside has gone almost black, and the only light is the orange shimmer of the fire and the blue refracted through the icy glass above. There are only a handful of pieces left on the board. We are both, by now, leaning forward, elbows touching, heads almost level. The tension is less competitive, more conspiratorial. We are two survivors, negotiating the rules of a new world.
I say, “Have you ever been to the city?”
He shakes his head, amused. “Once. I took a train. It was—horrifying. Too much of everything.”
“Did you go alone?”
He looks down at his hands, then up at me. “No. Whitby came. She shadowed me for two days, made sure I didn’t get lost.”
The story is ridiculous. I imagine Whitby trailing behind him through crowded terminals and grim cafes, cataloguing his every movement, reporting back to Maeve like some secret policeman.
“You like it here,” I say.
He considers, then nods. “I like knowing where I stand.”
“Do you?” I ask, and I let the question hang.
He leans in, so close I can see the flecks of green and gold in his eyes. “I do, right now.”
We play the endgame in near silence, every move a negotiation, a confession. When he finally wins, it is with a flourish—his pawn, promoted, sweeping across the board to deliver checkmate. He waits, lets the finality of it settle, then sits back.
I feel strangely bereft, like something vital has been removed.
Larkin watches me, face unreadable, then reaches across the board, his hand stopping just short of mine.
“If it’s any consolation,” he says, “you lasted longer than anyone ever has.”
I take his hand, more to prove a point than out of gratitude. His grip is warm, his skin rough at the edges. For a moment, we are locked together, both unwilling to let go.
He squeezes harder. The board rattles, the queen skids, but his grip is insistent and hot. I don’t pull away. The air changes—less oxygen, more fire—and Larkin vaults the game in a single, desperate lunge that ends with his mouth on mine.
It’s not a kiss, not at first. It’s a clashing of teeth and bone, the sharp taste of blood where his stubble grazes my chin, the stink of cold sweat and old smoke. His fingers dig into my wrist, hard enough to bruise.
I open my mouth to protest, or maybe to draw breath, but he’s already there: tongue, teeth, the acrid tang of wine and defeat.
My own hand comes up, instinct, to press him back, but I find myself curling it in the fabric at his shoulder instead, pinching hard enough to make him hiss.
His knee slams into the table’s edge, shoving it back, and in the next motion I am wrenched off my chair and onto the floor, my heels skidding and my balance stolen.
The chessboard crashes down with a convulsion of ivory and ebony; a handful of pawns roll under the radiators, scattering like startled rodents. My head knocks hard against the flagstone, a bright spike of pain lighting up my awareness.
There is no confusion about what is happening, only how quickly and greedily his hunger has decided to announce itself. His hands—one on my throat, the other braced by my hip—are all I know, the rest of the world receding into a thin, cold blur. His breath is an exhale of greenhouse heat, honeyedwith the memory of last night’s liquor, sharp with the mineral tang of need.
He pins me, but not with the full force that I expect—a restraint, a pressure meant as much for demonstration as dominance. The tension is a filament stretched between us, humming with electricity and threat.
His mouth finds my jaw, then the base of my ear, and for a second I forget every coherent objection I might have rehearsed. He bites down, just above the pulse, and the skin lights up with a bright, animal shock. I’m not sure if I gasp or snarl, but I twist underneath him, and he laughs—a sound so low and private I feel it in the space between my ribs.
“Larkin,” I say, but it’s a warning only in form.
“I’m not stopping,” he says, biting a path along my neck. “I know you want this.”He unzips my sweater with the same precision he used to set up the chessboard: quick, neat, no wasted effort. His hand glances my sternum, an electric slide of skin against skin, and all my breath pools shallow and sharp at the base of my throat. I try to make a joke, something to puncture the enormity of what’s happening—“So this is what losing feels like”—but he’s already kissing me again, swallowing the words before they can surface.
His palm traces my ribs, then pries my hips up off the stone with a single, insistent grip. We skid together across the cold floor. His knees pin both sides of my leg, and every shiver of protest is recalibrated into a new hunger, a kind of mutual violence turned back on itself. My fingers lace the back of his neck, anchor there. I want his weight and I want his heat and I want to open myself to him in every way I can.
The cold bites where our skin is exposed, measuring out the increments of pleasure and pain in perfect, freezing symmetry. He’s not gentle, even when he tries; every motionis intention layered over accident, every touch sharpened by a history of having none.
My mind flickers back to last night, to Lane’s instruction at the fire, the warmth of his hand over mine, patient and sure. There is none of that patience here. Larkin is all insistence, every movement a dare, a negotiation with no interest in compromise. I try to leverage my knee into his ribs, but he grabs my thigh and pins it flat, lips hot on my collarbone, his breath skating down the length of my exposed skin.
