Page 209 of Drown Like Heaven
My stomach dropped when he banded his arms tighter around my back, then let us fall again.
“Fuck!” I shouted, hating the feeling of the drop, my teeth clenched.
We plummeted headfirst out of the clouds, his wings tucked close around us. I held my breath, nails digging into his warm skin.I wish I was standing on solid ground again. I don’t want to do this anymore.I tried to be the person who could handle him, but I wasn’t capable of it.
The brightest lightning I’d ever seen in my entire life exploded off his wings and back and a scream punched out of my chest. Six white bolts anchored in the ocean, flaring and crackling in the air. His arms were solid around me, feeling my waist, my hip, fingers sliding up the back of my skull, hands all over me like heneededme.
I stared up at his face, so focused and determined. His jaw was tense, his neck straining.
“Does that hurt?”
“Yes,” he panted.
“You didn’t have to—”
“It hurts trying to control it. If I let myself fracture, just let go, I’ll kill you in an instant. I’m working really hard not to let that happen.”
“How do you control it?”
He just shook his head, lips pressed tight together. He wasn’t going to tell me.
The lightning flickered away and we were soaring over the ocean again, rain whipping against my face, my hair slick on my cheeks, my body trembling. Mason wasn’t a storm-veiled danger.
He was the whole fucking storm.
I’d thought the wings would mean something, that if I forced him to show me, it would make him mine, but it was just another twist on our lethal gravity. I jumped, he caught me, and nothing opened up between usexcept me. Nothing changed. The wind ripping, the storm breaking, his arms around me, and nothing was different.
I still needed him, and he still refused to give me the pieces I yearned for.
I kept my eyes squeezed shut, biting my tongue, hands clenched into fists, pretending I was anywhere else in the world, until I felt us slow over the beach.
Mason set me down on my feet on the dark sand as his wings tucked tight to his body. He rolled out his shoulders. Both of our clothes were entirely soaked through and thenostalgiaof that, the memories of standing on this exact beach with him, dripping wet and cold…
I spun on my heel, stalking away from him to hide the tears stinging my eyes.
If I knew now what I knew then…
This was supposed to be our turning point, the moment when I finally reached him, when I finally was allowed to crawl inside his ribcage and curl around his heart, see the inside of his skull. But all I’d done was prove to myself again just how far I would go for him, prove to myself that I’d never really know him the way I wanted to.
My desperate, self-destructive plan had been painfully naive.
Mason grabbed my shoulder and turned me to face him, just as I knew he would, and I didn’t resist him.
“Dakota. Don’t leave. Where are you going?”
“I don’t know. It doesn’t matter as long as I’m far, far away from you.”
“You saw my wings. You saw my electricity. Isn’t that what you wanted?”
I blinked back my tears. “You know it’s not. That was the most superficial show of power you could’ve given me. And I know it’s not the same—Iknowthat, but I understand what it’s like to be born broken, too.”I just jumped off a fucking cliff to make you open up to me. What sane person does that?
“Drop it,” he ordered and I didn’t care enough to fight him anymore. If he wanted to keep me out, whatever.I don’t care. Everything is going to keep spiraling out of control no matter what I do. And yet, I still want you.
He walked me over to the large rock I liked sitting on and laid me down on my back, situating himself on top of me, his wings held over us to block the rain.
“Do you really want to know what my first real memory is?” Mason said, harsh and kinda quiet. I swallowed my fear, staring up at him in the dark shell he’d constructed around us, not saying anything that might scare him out of telling me this. “It was finding out I’m fucking Thrausian as a child. You don’t—you don’t understand what angels in Heaven think of Thruasians. It’s not good. I don’t evenblamethem, but that doesn’t make it any easier to accept.”
“Why would they hate you for something you have no control over?” I whispered.
