The memory made my eyes sting, and I nearly panicked. I couldn’t lose control. I had to keep trying to reach him, and the only way to do that was to let him in completely, to become as captured by the past overwhelming the present as I wanted him to be.
Our lips fit together like the last two pieces of a puzzle; our tongues met like rain across a wind-washed desert—moisture and heat, desperation, salvation.
“Touch me,” I said.
Love me, I thought.
We kissed for what seemed like hours; maybe it was. I’d never gotten tired of kissing him back then. Sometimes that was all that we’d had.
They say you never forget your first love or your first time. When they’re one and the same, you dream of it, dream of him, for years, maybe forever. I don’t know.
Now I had him in my arms again. His mouth on mine, his hands, both rough and gentle, wandered everywhere. I needed him inside me. I had to see if the dreams were even close to the reality.
I opened myself, welcomed him in, the slick slide, the way that he filled me, familiar. Though I no longer recognized him in the light, I knew him in the dark. There he wasn’t a monster. There he was only a man.
He leaned his forehead against mine, took a deep breath as if to speak.
“Don’t talk.” I crushed any words with my mouth.
Oh, God, please don’t talk.
We continued to kiss; I wouldn’t let him go. With one hand at the nape of his neck I held him to me, the other at his hip showed him the rhythm. Slow and deep; I didn’t want it to end. Not yet. As long as we were like this, in the dark, the bad things couldn’t reach us. I was still me; Jimmy was still Jimmy; we were together again as if we’d never been apart.
But nothing good lasts forever. I knew that as well as anyone, probably better.
I pulled him to me too fast, let him in too far, and he tensed, his whole body straining to hold back, but he was unable to.
Once he lost control, so did I. The waves of sensation washed over us both. He plunged in one last time and stilled. The tiny movement, the release so deep within, made me gasp and wrap my legs around him, tilting upward, trying to draw him closer. It had always been like this—never long enough, never deep enough, never, ever enough.
His mouth left mine, trailing over my chin, down my neck to my breast where he gently kissed first one slope and then the other as the last shivers died away.
My chest ached from holding in what I felt. How could he touch me like that and not feel it too?
We’d made love like this half a dozen times before, and every time we’d lain in the same way afterward. His mouth at my breast, tracing the fine blue lines with his tongue, my fingers caressing his face, his back, his arms.
We’d whisper secrets, dream of the future, profess a love that would last forever. I’d believed it then; I believed it again now.
His breath on my neck was soft as he nuzzled me, but his tongue was hard, insistent, as he traced first the hoi-low and then the slope. My nipples tightened. I still wanted him.
I lifted my arms, tilted my head, arched, and he grew hard again while still inside me. I knew that I’d reached him, that he would come back to me. Together we’d escape. We’d save the world, exact vengeance for Ruthie.
“Jimmy.” I put all the love, all the trust, into the response of my body and the whisper of my voice. With that one word I asked him for the truth.
He answered by sinking his fangs into my neck.
Chapter 38
The arch of my body went from pleasure to pain. I tensed, tightened, gasped, and I swear as he began to suckle my neck, he came again in a rush that made me dizzy.
Or maybe that was just blood loss. He was sucking on me like a dehydrated kid with a straw.
I would have fought back, but I couldn’t move. The first strike of his fangs had paralyzed me.
The betrayal was almost more than I could bear. He could have drunk from me the first time we’d been together, I’d expected him to, but he’d waited until I was at my most vulnerable. Then he’d struck like the evil thing that he was.
My hands fell away from his neck; my body went limp as my eyes fluttered closed. I could see us below me, as if I floated somewhere near the ceiling.
My eyes weren’t closed but wide open and staring. I tilted my head. I looked a little dead.
From this angle, with his mouth at my neck, our legs entwined, his body growing slack within mine, the view was quite pornographic. If I weren’t careful I’d end up starring in one of the videos on the huge wide screen in the living room.
Aw, hell, was I already? I wouldn’t put it past them.
I continued to watch, both fascinated and repelled as he drank from me. His back was so beautiful, all muscles and sleek, tanned skin. I reached out to touch, but I didn’t have an arm. My arm was on the bed with the rest of me.
I’d given him my heart, my soul, my body, and when I’d trusted him the most, he’d hurt me.
Talk about deja vu.
I forced my attention back to us. I was getting pretty pale. He needed to stop that before he—