He whispered, “Holy shit, yes.”
A nearby raucous laugh jolted her. Khalil put a hand on her shoulder protectively as he looked around. She looked too. Six young men, around twenty or twenty-one years old, were walking leisurely in their direction, talking and joking. Khalil’s eyes narrowed. He said between his teeth, “I want them to go away.”
She started to laugh. “It’s a public street. They’re not doing anything wrong.”
“I have no interest in that,” he said.
She took an unsteady breath. She had been worried about going from friends, to kissing, to possibly other things with Khalil, but somehow she had slid headfirst into a foreign landscape she couldn’t have foreseen. That slippery slope was a treacherous thing.
“We’re here,” she managed to say. “And as you said, we might as well go in.”
He gave her a glowering look. He said, “I have no interest in doing that, either.”
The problem was, neither did she.
Which was all the more reason, she thought, why they should.
…
Djinn didn’t get drunk. Alcohol had no effect on them.
But other things could, and Khalil was reeling from a bombardment of physical sensations. Djinn were highly sensitive, but in their original state, what they were most sensitive to was the ebb and flow of Power and energy.
The full range of physical sensation was an entirely different spectrum of experience from anything he had ever known.
The slight friction of the aged denim jeans on his thighs. The stretchy give of the cotton T-shirt across his chest and shoulders. The insubstantial lick of the summer breeze against his cheek.
He was euphoric, disturbed. He thought this must be what intoxication felt like. He wasn’t altogether sure he liked it.
And then Grace came carefully down the stairs, and she was such a feast of color, all he could do was stare. Her skin looked burnished, and her outfit made him think of a bouquet of flowers. Her short, damp hair glinted with red-gold highlights, and when she neared him, her multicolored eyes rounded with wonder. Then her scent wafted over him, a clean, light fragrance that he thought must be unique in all the world.
And then she touched him.
Just that one thing, just that simple touch on his arm, and he went into shock. Her flesh, touching his. When she did it again, her gentle hand slid along the contours of his arm to his palm, and he felt all of it.
Intensely. Ecstatically. Intimately.
Hungrily.
He followed her out of the house in a daze, where he encountered so many more new sensations: the texture of the screen door’s wooden frame, the scents of a summer night, the rough rhythm of chirruping insects. He climbed into her car. His fingertips learned the smooth, hard metal of the car doors, and the soft, worn passenger seat. When he turned to look at Grace, he caught the shadowed gleam of her smile.
Would he ever see another smile as gorgeous as hers?
And the deadly seductive thing was, he could sense how the physical evidence of her pleasure spread throughout her psyche. He could feel her smile as well as see it. It lightened the crackle of her spitfire personality.
Then came more sensations. The blast of air swirling through open car windows, the feeling of movement through space as they drove into the city, the pressure of his seat belt against his collarbone and torso.
When she cried at the check she had received from Carling and Rune, he felt the wetness of her tears on the softness of her cheek as he wiped them away.
Then he kissed her.
And it was the first kiss, the only kiss.
The only one in the entire world.
She embraced him, and there was more friction, this time from her warm arm sliding along the back of his neck. She molded her soft lips to his, and the kiss became a sensitive and searching dance as they shifted and caressed in response to each other’s movements.
They parted, and he discovered more colors: the darkened rose of her lips and the blush in her cheeks. Her eyes shone with a lustrous sparkle, and her energy flared with brilliance.
He had once believed he knew desire, from the things he had witnessed and the lovers he had taken. Desire, he had thought, was an artifice, an educated exchange in pleasure.
The roar of agonized hunger he now felt seared him. There was nothing of artifice in this. It was raw and edged, and he barely held it in control.
He had existed for so long he had never bothered to count the years. The numbers and the accounting had no meaning for him. But he remembered living them all. He measured the span of his life by events, and he had never experienced desire like this, as a complete desperation.
She felt it too; he knew she did. She ached with just as much hunger as he did. The raw burn of it was spiced with the complexity of her thoughts and feelings.
And she still preferred to go into that establishment.
He could come to only one conclusion. Clearly she had not found the kiss as compelling as he had.