“I don’t want anything happening to you.”
“So don’t let it. Stay by my side, for our biggest performance yet.”
He doesn’t answer, just tentatively reaches out and rubs his fingers along my jaw.
“Maybe I trained you under this roof,” I add slowly, “but the truth? You’re the one who showed me all that magic can really do. When we’re together, we’re so much more than ourselves—we’re extraordinary. You have to feel that too.”
He drops his hand, takes a sudden step back. “I really shouldn’t be here, Joan.”
“Why, because of Gunn?” I blurt out, my heart hammering. “Don’t think about Gunn right now.”
Alex shakes his head. “Because of everything. I need—I need to think.” He quickly climbs over the bed, pulls the window open to leave. No. No no no no no—
Before he can climb through it, I focus my magic on the glass pane. The window seals closed with a slow, satisfying snap in front of him. Alex doesn’t turn around.
“You’re lying to yourself, Alex,” I flounder. “Maybe you got into this game for revenge, or for an easy way of making a living after your father burned your old life to the ground. But that can’t be all it’s about for you anymore. I know you feel this too.”
He doesn’t answer; his fingers dance on the window’s edge.
“We don’t have to punish ourselves forever. We deserve this. We deserve each other.”
Alex turns, studies me, waits a beat, a second that feels as long as forever. “You think you know me, Joan,” he finally says quietly.
“I do know you,” I tell him, believing it with every fiber of my being. “Maybe I don’t know everything”—I give his words from the other night back to him—“but I know the important things.”
There’s a second, a moment, a minute more. Silence, where the air becomes more charged, tense with almost an electric energy in between us. Alex stares at me. I stare back at him. He doesn’t speak, doesn’t move. I’m just as sure he’s going to turn and go as I am that he’s going to stay.
I’m not positive who first gives in to the pull, the magnetic force drawing us together, but once it starts it’s like a train barreling through the wall, and we’re going so fast, so intense, flying, that I can’t slow down, can’t get off, even if I wanted to.
Alex’s fingers are in my hair—not tentatively, but rough and assured, and he presses into me, his lips on my lips, and over them, under them.
His arms pull around my waist, the warmth of his hands presses against my back, and then he lifts me off the floor and onto my knees on the bed, facing him. Eye-to-eye with him.
We tear off each other’s clothes, me pulling his shirt over his head and throwing it onto the floor, him unbuttoning my dress and letting it fall down around me like a shiny black puddle. It’s then that he sees my arm, red and marked and naked under the low lights of my room. He grips it, pulls it closer. As he holds it, I don’t move, don’t breathe.
But then he takes the field of scars to his lips, kisses them, lets his mouth move up to my shoulder, to my lips, enveloping me completely, accepting me completely. I guide him next to me, and then we’re lying together, horizontal, like the sea and sky merging into a hazy slice of morning.
“God, I’ve wanted this,” he whispers. “So much. Too much.”
He flips me under him quickly, and then he’s staring down at me, hovering over me. I study him, his hard jaw, his face, that thick, perfect hair that right now is hanging down like a curtain. He’s more than perfect—he’s magic, addictive. In fact, maybe right now, this is what it’s like, to have an addiction—to want something even more as you’re consuming it, to dread the high wearing off even as you’re at the peak of it.
I lean up to kiss him, and then grab his neck and pull him into me.
Alex takes his time, teasing me, moving his mouth down to the hollow of my breastbone, and when I can’t stand the waiting anymore, I make it known. I sigh and bite on his shoulder, and he kisses me, long and deep, muffles my moans.
We’re standing on a precipice, right at the start of a performance, and then the magic takes over and for one perfect stretch of a moment we are one, we are exactly the same—
As soon as it’s over, I want him back, want to live in the spell all over again.
Alex collapses, gently, tenderly curls himself into me. His soft, slippery skin presses against mine. My body feels spent and sore and full in all the right ways—