She shook her head. Not back and forth or up and down, but more in a circular motion. “Yes… No. Sort of.” A shaky sigh escaped her lips. “Wow. Someone needs to learn how to drive. That guy—”
“Someone just tried to run you down, Sammy,” I barked before she could get any further. She wasn’t glossing over it this time. “On purpose. I know about the other stuff that’s been going on, so don’t try to bullshit me.”
She kept her eyes down and said nothing.
“I’m never going to buy this shit you’re selling. Just let me help you. Please.”
Sam lifted her head. For a second she didn’t say anything, but it was all there in her eyes. Pain. Betrayal. Sadness. Even without the dizzying mix of color swirling around her shoulders it was obvious. “It isn’t your problem. Remember?” she asked quietly. She made a move to walk away, but hesitated, gaze lifting to meet mine. “I don’t get it, Jax. One minute we’re standing in the woods and you’re spilling your guts and spouting shit about it being you and me against the world. You kiss the crap out of me, then the next morning I’m waking up to Rick at our front door telling us you’ve left home.” She ran both hands through her long hair, then clapped her hands once. The sound echoed in the alleyway. “Boom. Just like that. No note. No phone call. No explanation. Not even to me.”
“I did what I had to do,” I said. “I know that doesn’t make a lot of sense, and that you don’t understand, but I did what I did for you.”
“For me?”
“I don’t expect you to for—”
She hit me. Fist tight, Sam punched me in the jaw. The blow didn’t hurt. In fact, it felt good. Justified. I deserved it and then some. This was her chance to let it out.
“How dare you say it was for me,” she cried, shoving me hard in the chest. The waves of gray and blue turned red, swirling like a tornado. “It was for you. For your own selfish reasons.” She shoved harder, and the demon grew restless, excited by her outrage. “But whatever your reasons were, they were all for you and no one else.”
Maybe it was the demon, and maybe it was just my own temper, but I couldn’t stop myself. When she raised her hand to push me again, I caught it and held tight. Pushing her back, I said, “I’m not going to say this again, so listen carefully. There are things you don’t know—” She opened her mouth to interrupt, but I clamped a hand across. Always talking. Always interrupting. “Things you’ll never know. But it killed me to leave and if you think I haven’t felt guilty about it every fucking day since, you’re delusional.”
She pried my hand lose and laughed. A broken, painful sound that touched me in places I didn’t want to go. “Guilty? Good. You should feel guilty. I would have never been on that sidewalk—at that stupid college—if you hadn’t left me behind. You don’t care about anyone—”
I grabbed her by the shoulders and forced her back to the wall again. “Enough!”
She stared, shocked.
“Like it or not, I did what I did because I had to. Not because I wanted to.” What the hell was it about this girl? She was a magnetic pull that seemed to suck away all common sense. Before I knew what I was doing, I brushed my thumb lightly across her cheek to wipe away a single tear.
She closed her eyes for a second, holding her breath and staying absolutely still. When she opened them, a lot of the red smoke dissipated. “Did you know? That night you left, when you kissed me, that it was good-bye?”
Fuck. Her words were like a scythe cutting me in half. If I’d known, I never would have kissed her. “No. It wasn’t supposed to be a kiss good-bye. It wasn’t supposed to be the end. I wanted it to be the beginning.”
“But it was the end, right?”
There were a million ways I wanted to respond. All variations of hell, no. “Right.”
By the subtle nod of her head, I could tell she’d expected as much, but the pain was still there. In her eyes and in her colors. Deep blue. In the way her breath hitched and her eyes glistened. Sam took a deep breath. “Then do it.”
“Huh?”
She pushed against me, stopping a few inches from my lips. “Kiss me good-bye.”
My gaze dropped to her mouth, lips ruby-tinted and inviting. Shit…
Inside, the demon rumbled, but instead of the usual images it fed me—blood, violence, and rage—it showed something else. A flash of the kiss the night I left. Then, another of the one at the bottom of the lake. It wanted me to kiss Sam. The want fanned into something stronger. Need. It needed me to kiss Sam.
So I did.
It wasn’t a slow, sweet kiss. It was the dive-right-in-before-you-lose-your-fucking-nerve kind. Arms winding around her waist, I pulled her close and covered her mouth with mine. Soft, warm, and eager, she tasted faintly of vodka and cherries. It was sensation overload. A veritable shock to my system. I was a lightning rod in a hurricane. Pushed to the brink, but happy, because it’s where I was meant to be. Always riding the line between pleasure and pain.
This was need. A primal, dark, animalistic force that screamed in every one of my limbs. Being here with her now, after having been away for so long, made me desperate to take as much of her as I could. Devour what I could get and savor it.
I ground my hips against her, groaning into her mouth when the sensation threatened to send me crashing over the edge. She gasped and pushed back, riding the high as eagerly as I was. There was nothing gentle here. Nothing chaste. The moment was about something forbidden and raw. The curse had taken my life from me, but I wasn’t the only one. It destroyed everyone it touched. Breaking and shattering until there was nothing left but emptiness and anger.
Sam’s fingers clutched my shoulders, digging into skin like she was trying to keep me there forever. The energy radiating from her was a humming vibration setting every part of my body on fire. I tasted her sadness and regret, and the pain she’d felt for every day I’d been gone. Breathing deep, I took it in, giving the thing inside what it craved and easing some of my pain. It drove the demon crazy. The monster scratched and writhed to get a bigger taste. I pushed it back.
She couldn’t feel the emotion like I could, but I wanted to make sure she understood what I was unable to put into words.
That I missed her.
My lips moved with hers as I roughly grabbed either side of her face. Sliding my hands back, my fingers tangled through her long hair, then settled to cradle the back of her head to keep it away from the brick wall. A contented sigh rose in her throat at the contact. It was the most fragile, delicate sound I’d ever heard and it drove me crazy.
That she was the single most important thing to me…
She deepened the kiss, rising up onto her toes and licking at my bottom lip. Her cheeks were warm and wet, tears falling freely now. The debris of the broken past between us momentarily washed away.
That everything I was doing was to keep her safe…
We were approaching the danger zone. The demon, restless and itching for the surface, pushed harder. It flashed a succession of images, all variations of Sam, naked beneath me and moaning my name. Breath ragged, I grabbed her arms and pinned them above her head.
“Oh my—” Her voice cut off as she arched violently into me, ending in a desperate whimper that almost made me come right then and there. The fire blazed between us, raw and dangerous, and it was only when my fingers moved to slip beneath her skirt and remove the satiny barrier between us that I was able to stop and pull away.