Singing Electricity by Charlotte Stein

Author:Charlotte Stein
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: dystopian romance
Publisher: Charlotte Stein
Published: 2017-06-19T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eleven

She woke some time just before dawn, still bound tightly in a dream she didn’t want to be having. For some reason she’d been searching and searching for something that didn’t exist, and her failure to find it remained with her. She could feel it in the ridiculous wetness on her cheeks, and the fierce urge to check that he was still there.

Despite the fact that he was always still there, now. He no longer rose at silly o’clock to avoid her. He didn’t run away when something happened between them. And true, occasionally he looked a little like he was having his teeth pulled out with pliers while these things were going on. But she was willing to take what he could give.

Anything more was just a bonus, a possibility, a far-off thing she didn’t exactly hope for. She wasn’t even sure why she was crying, or what her dreams thought they were doing putting in heavy subtexts like that.

He gave her a lot. A lot was enough. A lot was her reaching across the bed toward him, without fear. It was no longer thinking about touching him as invading his space, but as something an ordinary woman did to her equally ordinary lover. He was her lover, she thought, and if it had to be without the L and the O and the V and the E, she would live just fine on the R. She’d lived her life with nothing but the R, and been perfectly happy. She wasn’t even sure what she’d ever liked about the other letters now, in truth.

Love was messy, it was sticky, it fucked things up. It had almost spoiled some perfectly reasonable sex on more than one occasion, and now here it was interfering with her hand on his arm. She just wanted to stroke over his biceps with the back of her hand. Love wanted her to cuddle.

After all, it would have been easy to. He was sprawled out on his back rather than curled into a tight corner—a change that was as dangerous as it was awesome. On the one hand, she really liked the gradual move he’d made from stone statue to comfortable bed partner. But on the other, it was far too easy to fall into bad habits.

She could already feel her hand trying to inch over his chest, despite her best intentions. And the justifications were starting to come thick and fast too. Why, he’d done the same thing to her the other morning. He’d draped himself all over her like a wet rag. What was wrong with her returning the gesture?

Apart from the fact that it made her a different person. She wasn’t a hugger. She didn’t hug people. She was like him, wary of feelings and impervious to anything other than a kind of messy affection. She didn’t even react when he took her hand, which was good on a number of levels. The first being her current resistance to anything that might be read as love, and the second was the reason for the sudden gesture.

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