Smoulder by Brenna Yovanoff

Author:Brenna Yovanoff [Yovanoff, Brenna]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780857070791
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

CRAVING

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

I wake suddenly. Like a blanket being lifted from my face, it happens all at once. In my hotel room, the streetlights make wavy patterns on the wall.

“Daphne.” The word is hesitant, choked.

It takes days or hours or seconds to realize that someone is speaking to me, and when I roll over, I still feel half-asleep.

“Daphne.” Truman is leaning over the bed.

“What is it?” I ask, sitting up and patting around for the lamp, but I can’t find the switch. “What’s wrong?”

“Can I sleep with you?” Even though the room is dark, he turns his face away when he asks it.

When I lift the blanket, he climbs in beside me. His whole body is shaking.

After a little, when he doesn’t stop, I reach out and pull him closer. He gasps, but lets me do it. I remember him falling into my lap in the bathroom, how he shook and the tears leaked out of his eyes. Now though, his back is to me. His shoulders are hard, and under my hands, his shirt feels damp.

“What’s wrong?” I ask again, speaking very quietly against his neck.

“I was dreaming.” His voice sounds dry and hoarse, like he might be thirsty. “I—I was just having really bad dreams.”

There’s a fog of agitation around him, almost a palpable thing, and I pull back even though I don’t want to. The feeling of him lying next to me is almost agonizingly appealing and I’m gripped by the same desire I felt last night, when I leaned over him in his room. When I kissed him.

We lie against each other in the sagging middle of the bed and even though I know it’s not the right thing to do, I open my mouth and breathe the air coming off him. Not a smell or a taste, but something deeper. When I hold onto him, I don’t let myself touch my lips to his neck. If I do, I’ll taste the thing that makes him shudder. I will drink it from his skin like liquid, and that’s unconscionable. When I press my forehead to his back, the shape of his pain is alluring, almost visible. It forms him, tells him to protect himself, makes him everything he is. He needs to keep it.

I close my eyes against it, resisting the urge to put my mouth to his skin. I close my eyes so tight that I see tiny lights, like sparks—the embers of his sadness.

When he shivers, he makes a noise in his throat like something is loose and knocking around inside him, a piece of broken machinery, clanking and grinding. I press closer to him in the dark, and after awhile, his breathing is slower again.

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