When I rinsed the lather from her hair, she tilted her head back into my cupped palm, the way I had held her when she was on the kitchen table. She was beginning to trust me. The curve running from her neck to her shoulder was exquisite. I longed to run my fingers over her whole body. Soon, very soon.
After so much talk of darkness, I did not realize until after I had finished rinsing her hair that the shadow had retreated from the edges of my vision.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Kat
The water stopped steaming. Gav’s hands were in my hair, his long fingers teasing out the knots slowly, carefully. He slicked my hair back with more hot water, and all of the thoughts that had been drifting through my mind slowly washed away with the remnants of the shampoo.
My suicide. It felt like forever ago. How long had it been? Seven years?
I’d lied to Gavriel. My stepdad had been horrible to me, sure. He’d beat my mother and me too, sometimes. But the numbness had started creeping through my body long before then.
The first emotion to go was happiness. It went hiding one day, and I thought it would come back, but it didn’t. I searched for it for a while, then one day I stopped searching. I had forgotten what it felt like, or why I was searching for it in the first place.
Then I couldn’t feel sadness. No sadness, no frustration. When bad things happened, I would have to force myself to frown, as though I cared whether or not our baseball team had lost, or whether or not a character in a movie died. I didn’t care when my tests started coming back with failing grades.
Anger was the last one, and I clung to it for a while, yelling at my mom for my stepdad’s faults. Then even the anger left, and I was alone with nothing but a barrier in my brain that kept me from feeling a thing.
Some people can’t feel pain on their skin, I read once. They touch a hot stove and don’t even notice. It was like that, but with everything. It’s not that the feelings were gone, really. They weren’t. They were just buried so deep inside of me that I didn’t even want to think about what would happen if they came back.
Sorrow and happiness both, sunken into the tissue of my body. Hiding under layer after layer of skin, invisible. Like an empty box wrapped and put under the Christmas tree to tease.
Unwrap me and there’s nothing left.
Gavriel’s hand was moving down my neck, now, the washcloth cleaning off every inch of my skin. Here, trapped in this house, trapped in this bathtub, I had nothing else to think about but the sensation of his hands on my body. I wasn’t worrying about getting enough hours for work, or being able to pay off my bills. The only thing that my mind had to think about was him.
And oh, God forgive me, he felt good.
Was he evil? Truly evil? Was he good, as he claimed, killing only evil men? I didn’t know, and my body didn’t care.
His hands moved down and over my breasts, and I let out a small gasp as the washcloth grazed my nipple. Gav leaned forward. I could hear his breathing in my ear, and his dark hair was partially reflected in the ripples of water. But he didn’t say anything.
No, he said nothing, but his hands said it all. As he switched the washcloth from one hand to another, his fingers cupped my breast, sliding back and forth, letting the weight sway in the water. Then his thumb moved up, tracing a circle over my already erect nipple.
He knew how I felt. He had to know. My breathing was shallow, and he’d done this before - back on the table. Now, though, he was more gentle, his strokes like a soft breeze over my skin. He cupped another hand of water and held it to my collarbone where the silver hearts lay against my skin, letting the hot water drip down slowly.
Before, I had struggled against him. Struggled against the straps that held me down. Now there was nothing holding me down, and yet I did not struggle.
What could I have done? You might ask this. You might forgive me for giving in. There was nothing I could have done, not really. But the truth was that I had spent the last of my willpower in our conversation, and I did not want to fight any more.
No, it was that I did not want to fight this. Not when the washcloth stroked my nipple so slowly, not when he squeezed my breast slightly and made me moan in the back of my throat. The ache that I had not yet gotten rid of surged between my legs, swelled in the hot water.
At the sound of my moan he nuzzled the side of my head, his mouth against the bottom of my ear. His arm crossed over my chest and held me tight as he kissed me on the neck just below my ear, and made me moan again.
I was melting in this bathtub, melting under the pressure of his hands and the heat of his breath on my skin. He kissed me again and his tongue curved out, caressing the bottom of my earlobe, sliding hot and wet until finally he sealed his lips around the lobe and sucked, his tongue still teasing the strip of flesh between his lips.