Sea of Stars(91)
Trey strokes my back. “We need to find someone soon who can perform a commitment ceremony.”
“I don’t need a commitment ceremony to be with you,” I murmur against his skin, placing small kisses along the breadth of his wide shoulder.
“I need it.” He lifts my hair and unbraids it so that it falls over my shoulders.
“Why? I know how you feel about me.”
“Because I need everyone to know that you’re mine.”
I giggle. “That’s a little cavemanish, don’t you think?” I ask him teasingly.
The next thing I know, I’m on my back. With the palms of my hands flat against his chest, his warm skin rubs against me while I gasp at the exquisite feel of him. “Most of all, Kricket,” he says passionately in my ear, “I need you to know that you’re mine.”
His hands on me are possessive and demanding. “Say you’re mine, Kricket.” His fingers twine in my hair.
Intense pleasure washes over me. “I’m yours,” I whisper, biting my lip to keep from screaming it.
“Whose?” he growls again.
“Yours, Trey, I’m yours.” I say breathlessly, as we completely lose our minds and our bodies to each other. For the next few hours, we prove over and over that we belong to one another.
When I awake in our little love nest, I stretch beneath the blanket. “It will be dark soon,” Trey says from behind me. His hand moves on my side, stroking my skin possessively. I can’t help feeling disappointed that we’ll have to leave here soon. It’s been an oasis in a sea of scary. I sit up; Trey’s hand falls away when I crawl for my bag in the corner. On my knees, I sift through it until I find the personal tote that Jax gave me yesterday. Finding a comb within it, I sit on the mat and attempt to untangle the snarls from my hair. After a few minutes, I realize that it’s a hopeless mess.
“Here, let me try,” Trey says, holding out his hand for the comb.
Moving nearer to him, I place the comb in his hand and then turn around. Gently, he lifts my hair and begins combing it from the bottom up, carefully working out the snarls without pulling too hard on it.
“How did you learn to do that?” I ask him suspiciously.
“We own spixes. They sometimes wander into briar patches and get burrs entangled in their manes.”
“You took care of the spixes.”
“Every day for most of my childhood. I could train a spix from wild to tame faster than anyone we knew—even Charisma.”
“Really?” I murmur, trying to envision his life as a teenager. It was completely different from mine. “And Victus? Could he train spixes as well?”
Trey snorts. “He could, but he wasn’t very interested in them. He’s more of a thinker than a doer. He would come with me and talk to me for hours while I took care of things. He’s a philosopher—a dreamer. He dreams things up and I make them.”
“You sound like the perfect team—in some ways—opposites. I believe you’re a thinker too, though. If you weren’t such an extremely good planner, we’d be dead inside the city now. And your skills as a hacker are ridic, you know? Reprogramming drones can’t be as easy as you made it look.”
He pauses in combing out my hair. I glance at him over my shoulder; he leans forward and kisses me hard on the mouth.
“You make me happy,” he says in a low tone.
I have to blink a couple of times and look away. “Well, Trey, I think you’re the first person who has ever said that to me.”
“That’s impossible,” he says honestly.
“It’s the truth.” Not wanting to explore my past, I instead nose into his. “And what is Charisma? A thinker or a doer?” I ask.
“She’s a doer.”
“And me?”
“You are the rare person who is good at everything.”
“I can’t swim.”
“Yet.”
In no time at all, Trey manages to unknot my hair. I weave it in a fishtail plait.
“Are you hungry?” Trey asks.
“As a matter of fact, I was just about to talk to you regarding your penchant for starving me.” I smile at him, wrapping the blanket around me. “It’s really getting out of hand.”
“There are still some treats left from our commitment announcement.” Trey reaches for his gear, finding the sack full of goodies. He places them between us; the blanket he has wrapped around him is riding low on his hips. He also adds a few items that I’d rather ignore: namely, the kind of protein bar that I was forced to eat in the Forest of Omnicron.