“What?” I asked. He turned on his side and reached out, trailed a single fingertip over the curve of my shoulder and down my arm. Little earthquakes, building to a major seismic event inside…
“Never mind.” It wasn’t nothing, I could tell. He wasn’t trying to distract me, he really was trying to distract himself. From me. “Meditate for another half hour, and I’ll tell you.”
My entire attention fixed on the square half-inch of skin his finger was touching. “Half an hour?”
“Half an hour.”
“I can do that.”
Sheer bravado, but now I was motivated. I flopped back flat on the pillow, closed my eyes, and concentrated hard on that ocean… blue-green waves rolling in from a misty horizon… churning to pale lace as they crashed on the shore… whispers of mist cool on my skin… a fine, endless white sand beach that glittered in sunlight…
I felt like I was actually achieving something— clearing my mind of the idea of him lying beside me, anyway—when he blew it for me by talking again.
“Joanne,” he said. “Quit hovering.”
I opened my eyes and realized I was looking at the motel room ceiling. White spackled moonscape broken up by a dusty ice sculpture of a light fixture two inches from my nose.
Oh. When he said hovering, he meant hovering. As in seven feet above the bed.
“Crap,” I said, and looked over my shoulder. “I went all Exorcist.”
“Actually, it wasn’t a bad try. I felt you go quiet for a few minutes.”
“How many minutes?” I rotated myself in midair to face him. Ha! Managed it gracefully, in a controlled weightless spin, which was nice; control had been kind of a problem. Obviously. My hair spoiled the effect by flopping forward, and I tried shoving it back over my shoulders. It repeated the flopping thing.
“Let’s call it… thirty.” David’s smile turned dangerously amused, and he reached down and pulled the sheet away from the rest of him. I stopped messing with my hair and lived for the moment, because like me, David hadn’t bothered with pajamas. He patted the Joanne-shaped hollow in the bed next to him.
I tried to get down. Really. But whatever switch I’d thrown to get up here, I couldn’t seem to find it again. I kept hovering. “Um, not that I’m not motivated, but…”
“You’re stuck.”
“Kind of a yes, bordering on an oh, crap.” I tried to make it funny, but truth was, it scared me. All this power, none of the control I so obviously needed just to get through what was for David nothing but an autonomic function. “You forgot to tell me about the gravity-being-optional part of this exercise.”
He levitated up, an inch at a time, and when he was still a foot away I felt the summer heat of his skin. He smelled like warm cinnamon and peaches, and it made my mouth water and my body go golden.
He stopped with a cool two-inch cushion of air between us.
“I didn’t forget,” he said. “I just didn’t think you’d be able to do this for a while. Don’t worry, it’s normal.”
“Normal? I’m halfway into the bed of the guy upstairs!”
“I’d rather you were more than halfway into the bed down here.” That look on his face—naked, powerful, proprietary—sent a pulse of sheer need through me.
“Tease,” I said. He made a sound in his throat that wasn’t quite a laugh.
“Come back to bed and we’ll see.” He lowered himself by a couple of inches. I tried to follow. Failed. He drifted back up. “Want me to help you?”
“No. Yes. Hell. I don’t know, what’s the right answer?”
His hand touched my face and drew a slow line of fire down my neck to my collarbone. “You have to learn to stay in the body, Jo. We can’t exactly do this out in public.”
“News flash. You do this out in public and you draw attention for more than defying gravity.” I tried to sound nonchalant, but it was tough with all the combustion inside me. God. I couldn’t seem to get used to the hypersensitive nature of being a Djinn. It was the little things that got me—the sharp-edged beauty of how things looked, the intensity of how they felt, tasted, smelled, sounded. The human world was so real. Sometimes it was so real it made me weep. I couldn’t decide if it was like living in a perpetual state of orgasm, or being perpetually stoned; maybe both.
The casual touch of David’s fingers on my skin was enough to start chain reactions of pleasure deep inside, and I caught my breath and closed my eyes as his touch moved down, glided over the curve of my breast.
“Come back to bed,” he murmured, and his lips brushed mine when he spoke.