Total pages in book: 87
Estimated words: 89074 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 445(@200wpm)___ 356(@250wpm)___ 297(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 89074 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 445(@200wpm)___ 356(@250wpm)___ 297(@300wpm)
“Boo,” Rayne says softly, coming up to my side.
He’s smiling. His dimples are showing, and at some point he’d gotten a little sticker of a rose placed on the side of his cheek.
Before I can say anything he’s leaning in.
Sliding his arm around my waist.
He tugs me into a kiss, pushing my back up against the tree as he kisses me.
“Needy when you’re drunk,” I murmur against his lips.
But it feels like I’m needy, too.
The moment he touches me, I want more.
His hands are grasping all around my waist, pulling up the bottom of my sweatshirt to try to get to my skin.
“I said I missed you,” he says. “Meant it.”
He slides his knee between my legs, running his thigh along my bulge as he goes in for another deep kiss.
He’s particularly hungry for contact.
“We’re surrounded by the entire campus right now, Rayne,” I tell him as his kisses move lower onto my neck.
“Ask me if I fucking care.”
I run my fingers along the back of his hair.
“I know you care. When you’re not whiskey-drunk,” I tell him, looking in his eyes as he pulls back a little.
He keeps holding my gaze, his eyes half-lidded, as he reaches behind him. He goes into his back pocket and pulls out a small, fuzzy thing.
“Won you this.”
I look down as he hands me a tiny stuffed animal cat, barely bigger than a golf ball.
I see the likeness immediately.
“It’s Pearl.”
Rayne nods. “She even has the little blue eyes.”
“You won me a little gift,” I say, running my fingertip along the soft, fuzzy thing.
“I know it’s not a knife or some sort of medieval sword, but it’s what I could find,” Rayne says.
I roll the little toy over in my hand as a strange feeling hits me.
No one’s ever won me a gift before. I can’t even remember the last time I got a gift in general. My family stopped meeting up for Christmas after Wes and I went off to college, and since Lune died, it was never the same, anyway.
Rayne’s just being nice to me.
Nice.
Treating me like I’m not a monster. Like I’m not some feral animal to be avoided at all costs, and regarded with fear.
“Do you like it?” Rayne asks, bringing his hand forward again and putting his fingertips into my front hoodie pocket, pulling me a little toward him.
He’s acting downright fucking smitten.
Like he really is my boyfriend.
It’s almost intoxicating after a week of him avoiding me.
“You should get back to your friends,” I tell him. “And yes. I love it, Rayne.”
He’s coming forward to kiss me again before I can stop him, and once his lips are on mine I don’t want to push him away.
I put my hands on the small of his back and pull him as close as I can.
I kiss him like I’m hungry for it, too.
Like I’m making it count. Because I have no clue how much longer I’ll be able to have this.
There’s no world where Rayne and I could be normal. Be at the fair, walking around together, hand in hand.
It could never be my arm around him in all of the stupid pictures.
I have my claim to him in the shadows. In the darkest parts of the night, when it’s just us, in our room.
But then it ends.
It has to end.
Like everything good in my life inevitably does.
“Go back to them,” I say as I break off from the kiss, giving his hips a little shove.
There’s something smoldering behind his eyes, though.
“What if he found out?” Rayne says quietly, his stare burning right into me.
“Nothing good would come of it. We both know that.”
“I want you,” he says in a low tone.
“Dangerous territory you’re in, wanting me. Nothing good can come of that, either.”
He pulls his body away from mine in an instant.
Like he’s depriving me, on purpose.
And the worst part is that it’s fucking working. I miss his contact immediately, and my instinct is to reach out and pull him right back even though we both know better.
“I know you want me, too,” he tells me before he walks back into the crowd.
19
Rayne
The Onyx House front room is full, and the rows of dark red candles in every windowsill are lit.
“Last call for confessions,” Noah says, walking all around the room and shaking the little black box full of our little pieces of paper. “Anyone who hasn’t added yours yet, you better put it in now.”
I watch as a couple of guys walk over to slide their papers in through the slot at the top.
Everyone in the house is milling around, heading upstairs to grab their short capes and coming back down again with them tied around their back. Moments like these, when all thirty of us put on our capes and gather with the candles lit, are when I truly feel like I’m part of a secret society.