“Are you okay, my love?”
I nodded. “I might actually have found Heaven on Earth.”
David studied my face for a second, then cupped the back of my head and rolled me up, slipping behind me, slowly looping his arms around my shoulders, like the wings of a mother swan. “I think you’re delusional.”
I giggled quietly, resting my feet beside his, our knees bent, committing the feel of his bare chest on my slippery, rain-soaked spine to memory. If I ignored the breeze making my wet bra cold, I could actually pretend we really were naked together. “Thank you, David.”
“For what?”
For letting me have my own way, for wanting it, too, for not denying that he wanted it, for being more than just an ordinary boy—for… “For being real.” I tucked my brow against his ear and slowly tickled the back of his wrist, imagining his blood in my mouth.
“You don’t have to imagine it, Ara,” he said, kissing the bone above my eye. “If you want it, you can have it.”
“Really?” I turned slightly at the shoulders to look back at him.
He lifted his wrist and shut his eyes tight for a second, and when I snuggled my spine against his chest again, saw red gush out over his skin. He tipped his arm, balancing the liquid there as he slowly offered it to my lips.
Without hesitation, I opened my mouth and scooped up the runaway drops with my tongue, wrapping my lips around his arm, the warmth of sweet orange-chocolate flooding my mouth like liquid made of satin ribbons.
“Describe it to me,” he whispered into my hair. “In your thoughts.”
I swirled the warm blood around on my tongue and let it slide down my throat, into my stomach—like the first hot cocoa of winter; smooth and rich, warm—like his voice. You taste like...like...
“Okay.” He slid his index finger against my lip then down my chin, gently pulling my face away from his wrist. “That’s enough, my love. I’m not sure what it’ll do to you.”
Through the whir of the world spinning around me, I turned my head and looked up into David’s eyes, filling with that amazing, almost transparent shade of green, but brighter than ever before—Dorothy’s Emerald City illustrated in the gaze of a vampire. “David, I think I can see your soul.”
He closed his eyes around a smile. “You are so damn sweet.”
I licked my teeth, tasting his blood again. “Mm, no, you are.”
“I am, huh?” He looked at my lips, moving slowly onto his knees in front of me. “Let me taste it.”
I opened my mouth to touch David’s, his tongue skimming across mine, pushing it away from the sharp edges of his fangs. Warm sweet butter and salty copper mixed in our kiss, and it almost felt like David and I were thinking the same thing—thinking how amazing it was to taste the essence of him and me; everything that made us exist broken down to flavour between our lips—tangible, real.
My body sung with ideas and desires too long refused.
“I know,” David whispered into my breath.
“You know what?” I angled my face to the sky, laying back on my elbows as his lips travelled down my neck, over each and every one of the tiny scars there.
“I know how you feel.”
I moaned, my breath expelling in a half gasp as his lips circled my navel suddenly. “Mm. I don’t think you do.”
He laughed, my wet skin making the path of his breath obvious.
“David.” I parted my knees and let him kiss my inner thigh, feeling his wet hair drip against my undies. “What are you doing?”
“I want to know every inch of your body by only the memory of my lips.”
My eyes flung open as he kissed fabric, folding it down over my hips a little.
“Don’t worry,” he said. “I won’t go there—today.”
Droplets of rain tickled my flesh, skimming silkily over my belly, staying on my skin until they reached my back, soaking away into the ground then. It was cold, I could tell, and I hoped the goosebumps over my skin, probably making my legs prickly, didn’t turn David off touching me.
“You’re not prickly, Ara,” David said, caressing the underside of my knee delicately, bringing my ankle up over his hip as he drank the rain from the curve of my waist.
I drove my fingers into his wet hair, following the movements of his head against my skin. “David?”
“Yes, my love?”
“I want to feel you against me.”
“I know you do,” he said, and when I hooked my fingers just under his elbows and tugged him upward, his bare chest and arms slipped across my body, stealing a quick gasp as I felt him on top of me for the first time. It was like a hunger finally fed; a wave finally meeting a rock, dissolving into spray. For everything else in the world that made me cry, in this moment I finally found life. I wanted to tear away the wet remains of fabric between us and feel him inside me.
He laughed breathily into the flesh just below my ear. “Ara, I can't think straight when you think that way.”
“Don’t then. When you think straight, you deny me what I want.”
He stopped and pushed up slowly on his elbows, elevating his chest from mine.
I stared him down, beads of water blinding me, the rain pouring into our quiet little world as if it had no care for the fact that our forever was limited. “I know what you’re doing,” I said. “I know you’re about to tell me we have to stop.”
“I have good reason for that.” He rose onto his knees, keeping his hands beside my shoulders, his body forming a shelter over mine.
“What reason?”
David nodded to the now dark sky. “That rain’s gonna get heavier any minute.”
“No. This sucks! You never give me my own way.”
“That, my love, is because your own way involves me taking something from you I'm not willing to take.”
“My virginity?”
A cheeky grin spread across his face, golden under the grey sky. “Yes.”
“Oh, my holy, freakin’ God. You have got to be kidding me!”
“Sorry. I'm not.”
With the cold conclusiveness of reason, the small split in my wrist started stinging. “Why? Is my virginity like kryptonite or something?”
“No. Even better.” He dropped a quick kiss on my mouth. “It’s sacred.”
“Sacred?” My arched brow thickened the sarcasm.
He breathed out through his nose, closing his lips into a thin smile. “Yes, my love. You will always remember your first. If you choose not to come with me, one day you will fall in love with someone else, and you’ll want to be pure—untainted—for him. If I take you now, you can never go back. I would hate for you to regret any of our interactions one day.”