“Did you feel it?” she asked. So quiet. So unsure. “Did you feel my heart through the space, even when you couldn’t see me?”
My hand splayed over the side of her face. “Every day, I thought I was losing my mind, Aster, the way every road wanted to end with you. Every fucking minute I wanted to come to you. Find you. To listen to the call of your voice that forever echoed in my ear.”
Shifting, she pressed her mouth to my palm, kissed it gently, lingered there for the longest time.
She held my hand to her face like her haggard breaths could heal our wounds.
I eased down onto my knees, took her face in my hands, and stared at her through the lapping shadows. “Did you feel it? Did you feel me?”
Tears slipped from her gorgeous eyes, the moisture seeping into the webs of my fingers.
“You are the only thing, the only one, I’ve ever felt.”
“Aster.” I leaned forward and pressed my mouth against hers.
Aster inhaled like it was the first time in years she could breathe. Then her hands spread over my chest and up around my neck.
I kissed her slow. My lips in a constant press and pull with hers. Soft laps and tiny flicks of tongue.
Without breaking the kiss, she fumbled through the buttons of my shirt.
The first.
The second.
She moved faster the farther she went.
She gasped a little sound when she got the last one free, and she pressed her palms to my bare chest and ran them up over my shoulders to push back the fabric.
I was quick to wind out of it, needing to feel her heat, the touch of her hands, the raking of her eyes.
They flew over me like a storm. Like annihilation. This one single girl who held the power to destroy me. She’d done it before, under the covenant of a thousand secret kisses, so I should have known better right then.
But yesterday didn’t matter. This moment was the only one I could control.
My skin was unmarred except for the single tattoo that ran up my side from my waist to my ribs.
She whimpered when she saw it.
GREED.
Aster edged back a fraction, and she glanced at me once in question before she turned to watch as she ran her fingers over the ink.
“It stole you from me.” I could barely hear her heartbroken words over the crash of her heart. The pound, pound, pounding that ravaged and shook.
She was wrong.
“Everything I ever had belonged to you.”
Everything I’d ever done had been done for her.
Every lie told in her favor.
She looked back at me. “Our worlds have always been against us.”
I set my hand on the side of her face. “Then let’s burn it down.”
She leaned forward, and she was kissing along my bare chest, over that rampage that beat against my ribs, over the hatred that churned in my soul, over the word that had cost it all.