Giving my ass one last pointed squeeze, he resumed his high-maintenance routine.
I returned to my room to dress for the day, and by that time, Loren still wasn’t done perfecting his hair, so I tiptoed back out of the room and made my way downstairs. “Black is the Soul” by Korn was blaring, and it led me right to Houston.
I found him sitting at the island in their kitchen that was just as dark, Victorian, and gothic as the rest of their castle and scowling at the laptop in front of him. He was so into his search that he didn’t notice me standing next to him until it was too late.
“Are you writing a book?” I asked him when I read the headline of the medical article he was reading.
Quickly shutting the laptop closed, Houston regarded me long and hard. “You’re synesthetic.”
First, the song he’d written from my point-of-view as if we were one mind and now this. I was starting to feel uncomfortable, though strangely not creeped out, which was disturbing in itself.
No, I was having trouble coming to terms with the fact that I would never be able to hide from Houston Morrow. Never.
Suddenly, I was on the defensive.
“Or maybe everyone else is just doing it wrong, and you’re synesthetic,” I elusively pointed out. “Ever think of that?” My heart thudded as I waited for his answer while Houston waited for mine with all his composure intact.
I sighed when the staring contest ended with me silently accepting that Houston was just as assertive without needing to speak a word.
“I didn’t find out until a couple of years ago that not everyone—correction—no one I’ve ever met perceives sound through color.”
“Chromesthesia,” he said simply for confirmation.
I nodded. “It’s not always just color. Sometimes it’s shapes and movements too. The only constant seems to be music. Regular sounds like a dog barking or a horn honking have no effect.” The faint scent of the ocean warned me of my distress when I wondered if Houston thought I was a basket case now.
“And this?” he asked me, tapping my wriggling nose when I tried to push the emotion away. “What are you feeling right now?”
I took a step back.
My lips parted, but no words came.
He couldn’t know that.
After three years of searching for articles and conversing with strangers through forums, I hadn’t been able to name how or why I tasted my emotions or even smelled them. I’d already been scanned, prodded, and tested for tumors and dementia. The closest I’d come to finding an answer was other synesthetes who feel their emotions through colors, temperatures, and spatial sense. But none whose emotions caused them to hallucinate tastes and smells.
Sometimes I wondered if I would have preferred it that way. My emotions, including the good ones, had ruined my ability to appreciate simple things like roses and cinnamon when I actually encountered them.
“What do you mean?” I was back to being elusive.
Houston closed the gap I’d placed between us, making it clear I wouldn’t get away with it. “Tell me,” he demanded softly, and I found I hated his casual confidence much more than his forcefulness. It was much easier to deny him when he was being a dick.
“Desire tastes like cherries, shame smells like olives, happiness tastes like chocolate, sorrow smells like roses…should I keep going, or do you get the point?”
Houston’s hands drifted underneath my sundress, where he placed his hand on my hips before backing and trapping me against the window behind me. “And what about me? What do I smell like?”
My heart skipped a beat as vanilla filled the air.
“How do you know I feel anything at all?”
“The same way I figured out you were a hundred times more complicated than you let on, Braxton Fawn. I haven’t stopped paying attention.” When he kissed me, he forced my lips to part and my mouth to accept his tongue. I moaned in response. It was a desperate, broken sound. Whatever emotion Houston was responsible for evoking, I was drunk with it by the time he let me up for air. “And I never will,” he warned me.
I shivered just as Loren sauntered into the kitchen, fully dressed and brazenly debonair. If there was ever a walking example of perfection, he was it. To my ears, I sounded like a love-drunk fool, but the way the three of them overwhelmed me, separately and definitely together, it was hard to care about anything other than giving in to them.
“Can you stop groping my girl?” Loren griped. His eyes weren’t even on us. He was focusing on fastening his expensive-looking watch as he stood by the door with a scowl. “We’ve got somewhere to be.”
“She’s not just yours,” Houston reminded him.
“Keep fighting over me like I’m a chew toy, and I’ll dump the three of you for me, myself, and I.”