The Arrangement 19 (The Arrangement 19)

“Why does everyone say that? I wasn’t a dark child.” He drops his gaze and looks at his hands, his tone serious now. “That came later, much later.”

I know this place is right on top of a raw nerve for him, but I’m not sure why. I look around, hoping he’ll tell me more, but he’s silent. There’s a chest on the side of the room, right below a little window. There’s no sign of the escape hatch or hole in the floor, but there is a rickety rope ladder piled into the corner. I wonder how he got me up here. He must have carried me.

The ceiling is low and crumbling, cedar shakes tumbling through holes in the roof. In its heyday, the little fort must have been swicked. I feel almost sad to see it in such disrepair, vines and branches growing through it unchecked.

“So, we’re still by the mansion, then?” I ask, crawling over to the window. I test the floor carefully, pressing on each plank, worried I’ll fall through.

“It’s sturdy. You won't fall. And yes, we’re still by the house.” Sean scoots back and leans against the wall.

I glance over the sill and look out. All I can see is trees. Disappointed, I sit back down. The floor beneath me creaks under my weight, and I crab-crawl forward toward the tree.

“Are you sure this isn’t like Owl’s house? That sucker blew away with Piglet and Pooh in it.”

“Are you talking about a children’s book?” Sean blinks and grins.

“Winnie the Pooh was stuffed with fluff. I’m a little more, well, stuffed with bones that don’t want to shatter when this thing falls out of the sky.”

My heart is racing, unable to calm down. Sean smiles softly, taking my hand and pulling me toward him. I shake my head, refusing to move.

“Are you afraid of heights, Miss Smith?”

“Only when there isn’t a plane around me.”

“Seriously?” Amusement lights his face, his expression betraying his belief that this is a silly thing to fear.

“Tell me something," I say nodding and closing my eyes tightly. "Talk, or I’m going to flip out.”

He notices the way I’m shaking and comes to sit beside me. He places his hand on top of mine and gently squeezes it.

“We’re in my old tree house. Peter and I played up here as children. I had a tendency to find the tallest tree and climb it. My mother,” his voice catches in his throat, but he spits out the rest of the thought, “didn’t like it, but my father encouraged us to climb higher and go further. One day he took us back here and asked which tree I liked best. I picked this one. I showed him how high I could climb. The next time he walked us out this way, this tree house was two limbs higher than I'd climbed. When we were children, the man was always pushing us to go further, to climb higher, and to dream bigger. God, he’s changed.” Sean rubs his hand over his face and tips his head back against the wall.

“So, once upon a time, your dad was nice?”

Sean’s eyes cut over to me. He shrugs.

“Yeah, he was. Before the mistresses came around, he gave Pete and me all his attention. He told me that I could have this place and do anything I wanted with it if I could get up here. There wasn’t a ladder. It took me a month to get up here. I suppose it was more for me than Pete. He was still young then and couldn’t climb the way I did. Dad added the ladder later for him.”

“So, you played up here when you were little?” I look around again, wondering about the man sitting next to me. It’s a normal tree house, except that it’s practically in the clouds.

“Yeah, I did. I can’t remember the last time I was up here. I had to be thirteen or so.” He smiles softly, lost in thought. “I'd just had my first kiss, and came up here afterward to get away from Pete and Jon. By then, it was overgrown and aging poorly. This morning, I almost couldn’t find it. The forest has grown up around it, devouring it.”

The terror melts away as he speaks, and I get to see a side that he usually keeps hidden.

“First kiss?”

“Yeah.” He smiles. “It was sweet and quick. But at the time, it felt like a lifetime of bliss.” Sean realizes he has a smile on his face, and it vanishes.

“Sean Ferro kissed a girl sweetly? I can’t imagine it. That’s like saying Dracula’s teeth are candy corn.”

“How is that the same?” His eyes are laughing as he looks at me, and all I want is to keep him looking just like this.

“Well, you think that he’s going to be all mean and nasty, but no--alas! The dark dude in the cape with a taste for blood is just a sugar addict who--”

"You did not just compare me to Dracula,” Sean interrupts.

“Blah! I vant to suck your sveets!” I hold up my hands and point my fingers down like teeth, speaking with my best Transylvanian accent. Sean's eyes go wide, and then he actually giggles.

“You’re insane.”

“Holy shit! You giggled. I heard it.” I grab his ultra tight shirt and yank him toward me. “Open.” I tap his lips. “I need to check your teeth.”

Sean watches my mouth as I speak, with the sweet grin still in place. It’s so unlike him that it makes my stomach flip. He reaches for me slowly and, when our eyes meet, he holds my gaze. Sean brushes his hand against my cheek and slides his fingers around the back of my neck. His other hand finds my cheek and inch-by-inch he gets closer. My pulse is hammering in my ears, and it’s all I can do to not squeal. Butterflies erupt in my stomach and move through me in waves. The fierce flutter makes it hard to breathe as Sean’s beautiful mouth gets closer.

Normally he takes what he wants or tells me to, but this is different. It has me supercharged, and every inch of me is tingling. It’s like I licked an electrical socket. I can’t move. I want to lean into the kiss, but I want to see what he’s going to do. The way he moves toward me and looks at me through those dark lashes, the way he cradles my head and cups my cheek--it's as if he's asking and it leaves me trembling.

He stops right before our lips touch, a breath away. His gaze drops to my mouth, and he pauses, not kissing, just waiting. I can’t move. The magic of the moment makes the rest of the world melt away. It feels pure and perfect. I didn’t know he could be like this.

Sean reveals another version of him, one long buried. I’m drawn to him, pulled to his mouth. I want his arms to hold me tight, but there’s nothing harsh or hurried. His breath washes over my mouth, and my lips part slightly, wanting him, waiting for him to kiss me.

Sean’s dark lashes flutter closed, and he leans in, gently brushing his lips against mine. The butterflies wiz through me as his touch sets off a shower of sparks. The smoothness of his bottom lip against mine, the way he moves surely and gently sets every inch of me on fire. I want more, but he doesn’t deepen the kiss. Instead, he slowly slides his lips closed before pressing them to mine, and then pulls away.

I’m breathless. The kiss feels like it froze time, but it passes too quickly. It’s an enigma I don’t understand. I blink wildly, and try to fathom why that affected me so much.

Sean doesn’t smile or say any of the assy things he usually does. He doesn’t try to own me, make me, or command me. He just pulls away, as if he didn’t know what he did to me. How can one kiss do that?

After a moment, I manage to catch his eye. The corner of his mouth pulls up, and he quickly looks away. My chest tightens as my heart beats harder. My impulse is telling me to jump him, but there’s something so fragile about him that I can’t.

My chest rises and falls, as I suck in way too much air. I can’t hide what that did to me, how it made me fee

l. I finally breathe his name.

“Sean?” He glances at me from the corner of his eye.

“Yeah?”

What do I say? I want to ask him why he doesn’t love me like that, but how can I? He mentions his first kiss and sugar, then gives me this orgasmically mind-blowing kiss. What the fuck? I can’t say any of it though, so I just sit there gaping, my mouth hanging open. He smirks.

“So I suppose you like sweet kisses, now?”

“I like your kisses, all of them. I like how you surprise me, how there’s always another side of you that I haven’t seen before. You literally took my breath away. Do you know how rare that is?” I stare at him and think that he honestly doesn’t know.

“It’s not something I like to do.” He looks down at his hands, and I swear he’s sitting like a teenager, shoulders slumped forward, his back curved, and lowers his head into his hands. “It’s too--” He sucks in a shaky breath and finishes, “invasive.”

That’s not the word I thought he was going to say.

“How so?”

“It reveals something about you, about me," he says without looking at me. "It’s vulnerability and weakness wrapped in pleasure. Pleasure has a way of stripping everything else away and making decisions we normally wouldn’t make. I swore I’d never kiss someone like that again.”

I don’t know what to say. It feels like he just told me a big secret--I can feel the weight of it--but I can’t see how he got there. I touch his knee.

“We can’t change who we are, Sean. Kisses like that are rare. It lasted forever, but not long enough. Sean, I’ve had sweet kisses before. That’s not it. It’s not that I’m a candy fang banger, either.” He smiles and looks over at me. “It’s you. It’s when you let yourself be seen--that’s the difference.”

His lips part like he wants to say something, but he closes his eyes and looks away. Tipping his head against the wall, he opens those dark eyes and looks at the starry sky.

“I have trouble with that. I know that’s an understatement, but it’s hard to give someone a piece of your heart willingly only to have it torn away. A person can only do that so many times.”