My Darling Arrow (St. Mary's Rebels 1)

My eyes sting. “Please. I didn’t know you’d freak out like this. I was just… You were so mean to me last night and I just wanted to make a stupid freaking point and I know I got a little dramatic back there but I… I honestly didn’t mean to make you mad.”

His nostrils flare. “Salem.”

I take a step closer to him.

My name from his lips, even curled up in anger, makes me want to touch him. Makes me wanna put a hand on his chest and fist his t-shirt and press close to him but I don’t.

I don’t want to make him even more angry.

I don’t want him to reject my touch.

“Please? Don’t be like this, okay? I don’t like it. I don’t like it that we’re fighting and you’re all angry. And we’re acting like we’re enemies. We’re not. You’re not my enemy, Arrow, and I’m not yours. Please, I’ll do anything. Just… can’t we be friends?”

As soon as I say it, my witchy heart starts pounding in my chest.

It’s pounding and pounding, making my body vibrate.

With a certain need, a craving.

A desperate desire to be his friend.

A bone-deep desire. A desire that has burst forth from my soul and I can’t ignore it.

Because for some very strange reason, we keep clashing, him and I.

For some crazy reason, we keep rubbing each other the wrong way. We keep creating sparks and friction. We keep creating fire.

And I’m done.

I’m done fighting with him.

I’m done arguing over stupid things.

I love him. He’s the boy I’ve loved since I was ten. I don’t wanna fight with him.

I never wanna fight with him.

So this is my peace offering.

I even offer him my outstretched hand. “Will you be my friend, Arrow?”

I know it’s a childish question.

But I don’t know how else to voice it. How else to tell him that this is an important moment in the history of my entire existence.

Asking him to be my friend.

Besides, I think he could use one, a friend.

He could use someone to just… be with. Maybe even to talk with, I don’t know.

He could just use someone.

Although Arrow still hasn’t looked at my hand. He still hasn’t moved his gaze from my face to glance at my offering and I don’t know how to stop the despair that’s spreading through my body. Just when I think my arm won’t stay up and will fall to my side, he takes it.

He takes my offered hand and catches me. This time from my fall into despair. Into sadness and melancholy.

I wouldn’t have believed it, if I wasn’t looking at it, our joined hands, with my own eyes. If I wasn’t feeling the scrape of his large palm against mine.

So this is what he feels like. This is what his skin feels like against mine.

Hot and strong, and sand and velvet at the same time.

Finally.

I smile up at him and find him watching me, watching my smiling, painted lips. He does his lip-lick thing for a second before he squeezes my hand and pulls me forward.

He comes forward too and then he’s hanging over me, his face dark but so beautiful.

“But I’m still taking you back,” he growls.

I flex my fingers against his hand, trying to wrap my head around the fact that I’m finally touching him and that our fingers are threaded together. “Okay.”

His grip increases even more. “And I’m keeping my eyes on you until I see you enter your dorm building.”

“Yes.”

“Then you’re going to go into your room, climb into your bed and go to fucking sleep, you understand?”

I jerk out a nod.

“And you’re never wearing a shirt like this. Ever again.”

I bite my lip at the vehemence in his voice and nod again.

He narrows his eyes at my mouth. “Good.”

“Arrow?” I whisper, blinking up at him, holding onto his hand like it’s my lifeline.

“What?”

“Before we go back to St. Mary’s, will you take me somewhere else first?”

He squeezes my hand to the point that I think he’ll break my skin and crush my bones.

But I don’t care.

He can do whatever he wants with me.

He can stab me with a knife and I’ll be lying on the ground, dying, drawing little hearts in blood.

His eyes stay on my smiling lips for a second before he replies, “Fine.”

I’m sitting on Arrow’s motorcycle.

I’m riding with him, my inner thighs hugging his outer, my arms around his waist and my cheek stuck to his sweet-smelling t-shirt as it rests on his shoulder blades.

Before we took off, I told him, “So Friend, this is my first motorcycle ride and I have a feeling that I’ve got a thing for speed. Which means that you should really step on it.”

I’m not even going to deny how much I loved saying Friend.

How much I’ll always love saying it.

He’s my friend. My Arrow.

Something moved over his features when I said that. A ripple of something that shone under the fat red moon.