The Touch Of Twilight (41 page)

The removal of my clothing went a little more slowly, more considered as his hands worked over and down, between and in, his warrior’s artistry turned soft, but still relentless as he shaped and pressed and molded me as he pleased. My focus faded and sharpened in turn, as did my breath as he licked me into place, pressing kisses just so to ensure I stayed there.

By the time I lay naked beneath him, my body was dewy from openmouthed kisses, mind numb from those electric fingers, and my legs curled lightly around the backs of his thighs. He bent, found a breast, performed the lazy crisscross I’d fired across his nipples, and I arched back, hooked my ankles in on a moan, and rose to him.

He slid inside me like he’d been there before, like I’d drawn him a map he’d committed to memory, tracing memorized pathways on my bridging body so he could find his way there in the dark. Though coming to it late, I began to study him too.

But Hunter saw me looking, and offered a swollen smile before slipping his thumbs over my eyes, sliding his tongue between my lips, rocking forward to rest solidly at my core. All my senses shorted out as I curled around him, tightening inside. My hearing dimmed, sight snuffed, taste melting on a moan. My fingertips curled like talons on his naked back, and the safety he offered, that steady peace, the barrier between me and the rest of this heartbreaking world swept over me like a gauzy net.

And that was when his need reached in to kindle the remnants of our once-shared aureole. I hadn’t known it was possible, but there it was still living between us, sparking to life. What I thought was dead had only been banked, and I saw the same surprised realization flash across Hunter’s face before he plunged into me again, mouth and middle, separating those soft places while I simultaneously opened for more.

The connection was like electricity surging across naked distance to collide with a bolt of lightning; one force instantly recognizing the other. Seconds earlier I was wishing he could go deeper, and now he did…into my thoughts and knowledge, my experiences and past, the flash of a hard memory causing a tear to fall over his cheek. This both was and wasn’t the aureole we’d shared eight months earlier, more of an apparition born of our need, stark black and white line drawings blurring as one rushed into the next.

Our individual memories of the last few months fused to make a new story. My knowledge of how he felt about Marlo’s death was no longer empathetic. I owned it now, and gave him my recollection in return, our shared guilt shorting out as the memories repelled one another. There was a flashback from the last time we’d kissed, tucked in the shadows of a boneyard maze, and the power we’d denied then flamed to life now, redoubling itself so we both stiffened in the wake of its current. My memories differed from his only in that they appeared in boldface, but otherwise we shared them, like we were both scales, and the aureole the beam balancing out the raw power streaming through our split pulse.

But it wasn’t a bridled thing. The power turned on us suddenly, pulsing and alive, and we groaned together, bartering for breath as those shared memories fragmented into incomplete and current thoughts.

More…love this…can’t stop…thank you…

And, finally,
Fuck. Now
.

His orgasm drenched me in his aura, I could see it in our joining, and the syllables of my name arched gold across his tongue, into my mouth and down to warm where my bruised heart slammed mercilessly in my chest. When I cried out, sending my red aura channeling across to saturate his soul, it was in the tongue of the same ancient power that caused stars to shatter in the sky, elemental chaos reigning, the rich twining of color trailing behind like the tail of a shooting star.

I opened my eyes in the last moment, Hunter clasped close, and stared at the stars above. Each one looked cocked and ready to shoot. Yet as I gloried in the rightness and oneness and random perfection of an observable universe, I knew even celestial bodies were subject to certain laws. Strongly opposing elements only came together, brightly, because of so many other far-off deaths.

• • • *
      

“Your map is fucked up.” My voice was disembodied as we lay in the near darkness on that narrow bed, and raw from the yelling I’d done before we made love. Hunter had gone downstairs to retrieve some bottled water—hadn’t even gotten shot in the ass by fatal arrows while doing it—but I didn’t attempt to escape or follow. I was boneless and numb, parched from my loss of breath and dizzy from the gift of his.

“No,” he said, reclining beside me as he took a long swig from his bottle, one strong thigh bent and resting against mine, the other hanging off the bed. “The constellations are correct. The rest are frozen stars.”

I glanced back at the sky and only then noted the stars I’d thought were positioned incorrectly were all blazing more brightly than the others. I should have known I’d never catch Hunter making an astronomical mistake. He took the reading of the sky far too seriously. I was a novice, and that was being generous. “Frozen?”

“Black holes. All that’s left of giant stars that have evolved, contracted, and died.”

I shifted, trying to make out his features, but I was prone, and much of his face was hidden by my pillow. But his silhouette showed he was gazing up at his treasured recreation. “You track the death of stars?”

“Only the large ones.” He paused uncertainly before continuing. His voice rumbled deeply; I could feel it vibrating through the pillow beneath my head. “They have the shortest lives.”

I had enough trouble remembering the days of the week on the Western calendar, so while I didn’t know exactly what he was talking about, I did detect the sad undercurrent to his whisper. “Why?”

“Why do I track them?” I felt him shift, and nodded. He returned his attention to the heavens with a sigh, but not before I smelled myself on his breath. I warmed again like he was still in me. “The irony, I suppose. The idea that something so enormous, that once gave off such heat and light, can collapse in an instant, with such force and density even light can’t escape…”

I sat up on my elbow, and did study him now.

His eyes flicked to me, then away again, and he brought his bottled water up to his lips self-consciously. “It fascinates me.”

“It should frighten you,” I said sharply, because we obviously weren’t speaking of frozen stars anymore. Hunter, sensing my mood shift as clearly as if it was his own—and, who knew, it probably was—inched away and didn’t answer.

“I don’t understand,” I finally said, shaking my head as I sank back down, resting as my eye traced the pattern of the black holes. I didn’t explain what I meant, but I didn’t need to. He’d been so deep inside me he could probably explain me to myself.

“It’s simple,” he said after a time. “The Light in you is magnified because of your darkness. I’m like a child pressing my nose against a windowpane, seeing the source of the light and wanting to warm myself with it.”

“I don’t see it.”

“Because for you it’s like the sun. You’re blinded when looking directly at it.”

“But for you?”

Warm breath passed again over my skin, then the cool slide of one fingertip tracing my hips. Bumps shot along my thigh, tightened my nipples, raised hairs on my arms. Hunter’s whisper was steady as always. “It’s like the touch of twilight, a fleeting and beautiful thing. Even now, in the dark, it feels like waves rolling over my ankles. It makes me think a peaceful balance between the two really can exist.”

I didn’t know what to say to that. I didn’t feel beautiful or rare. But I couldn’t deny the peace slipping over me, coaxing me to release my questions and sorrows for now, and steal this sliver of time while I could. If I let my vision blur, it even felt like I was floating in that wrongly marked sky, weightless and buoyant amid the remains of dead stars. The power I’d felt before, the aureole obliterating the skin that separated us, was fading. And now, I thought dizzily, I was just tired. So I curled up and finally closed my eyes, drifting off at some point before sunrise, still blind to whatever it was Hunter saw as he continued to stare down at me.

• • • *
      

Chandra had been the one to tell Hunter where I was. She’d awoken in the cave at Cathedral Canyon, untied herself in short order—as I knew she would—then hiked back to town, which wasn’t as bad as it sounds. She wasn’t a star sign, but she could still move four times as fast as any mortal on foot. Once there she’d contacted the one person she knew could save me from myself. I suppose I should’ve been grateful. If she’d contacted Warren instead of Hunter, I’d be in a secret hospital, unconscious, and wearing someone else’s skin by now.

However, I doubt Chandra had predicted this turn of events, I thought, rising to dress at some point the next afternoon. It was Sunday—the day of Kimber’s metamorphosis and the doppelgänger’s deadline—and I knew I wasn’t the only one in Vegas waking with the distressed realization of what they’d done the night before. Despite the aureole we’d shared, and the solace I’d taken in Hunter’s bed and body, the morning after any ill-considered knee-jerk response was bound to appear sordid in the light of day. It seemed sadly appropriate that Hunter’s makeshift sky had been whitewashed into oblivion in the day’s light.

Hunter wasn’t stupid; he had to suspect I wasn’t making love to him as much as I’d been escaping the haunting image of Ben and Regan together. At least, not at first. Worse, he’d been willing to settle for it, which meant it was less a matter of him taking advantage of me than my exploitation of the perpetual state of hope I knew he lived in. I had exposed that hope. He had let me.

Of course, he also knew the moment I rose from his bed. He didn’t try to stop me, though I felt his gaze on my back and heard the bedcovers rustling as he shifted. I didn’t want to turn around and risk seeing anger—or worse, foolishness—stamped across those stoic features, but I owed him enough to at least look at him. So steeling myself to the expected hostility, I masked my own features and whirled.

He was sitting up, propped where the two walls met, the white sheet draped over him from navel down, though one leg was bent, exposed from thigh to ankle, his foot disappearing again under the covers. He watched me without blinking, everything he’d done and said the night before naked in those dark eyes. He didn’t look ashamed or foolish or apologetic, or anything you’d expect of a man who’d caught a woman sneaking from his bed. And with one short word, he opened to me again.

“Stay.”

My knees almost buckled.

“No,” I said quietly. I laced up the boots to my ridiculous costume, fingers trembling slightly. “I have to make sure he’s okay.”

But we both knew I was lying. If there’d even been a chance of Ben being killed or mortally wounded the night before, we would have both worked to save him then. But Regan hadn’t been killing him. That wasn’t what she’d wanted me to see.

“Why?”

I skipped past the stock replies and straightened to give him the real answer. “He makes me feel soft.”

The dark eyes narrowed. “I thought you didn’t like that.”

But I wanted it all the same, I thought, wincing. How fucked up was that? “There’s a strength in being vulnerable.”

“I know,” he said sharply.

I swallowed hard. He did. He was doing just that by showing me into his workshop via his secret passageway. By lying naked—literally and figuratively—in a bed he’d allowed me to share. By opening his body and mind to me so completely I’d momentarily forgotten myself. But…I sighed.

But Ben.

“I know what you’re thinking, Jo,” Hunter said, his voice so reasonable I was sure he’d rehearsed this during the night. “Peace and quiet sounds good. Some harmless little mortal sounds safe. But it won’t satisfy you for long.”

I wanted to tell him he didn’t know what would satisfy me, but after last night I couldn’t even think it. “Don’t push me, Hunter. I’m being pushed from too many sides right now, and I don’t need it from you.”

“No,” he said evenly. “It’s exactly what you need.”

I covered my face with my hands, slumping slightly, just for a moment. “Please. Just stop.”

He paused…but he didn’t stop. “So what do I make you feel, then? Because it’s something.”

Guilt. Chaos. Divided.

I looked him in the eye, needing to prove I too could be strong and vulnerable at the same time, and thinking the truth would settle things between us once and for all. “Whenever I look at you I feel at war with myself. You make me think of need, like there’s something lacking in myself. That, and violence.”

He winced before he could help himself, looking sad, like he’d trusted me with something fragile and I’d responded by smashing it at his feet.

“Look, Hunter—” I was reaching toward him, but he squeezed his eyes shut and jerked his head.

“You’ll make it worse.”

My frozen silence was making it worse anyway. I glanced down at the workshop floor, the organized clutter of tools and chests and tablets and books. Foam templates spilled from his waste bin, crumpled papers drooping over the drawing table and onto the floor. Chandra’s arrival had obviously interrupted his work. And he’d dropped everything to come to me.

“You know it’s not out there, right?” He huffed humorlessly at my returned look of incomprehension. “The lack you’re talking about. It just goes on and on. And one day you’ll be cruising along, doing the work you’ve championed for years, and suddenly it’ll rear its head, and your conviction fails.
All this time
, you’ll find yourself thinking,
I’ve been a fool
.” I swallowed hard as his gaze skittered past me, unseeing before he blinked. “But when it happens? It’s actually a relief. You’ll recognize yourself in the mirror again. It’s the epiphany you’ve been seeking laid out right under your nose.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I murmured.

“I’m saying you don’t have to do what you’ve always done,” he said, voice snapping sharp. I swallowed hard, and stepped back. “You can just forget, drop off all the memories that make you
you
, and give yourself leave to
feel more
.”