I hated that I couldn’t see her eyes. If I could, I’d weed out whatever was making her upset and destroy it.
It was a joke how quickly my principles were falling over left and right to make room for the bloodshed I’d unleash on the world for her. I’d repaint landscapes ruby red with the insides of any fucker who’d hurt her, and all she’d have to do was point a finger in the direction she wanted the massacre to start in.
Empty space formed between her lips, whatever she was thinking trying to find its way out.
“I honestly can’t remember a time now when I didn’t feel it,” she started thoughtfully, timbre naked and quiet. “But I know it started in gymnastics and just got worse after Johnny.”
My lungs suddenly felt ten times as heavy.
I actually had to momentarily shift my focus from her face to reminding myself to fucking breathe. She kept toying with my hair, eyes trained on my chest.
“The feeling is like… every drop of my blood is on fire. Sometimes it’s bearable.” A hollow whisper stole her voice down to nothing. “Sometimes it hurts so bad I want to scream and never stop.”
My knees nearly buckled to the floor, and in the most selfish way, I grabbed her harder for support. My bicep curled tighter around her waist, wanting to squeeze out the pain she was in. There was just so fucking much of it inside of her, it made me feel feral—tweaking like an addict on all ways I could get it all out of her.
“I know it's anxiety or guilt or whatever, but I call it the fire. It makes my skin itch and crawl. My heart races too fast trying to outrun this thing that’s inside of me because it feels like it’s going to kill me. It’s exhausting. And constant. Every single day, the feeling is there running beneath my skin… like being slowly burned alive from the inside out…”
The distracted trance of her fingers in my hair slowed, and springtime eyes lifted to me.
“Except these last few days with you.” My heart gripped the sides of my ribcage, bracing itself for whatever blow was coming off of her lips next. “You consume me instead of the fire. Instead of burning, I feel you.”
Counting my breaths in measured beats, I asked, “What do I feel like?”
“A hurricane.” She barely even had to think about it before she answered. “Sometimes you feel like the eye. Sometimes not.”
Sliding my eyes around her face, the inward pull of my brows was slow-forming and admittedly thrown. That word sat in my head, sounding powerful but feeling like shit.
“The eye of a storm is a pinprick,” I spat. “A fucking dot of peace surrounded by destruction and…”
“I know that.” She cut me off and blinked up at me, unjudging. “I feel that, too.”
With her big eyes staring up at me, my brain went into some kind of shutdown. Not a clean one where the lights are switched to off and it’s quiet. But the kind where shit is malfunctioning and wires are sparking and my brain cells were all running around in circles because not a single one of them knew what to do with her.
Because she wasn’t just dangerous anymore. She wasn’t just venomous.
Scarlett Avery was a lesson in penance for the damned.
She wasn’t dissecting me anymore to see what made me tick.
She was the thing that made me tick.
Her sharp wit, her wild flower scent, the unapologetic way she couldn’t give two shits what anyone thought about her, the drawings she’d pen on her body, the way she teased, the way she talked, the way she laughed, frowned, screamed, cried, the way she looked at me like the world could end tomorrow and she wouldn’t have a single regret.
Fuck, this woman was inside of me.
She was breathing in me.
She was the fire sending me up in flames just like the ones dancing in her eyes. Her soul burned in those emerald pits, and maybe that’s why I’d been obsessed with them from the beginning. I could recount every shade of green they’d ever been like it was my scripture and never tired of being at the center of them.
At the center of her world, I could control it. Bend it. Break it if I wanted.
And I did want.
As equally as I wanted to splatter the world with blood on her behalf, I wanted to punish her for tying me around her little finger as easily as she had.
“That sounds like a pretty fucked up feeling,” I rasped over her, knowing full good and well I was saying that shit to both of us.
Her lovely face pinched, an absurdity mapping out each jagged feature.