My lashes flutter closed, and I have to be out of my fucking mind, but I want it. I’d choose a mental break from reality over this nightmare I’ve landed in.
“Good girl,” he hums the moment I do it. The shiver that flits through me from his words alone tells me I shouldn’t be as trusting as I am with this man or his magic.
I’m alone in a bedroom with an admitted vampire. And now I’m trusting him with literally everything I have.
I have got to fix my fucked-up life at some point.
“You can trust me. And you should know you can trust me, because I didn’t have to ask your permission to change your reality, Crymson.”
Alarm bells ring out in my mind.
“Wait. What...”
But then it’s all washed away. I hear it even. Waves sweep in, and they pull away in a hypnotic rhythm of an ocean and nature and tranquility.
I can’t see anything but darkness. I still feel his touch though. I tighten my hold on him. My hands in his grounds me. It’s a coolness that I cling on to. Maybe it’s some of my fear clinging to him. Because I may want to slip away into whatever magic this is, but I don’t want to do it alone.
The wind picks up violently, my hair slashing across my face. A hurricane of emotions threaten to spill into the tranquil setting he’s giving me, and it terrifies me that I might ruin this before it has even begun.
“Relax,” I hear him whisper.
“I—I can’t.”
“Yes, you can. Just breathe.”
I shake my head back and forth with a jagged breath that only makes me more tense.
“I can’t,” I say on a shaking exhale.
“Think of something else. Anything else.”
“Can I kiss you?” I blurt, and the moment I ask it, he fully appears.
The winds calm. The chaotic energy recedes.
His tall stature comes to life out of the darkness like I drew him from the shadows. A shy smile curls Seven’s full lips. He leans in, his head dipping low as the feel of warm sand beneath my feet becomes a sudden reality. Nothing else matters. The most beautifully broken man is holding me. A perfect sunset that I can’t yet see warms my skin. Cold water materializes. It slides up against my ankles before slipping back into an unseen ocean.
“Close your eyes, Crymson,” he commands confidently when his lips are just over mine, hovering but not quite touching.
Everything is intensified. It’s like my entire life, I’ve been feeling things at a lower vibration, and I’m just now experiencing the world as it truly is. Shivers race up my arms the second his hands slide down my body. My lashes close the moment he commands it. I stand waiting. I’ve never felt so alive. Every nerve in my body tingles with anticipation.
Or maybe that’s his magic.
“I can hear your heartbeat.” Those words kiss across my lips, but that’s all he gives me.
My throat tightens as I swallow hard, and still, I wait. I want to feel him closer. I want everything he can give me, if only for a little while.
“I’m not allowed to taste you,” he whispers, his words skimming along my jaw and throat. His breath is a light sensation that shivers all through me. My thighs press hard with a tingling in my core that I can’t ignore as his lips brush ever so carefully at the base of my neck. “If I kiss you... I’ll want more. And that’s not allowed.”
The solidness of his chest is against mine as I shift even closer against him, pressing myself against every hard part of his body.
“Who says you’re not allowed?” I ask, my lips grazing the shell of his ear. The hard tremble of his body against mine pulls a smile at the corner of my mouth.
He’s so stiff and quiet usually. It feels good to tear all of that tense silence away from him with just the flutter of my breath along his ear.
“Mmm, too many people.” His hand slides lower, and soon I’m arching against his touch before it firmly slips over the curve of my ass. The fabric of my button-down shirt wrinkles between long, exploring fingers.
I’ve played games for survival all my life. I’ve used my body and my looks even when I was little and confused and scared in too many shitty foster homes. It’s how I started dating Van. He took me in on my seventeenth birthday. I thought he saved me. Really, he brought me right into his abusive, toxic love, and I was too damn young to realize it.