Page 70 of Falling for a Villainous Vampire

But this time it makes me die inside.

My heart drops through my body and beyond to the floor below. No, no, no, no, never, never, never, my mind panics. And my memories don’t even contradict it this time. They are empty of information, as silent as the grave, as silent as Phone has been, as silent as everything that could get me to stop. I don’t want to stop, is the thing.

At which point it hits me.

I’m not antsy and anxious and crawling out of my own skin because he’s here.

I’m all those things because I like that he is. I like living with this man. I want to live with him more. I don’t want to hesitate when he says, Let’s watch the antics of Frasier Crane again today. I don’t want to hold in my laugh when he asks me what a meme is. I find him practicing how to knot a necktie in the mirror, over an upper body that is completely bare, and I want to find it hilarious.

But most of all, I want to go beyond the clinical, the functional.

In fact, the only bad part of all of this is how that sudden need comes out.

“Would you like to kiss me?” I ask. Like a fucking teenager. Like I’m thirteen fucking years old. I briefly feel like someone has ripped a Band-Aid off my soul and exposed a raw wound underneath.

But then his face breaks into a smile like the sun.

And I think it heals.

I think I’m all right.

“I would like that very much, my sorceress,” he says. “Come to me, and it can be so,” he says. So I go. I cross the room and climb over the back of the couch, directly into his arms. And instead of thinking about it for another thousand times, I press my lips to his. I try it out for size. It won’t be anything, I tell myself.

Turns out, it’s a perfect fit.

In fact it’s so much of one that I freeze like that for a moment. Eyes probably as wide as his, hands holding myself steady on his strong shoulders, lips barely moving. Not one bit of me prepared for how beautiful this feels, how right, how much it weirdly thrills me.

That bloom of heat:

It’s definitely arousal.

And it’s almost more intense than his mouth between my legs.

It’s a fever, and to such a degree that when he pulls away to give me a hushed “By the gods,” I can’t seem to stand it. I drag him back, immediately, desperately, one hand fisting in his hair, the other right around his shoulders. Mouth crushed to his, more frantic than I’ve ever been about anything like this.

I need more of him.

No amount will ever be enough.

It doesn’t even feel like enough when he kisses me back. He matches my energy, mouth as hungry as my own, every move, every bit of the kiss coming with a deep and urgent groan. His hand is in my hair; he almost lifts me up, over him, into the air. And when he finally does pull away, it’s not to stop or speak.

It’s to get me on my back.

He spreads me out underneath him.

Then covers my body with his own, and kisses me again, and again, and again until I can hardly get air in. I have to remind him that I need to breathe—but somehow all that seems to do is make us laugh. I’m laughing in the middle of making out with a man, like that’s just easy for me to do now.

I don’t feel awkward, cynical, silly.

I feel like he looks—all dazed with desire, single-minded.

Like he’s just absolutely dying to fuck, I think. Though somehow, I’m still thinking of something else. My mind is on him feasting, rather than anything more straightforward and human. It’s not really imagining that this is going to lead to that kind of sex, until he abruptly sits back so he can pull his jersey over his head.

And I see it.

I see it.

He.