Starling House(88)

I’m expecting it to feel like it did before: a reckless collision, a thing that could only happen at the ragged edge of his self-restraint. But this time is different. This time Arthur kisses me with an awful, excruciating tenderness, like I’m spun sugar or fine crystal, like he has all the time in the world. It feels good. It feels dangerous. I want him suddenly to be less tender, to leave me with my lips split and my heart perfectly whole.

I’m shaking worse now, breathing too hard. Arthur’s chest touches mine and my entire body flinches away, as if I’m protecting some delicate instrument behind my breastbone.

Arthur pulls instantly back. “Did I hurt you?”

“No.” My voice is small and wretched.

“Do you—do you want to stop?”

“No,” I say, even more wretchedly.

Arthur pauses, studying me. I can’t meet his eyes. He touches his thumb to my lower lip, still so gentle I want to weep. “You asked me why I paid for Jasper’s tuition.”

“Because you didn’t want me to come back.”

“I lied.” He’s whispering now, his breath ghosting across my skin. “I did it so you wouldn’t have to come back. So that, if you came back, it would be because you wanted to.” Then, even softer, as if the words are coming from inside my own skull, “What do you want, Opal?”

“I want—” The truth is I want him and I’m scared of wanting him and ashamed of being scared. The truth is I’m a coward and a liar and a cold bastard, just like my mother, and in the end I will let him drown to save myself. I should cut and run right now, before it’s too late, before he finds out what kind of person I really am.

But I can’t seem to make myself move.

I close my eyes. Maybe there’s no difference between wanting and needing except in degree; maybe if you desire something badly enough, for long enough, it becomes a demand. “This,” I whisper. “I want this.”

Arthur’s hand slides to the back of my neck and the flat of his palm steadies me, pins me gently to the earth. “It’s alright.” He lowers his face until I can feel the rush of his breath on my lips. “I’ve got you, Opal.”

And I feel myself going under, sinking into the weight of his hand. My limbs go slow and heavy. I’m not shaking anymore.

I let him back me against the door. I let him touch me, his hands simultaneously rough and reverent. He lays his jaw along mine and speaks to me, and his voice is like that, too—the tone harsh, the words sweet. “It’s alright,” he says again, and “let me,” and once, raggedly, “fuck, Opal.”

I let him lay me down on the floor, the rug impossibly soft under the bare wings of my shoulder blades. I let him press into me so slowly I can’t breathe, can’t think, for wanting.

Arthur holds himself still, then, his body strung tight. “Are you sure—” he starts, but I’m suddenly, entirely sure, and tired of waiting.

“Christ on a bicycle,” I say, and shove him over, rolling until he’s beneath me, inside me, his hair a tangled black halo on the floor. His expression is stark and scraped raw, almost desperate; it’s the face of a starving man before a feast, holding on to his table manners only by the very tips of his fingers.

I imagine stamping on those fingers, one by one. I smile down at him, and I know by the hitch of his breath that it’s my real one: crooked and mean and just as hungry as he is.

I catch his hands—hovering, uncertain—and slide them up my thighs. I press his fingers into my hips, hard enough to hurt, hard enough that tomorrow I will see the faint blue ghosts of his thumbs and remember his hands holding me like I belong to him.

There’s no more hesitating, after that, no more doubt. There’s just the two of us and the thing between us, an urgent, animal hunger that swells until it swallows us both.

I let him hold me, afterward, and the geometry of our bodies feels natural, inexplicably familiar. It feels like four walls and a roof overhead, a space stolen from the rest of the world that belongs only to me. I don’t let myself think the word, but it moves through me like a shout down a mine shaft: a subterranean echo that goes on and on, loud enough to make the timbers shake.

Arthur’s knuckle traces a tear from the corner of my eye to my temple. He doesn’t say anything.

“Can I—” I’ve never asked to stay the night with anyone before and I don’t like it much. It feels like turning belly up, exposing my weakest flesh to him. “It’s just, with the motel gone, I don’t really know where to . . .”

A darkness passes over Arthur’s face, and for an unbearable second I think he’s going to send me away again, but then he presses his lips to the place where my collarbone meets my shoulder.

He leads me upstairs.

Arthur has spent his life preparing—for battle, for Beasts, for his own bitter end—but he wasn’t prepared for this. He wasn’t prepared for the flayed look in her eyes or the feel of her above him, or the way she wept when she came, like some final barricade had been breached inside her and left her without defense. He wasn’t prepared for the sight of her in his bed, the way the white tops of her shoulders would extend past the edge of his quilt. He looks away, but their afterimage lingers on the backs of his eyelids, a ghostly pair of half-moons.

Opal falls asleep easily and thoroughly, as a child would. Arthur thinks it’s probably a sign of physical exhaustion more than an act of trust, but he resolves to deserve it anyway. He holds himself rigidly awake, listening for the creak of a hinge, the scrape of a key in a lock. Baast keeps him company, sitting in the round window with her eyes fixed on the ground below.