Marianna
I wait for Blake to step out of my embrace. I’ll let him. It’s his choice to make, even if my fingers curl into his shirt, bunching the fabric.
His lips are heavy and full against mine, but they part, and he exhales deeply, trembling as his hand travels up my back to clutch the back of my neck.
“You’re doing this because you feel like you have to,” he says grimly, but heat laces through the words.
“No,” I whisper, opening my eyes. His face comes into view as I look up, searching his gaze. “Blake, I… I wish I could go back and change everything. I would have–I would have let you in.”
He shakes his head but kisses me again, harder this time, putting his whole body into it like this is the last time we’ll do this. He backs me against the wall in the entryway of his apartment, bracing his forearm just above my head. My hands travel down his chest and stomach before holding against his belt loops, and the kiss ends once more, leaving me breathless and warm.
“I won’t go further than this,” he says, but his tone is damning, full of tangled desire and grief. “Not like this.”
“Why not?”
“Because you were right to push me away. Everything you said to me the night I came to you, seeing you pregnant with Skye for the first time… you were right. I scared you. I lied to you, and I didn’t tell you what I was. It was my choice to push you away. You had every right to hate me, and for years I was glad you did. I have regrets–many of them–but I never regretted you. I want you, Marianna. Fuck, I’ve missed you. I love you, but we–I am not someone who can ever just… exist with someone like you.”
I pull away slightly, my back flat against the wall. He winces, closes his eyes as he struggles to find words to convey how he feels that won’t rip me to absolute shreds.
“I didn’t mean it like that,” he amends. “Marianna–”
“I know,” I whisper. “I–I don’t even remember most of that night, you know. When we fought. I don’t remember it. I blocked it out, I think. I regretted everything I said to you, though. I remember that clearly–that feeling has haunted me for almost a decade–”
“I don’t want to trap you more than I already have,” he says steadily, his eyes glowing softly in the darkness.
“You didn’t trap me. You gave me our daughter. I was the one who forced you away.”
“I didn’t fight it when I should have,” he says. “That makes me a weak man.”
“You were just as scared as I was,” I whisper, resting my head in the crook of his shoulder. I smooth my hands back up his chest until I’m tucked against him, breathing in his familiar scent. Like a winter storm. Like something bigger and grander than me. Something wild and fierce, but mysterious. “Show me.”
“What?”
“Show me your powers.”
He swallows hard, his chest convulsing. “I can’t do that.”
“Why not?”
“Because it’s–I could hurt you.”
“I’m already dying,” I whisper.
His free hand finds my hip. He smooths his thumb over my skin where my skirt has come loose where I tried tucking into my pants, and his touch is enough to send me barreling into heat.
“I made a mistake all those years ago,” I tell him, but he groans, sucking in a breath.
“Everything was my fault. It was my fault, Marianna.”
“I want to make it right. I want to… to see you, Blake. Really see you. Can you show me who you are? Powers and all?”
He groans again, his face just beside mine as he leans forward, closing his eyes like he’s in pain. “I’ve never shown anyone what I can actually do,” he says under his breath. “They know enough, I suppose, and I let them use my gifts to their advantage, but…”
“Show me,” I whisper, unbuttoning his shirt. I’m unsure why, but I just want to feel his skin. I spread my hands over his bare chest, and he sighs. I drink in his warmth, letting it flood my body, and he finally relents. He leans back far enough to look in my eyes. The world around us shifts as his eyes begin to glow. My vision blurs for several seconds before settling again, and this time, we’re in a void of darkness, just me and him.
Stars dance all around us, woven together by threads made of mist and starlight that twinkle overhead, suspended in mid-air.
He touches me, his hand smoothing up my arm to my shoulder, then my neck, until he caresses my cheek. I close my eyes as the heavens fade and are replaced by… a vision. A memory, something I’m witnessing through his perspective. Blake, as a boy of maybe fourteen, hurrying into a shoe-box sized dorm room and promptly throws up blood while it drips from his nose and ears. Blake, standing in front of a massive orrery in Moonrise, fighting for his life to stay upright while voices scream through his head, and a woman in white whispers in his ears to listen, but I don’t know what the voices show him, say to him…
He’s just a kid. A kid witnessing all the evil in the world, and he’s not as strong as he thought he was.
Another vision of him walking out of the temple in Moonrise, the color drained from his cheeks, his eyes dry and hollow, nearly crushes me. This is the Blake I remember. Young, emotionless, drifting through life like his own was taken from him.
He brings me back to the woven stars and says, “What do you want to see?”
“Am I in your head?”
“Yes.”
“Does it hurt?”
“Not really,” he says with a short laugh. “It tickles a bit.”
“Show me your favorite memory.”
I feel like I’m out of body when his powers take me to a familiar street tucked between several skyscrapers. Road noise erupts all around us, and I watch Blake, maybe sixteen at the time, look down at a map on his phone, a little lost. He goes to the wrong apartment at first, but then realizes there’s a basement level, and walks back outside feeling… dead. Lifeless and empty, like he’s felt for the past two years after brutal training with the mystics, after seeing every wrong in the world, every death, every unfairness. That’s his gift. Being able to see. He can see everything, and it’s overwhelming.
He finds the door to my old apartment and knocks.
I answer.
This is his memory of seeing me for the first time and… being able to relive it, watching him looking down at me, perplexed, while I scowl and try to tell him off…
I smile as his powers dance around me, painting the picture of the day the voices in his head finally quieted, all because of the girl who couldn’t figure out how to do math.
Blake’s apartment returns in fractals at first. I blink to clear my hazy vision, but I realize with a start we’re standing in a cloud of mist tinged with stars. His powers take up the entire apartment. The lights flicker out. The strange crystal spheres, which match the ones he keeps in Moonrise, light up with his magic where they’re resting on a nearby bookshelf. I turn to the spheres, watching his memories play out like a movie–memories of us. Some things… I don’t even remember. Little moments, I guess, that mattered immensely to him but went right over the top of my head.
“My mother can turn back time,” he says. “My dad gets the occasional vision. They’re similar in that way. Both can scry. I’m different. I can look into the heavens, burrow into any mind I want, and occasionally, I can see the future if I look hard enough.” His powers surge, lighting up the room to the point that it’s nearly blinding, before they fade in a phantom gust of wind. The apartment goes silent once again, and I turn back to him, my heart hammering.
“How many times have you looked into my head?”
“Just once. Twice, if you count trying to train you on the use of shields.”
“Why didn’t you show me this before? When we were younger?”
“I was afraid you wouldn’t accept me anymore. You were the only person who ever saw me for what I am.”
“A nerd?” I say with a laugh, and to my relief, he smiles, looking down at his shoes.
“Yeah. I guess.”
“This is what Skye will be able to do one day? Travel like that? Move through… space and time, through minds?”
“Yes, she’s already well on her way.”
“And you’ll be there for her when I’m gone, right?” The words are heavy on my tongue.
“I promise,” he says in a near whisper, and the boiling tension between us snaps.
I lunge at him, launching into his arms. He catches me, spinning me toward the open door to his room, which is shrouded in shadow. The kiss is… otherworldly. It’s the kind of kiss that would knock me off my feet if I’d still been standing, but my back hits his bed, his scent all around me, and nothing else matters.
He presses a kiss to my jaw, then my neck, sucking my tender skin. His teeth rake across my collarbone while I hastily unbutton his shirt, desperate to touch him–to feel him again, just skin separating us.
Late at night, when I’m alone and hungry for someone’s touch… it’s him I think about. It’s always been him.
But my neck aches where Dean’s mark was just sliced from my flesh.
I wince, and he lifts his head.
“I’m sorry,” I whisper as tears of fresh pain prickle along my lash line. I can’t fight them off.
“We don’t have to do anything, Anna. I think we’re getting ahead of ourselves–”
I pull him back to me, my mouth on his, and kiss him like my life depends on it because, honestly, I think it might. His touch is like a wildfire spreading through my body, burning away every terrible memory, every echoing, lingering touch left behind by a man who hated me so much he tried to drag me into death with him.
When I bury my face against Blake’s neck, dragging my tongue along the column of his throat… the King of Mystics finally bends until he breaks.
“Fuck,” he growls, low in his throat, and presses me into the mattress. “Careful. I don’t want to hurt you.”
I drag my teeth along his collarbone like he just did to me, mimicking the movement, and he sighs, rolling his neck like what I’m doing to him is making him unravel.
His hand caresses my breast before smoothing over my stomach, pulling my shirt free of my pants, then lower, unbuttoning my jeans and pulling the zipper down.
And then he’s pinning my wrists above my head, his mouth trailing down my body until he kisses above my navel. He lets go of my wrists, and I’m beyond the ability to move. I don’t want to break this spell. I can’t take it. I can’t handle the fire burning through me every time his mouth touches my skin.
He roughly pulls my jeans down and tosses them across the room. My panties are next, and the cool night air brushes over my skin, awakening my senses. Adrenaline courses through me and pools at my center, and his mouth dips below the apex of my thighs with a resounding growl of what I can only describe as satisfaction.
But, Blake being Blake, he reels himself back in at the very last second.
“We shouldn’t,” he whispers against my inner thigh, his breath hot and shallow against my aching folds. “Marianna, what have you done to me?”
“Please,” I whisper, then suck in a breath, letting it out in a breathy moan when he presses another wet, hungry kiss to my thigh. He lets out a shallow grunt before he nibbles my skin–anything to stop himself from what he really wants to do–what he’s desperately hungry for.
“Please,” I repeat, more desperate than before.
Blake, the Royal Prince of Crescent Falls, spreads my legs wide, and lets go of the restraints that control his life, giving in to what he wants, for once.
And it’s me.