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His chain-mesh shirt was cold and hard beneath my fingers as I met his stare through the water, and I swear time actually slowed down. Suddenly creeping past us in slow motion. Neil blinked, and air bubbles spilled from his lips, and his fingers slipped down my arms, and he smiled.
A sobering, clarifying kind of moment before—
We let go at the same time and pushed our way to the surface, gasping for air. The sounds of the party roared back into my awareness; the mute button suddenly being turned off.
My wings weighed what felt like a hundred pounds as I found my footing and a place to stand.
Neil did the same, following suit until he was standing right in front of me. He was dripping wet. I almost laughed, but he looked really good all soaked up and drenching wet.Too good.
“I can’t believe you did that,” he said with a smile.
I cocked my eyebrow.
“Okay, Icanbelieve you did that.” He laughed.
People in the middle of the pool were getting all rowdy, so I drifted back into a small corner, tugging Neil along with me.
My dress was stuck to my body like a second skin, and I caught his eyes glued to it before he glanced back up at me, swallowing thickly. My breaths screeched to a halt somewhere between my lungs and my mouth.
Because the fire I saw burning in his gaze?
That was not the way someone wholesome looked at someone they were simply interested in. It was the way someone looked at you when they wanted to demolish you.Obliterate you.
My brain was having a hard time computing:
Neil. Wholesome. Good.
Neil. Surprising. A little bad?
I found my lost breath, sucking it into my lungs as he lowered his mouth to mine, and every single one of those thoughts disintegrated and blew away in the wind when he kissed me.
I thought I knew all there was to know about how much a kiss could make you feel, but I knew nothing.
Nothing at all.
My senses went haywire, exploding with tastes, and sounds, and feelings completely foreign to me.
Neil’s lips were soft. And slow. And they felt like they were carefully learning all of the curves of mine. But somehow, beneath all of that, his mouth was equally as devastating—mindful and dominating in equal measure.
It was yet another fallacy. Another contradiction to who I’d assumed he was, peeling back another layer of expectation and throwing it out the proverbial window with everything else.
Neil was pure, and honest, and kind—all the good things this world had to offer, and yet his kiss…
His kiss felt like absolute sin.
It was so much dirtier than I ever could’ve imagined. The way he kissed my mouth like he was making love to it; the way his fingers curled around my neck as he slid his tongue over mine.
It was a shocker. A jolt to my system.
There was no way he hadn’t done this before, but I didn’t actually care about that at the moment. Because every ounce of me had flooded with a warm, clawing need. And I was already a fairly greedy person, I’d say, but I familiarized myself with a brand-new level of it as Neil kissed me.
Because no kiss had ever felt this way. Not even close. I could easily admit that. So no way in hell was I about to let it end anytime soon—if ever.
I curled my fingers into his hair and yanked him closer.
I pushed myself into him so hard it bordered on painful, but he pushed back just as hard, shocking me all over again.
The pain and shock coiled itself together with something else and left me with a suffocating ache I wasn’t familiar with; I had the terrifying thought that I could drown in it if I wasn’t careful.