Page 74 of The Blood we Crave

Nausea rolls through my stomach, disgusted with myself for what I’d done. For touching her. For allowing myself to lose my self-control.

How could I have been so soft? So weak for someone?

I’d demanded her not to break in front of all those undeserving eyes, yet there I was, breaking apart in that mausoleum. The restraint I’d crafted had exploded in a matter of seconds at the sound of her empty voice.

I’m sickened by myself.

I am not these things, these feeble and tender things she made me. I’d been born with no weakness or emotion—that was what was preached from birth to sentencing. A cold-blooded killer was what I was to become, and any hint of feeling is a virus that needs to be extracted.

Lyra is a plague.

A disastrous affliction.

I’d known that being near her would do this—cause her infection to spread throughout my body before I even had a chance to recognize it was affecting me. She is a beacon of emotion and feeling, always pulling it out of people, involving all the wrong things for someone like me.

Killing her would be easier than living with this.

These visions of her. The tightness in my groin when her name floats across my mind. The physical pinch of pain that radiates in my chest when I remember what she sounded like moaning my name.

I want to hear them again. To taste the cherries on her tongue. To feel my skin against hers because, for the first time, my body didn’t revolt against it.

Since I can recall, my mind has been a weapon. Always sharp, ready to rip the world in two. It had been ground and beaten into something lethal to use against just about everyone.

Yet, it had been quiet between her thighs. Completely empty of turmoil and thought in her arms. The only other place of solace that feels the same is playing piano.

The keys help me get lost.

She makes mewant.

Want things I have no right to. Things I’m not qualified to handle.

And it’s dangerous for people like me to want. To crave. To consume.

“To need people is to fail, Alexander. To want is for the weak. Are you weak, my boy?”

My hands tear through my hair, pushing through the white strands and pulling. Water cascades across me in constant drips as I bend over and open my lungs.

“Fuck!” I roar, the loudest my voice has ever rung in my ears.

I scream as the steam floats around me, scream until I feel my chest rattle in discomfort and the stone walls shake.

My mind wants to kill anything regarding Lyra, to slaughter all the thoughts that spiral around her and pull her apart until nothing remains.

But my body wants to keep her.

My flesh is weak, overpowering hormones trying to take over all the years of discipline I’d mastered. One quirky, bug-loving girl is enough to demolish everything I’d built.

Lyra. Lyra. Lyra. Lyra.

I scrawl her name along the walls of my mind while trying desperately to scrub it clean after every line. Once again, I scream, this feeling too much for me to take.

There’s a reason why I’d stayed away. Why I’d ignored her in the first place, had avoided being in the same space as her.

I know what she is to me.

Lyra. Lyra. Lyra. Lyra.

I can feel my voice starting to give. I’d given too much time for her to fester inside of me. And I was allowing it to continue, allowing it to overrun everything.