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Call it carnal curiosity—intellectual lust. Wanting to lick her mouth to taste her fever, wanting to crush her breasts in my fingers to test if her nipples are more sensitive than her bruises.
She’s crawling with germs. With her stuffy nose and her voice hoarse from a sore throat and her infected leg in its clean white bandaging. Normally, this would make her utterly repellent to me. If she were anybody else, I wouldn’t have so much as stepped in the same room as her.
She’s practically a dynamite of bacteria and illness lit from both ends. The sick curiosity within me is telling me to grab the dynamite with both ends and find out if it’ll blow me apart.
I push off the doorway and cross the space between us to yank Willow’s towel out of her hands. She glares at me but stays silent.I run the towel along her limbs, drying her body with clinical efficiency, then I toss the towel aside. Reaching over Willow’s shoulders, I grab her hair in both hands, wringing the dark strands dry with my fingers, bending her back to let the sink behind her catch the water.
The sudden tug on her hair forces Willow to bow her head back, arching her neck.
Her neck—the only part of her not covered with bruises. Gossamer skin veiling the bouquets of vulnerable parts. Trachea and larynx and oesophagus, the carotid arteries rich with oxygenated blood.
How good would it feel, I wonder, to fall on her like Cerberus did back in that alleyway? To sink my teeth into that porcelain skin and rip into all those nerves and muscles and tubes and veins.
“Stop falling in love with me,” Willow rasps. “You’re embarrassing yourself.”
I tighten my fingers in her hair, pulling harder. “Like I would ever fall in love with scum like you.”
“You’re not looking at me the way someone looks at scum,” she says.
She makes no attempt to free herself from my grip. Like she’s not scared I’m stronger than her, that she’s naked in my bathroom, in my house, between my arms. Like she doesn’t know we’re alone here and that she could scream for hours and nobody would ever hear her.
“How am I looking at you?”
My voice is calm, but my pulse is a hot drumbeat in a cold void. I lean down over her, pressing the strength of my presence down on her, willing her to cower and flinch from me.
She doesn’t. “You’re looking at me like I’m meat and you’re a hungry snake.”
I laugh right against her mouth, a short, breathless sound. “What if Iamhungry?”
Her hand shoots up—fast, considering she’s woozy from the fever, the medication, the hot bath. She slams her palm against my throat and curls her fingers into my neck. Hard, like she’s trying to pierce the skin with her fingernails.
“Stay hungry,” she commands roughly.
I push my knees between hers until the flat of my thigh is pressed between her legs, the hottest part of her still despite the fever.
“Why should I?” I ask against her ear, pulling harder on her hair.
The blood rushes through my body, everywhere but between my legs. I’m not turned-on, but I’m aroused—excited—in a way that makes me feel a little insane.
“You lost the hunt,” Willow says, pushing harder on my neck, applying pressure.
It constricts the flow of air to my brain, makes the blood rush like a storm through me, my pulse deafening in my ears, my entire body buzzing as if my muscles are powered by raw electricity.
“So what?” I trace the taut line of her neck with my lips. Touching, not tasting. Not yet.
What would her blood taste like? Not sweet and fragrant, but dark and moreish, like liquorice and iron. What would her moans of pain sound like if I bit her or choked her?
Like music, like a glorious fucking aria.
“So,” Willow bites out. “Animals only get toeatwhat theycatch, fucker.”
I pull back to look at her. Her eyes gleam dully from the dark hollows of their sockets. A flush glows crimson in her cheeks, like there’s a furnace glowering right underneath the skin. Hermouth looks like I want to test the red flesh of it with the tip of a knife.
“I’m not an animal, Lynch.” I release her hair, but my fingers linger at the nape of her neck, trailing along the contours of her spine, her neck, thumbs pressing against the ridges of her trachea. “Animals hunt for sustenance—you’re nothing but poison. Vermin. Something to be eradicated.”
She laughs, dark and hateful.
“I could say the same about you and your kind, the rich leeches on the flank of the world.” She tightens her hand around my throat. “MaybeIshould be the one huntingyou.”
