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Pollux shakes his head, hesitating as he spreads his claw-tipped fingers and looks at them. “Scary…huh? We are fear. We were once boogeymen. Now we are dream eaters. We craft nightmares and feed on terror.”
“Spooky scary skeletons,” I sing.
Pollux exhales a laugh. “I suppose.”
“You don’t seem very scary to me.”
His thumb traces my cheek again. “Have you ever been afraid, dearest? Is it an emotion you even know? Or…do you always go straight to worry and anger?”
My eyes roll, and I fall onto my back. Inexplicably, my knuckles meet atop my stomach and run up and down one another. Over and over. “I’m a redhead. What do you think?”
He murmurs a curse. “I think you are the most beautiful thing I have ever laid eyes on. I think your mind is the most ethereal place I have ever been.” He lets his gaze drift out across the distance while I watch him. “I think…you have enchanted my mind and my soul. My body seeks to do your will, if only I might discover what it is.”
Well, holy heck…
He seems different here.
And not just because he looks different.
For some reason, my head seems to have made him softer. Safer. One hundred percent Pollux parenting two kids in an apron.
With fangs and claws, but peace and calm to match. Also, rizz. For some reason I have given him what I can only describe using the slang my kids bring into my presence against my will. That last line he whispered while looking dreamily out across the world my brain has made felt so scandalous I can hardly contain myself.
My hand lifts before I realize, and his attention falls squarely when my touch glides across his cheek, over a dark line in his skin. My touch finds its way to his ears. They’re pointed, spearing alongside his hair like pale knives.
His touch drops around my throat. His thumb skims my pulse, adding just enough pressure to the tempo of my heart. I feel it beat against the pad.
A swear rumbles from his lips.
His face lowers, and I swallow.
Somewhere, deep in the back of my skull, I do not know what I’m doing.
I’m not a wild person. I’m not attracted to oddities, evil, or danger.
I’ve been too angry in the waking world to bother finding him handsome beyond a vague mention of how his conventional attractiveness may be something he uses to manipulate others. In this moment, I have never been more attracted to anyone. It’s like the reality of the situation has been stripped away.
He’s not a monster now that he looks like one.
He’s just…beautiful. And I want him in ways I shouldn’t.
This will haunt me when I wake up.
Perhaps I’ll never recover from the guilt.
His nose skims mine.
His fingers flex around my neck as my eyes fall closed.
In the darkness, I expect I’ll wake up to Chai sitting on my throat again, but I don’t. I continue to feel him, his lips, his breath. His scent in my lungs.
“Dearest…” he whispers against me, and maybe that’s what prompted this whole mess in the first place. That little insane thing he called me this afternoon got stuck in my head and rewrote some deprived part of my brain. Dearest. No one has ever called me anything half so enchanting.
The few boyfriends I’ve had stopped marvelously at babe.
This is absolutely a product of the dumpster mind of a young woman who has not been on a date in years. I’m already disappointed in myself. Bad people shouldn’t be pretty enough that I still think they’re pretty when they look like dark faeries.
I laugh.
