Page 165 of Slashed Bonds

Not far—an inch, maybe two, the barest tether. The gap he leaves is full of water, not air: thin film sheened over my lips, a ghost of his mouth keeping the heat alive even when he’s not touching me.

The spray comes down harder on my back, colder now that his chest is gone, but the part of me where he was is a furnace. There is a shape in the space between us, the way a body casts a wake, and I can feel the edges of it as if I’d swallowed him whole and now he’s living under my tongue.

He says, low, “Are you drenched for me?”

I grin.

It’s not a performative thing—not the show-practice I learned to do in locker rooms, not the little mask that used to get me through a night.

It just bubbles up, which I dare to allow the freedom to bloom, because the way he says it is not a line.

It’s a temperature, a pressure, a force of nature that only knows one way to be.

And then—impossible not to notice—I still can’t see him.

Or anything, really.

The blindfold has been soaked for ten minutes, pressed so close to my face I taste slate and rain and whatever molecules of Killian got left behind when he cinched the knot.

When I tip my head up to try to find him, I find only black, with a thin seam of light where the cloth doesn’t perfectly meet the bridge of my nose.

His blindfold.

He’d tied it over my eyes, careful as a doctor taping a wound.

Not a threat. A containment.

I have never let anyone blind me.

Not for a second.

I would rather be watched, filmed, even, than lose a single sense.

But right now—I’m not afraid. Not even a little.

And that, apparently, is why the room is so loud.

Everything else is dialed up.

The warm stone under my feet, the chill of the droplets where they run down to the hollow of my collarbone, the heat that radiates off Killian’s skin and the ice-rink-bright flash of Nikolai somewhere behind me, always moving, always on some axis I don’t anticipate.

With the world narrowed to touch, smell, and the thump of my own pulse, I have to re-learn every perimeter. It’s not disorienting; it’s clarifying.

It feels like I’ve shed a layer of skin, a filter I used to keep between my body and the world.

I can hear the water landing on the slate, can count the way it falls: heavy, even, relentless, then splintering into a thousand tiny streams like glass shattering in slow motion.

The tile is so cold at my heel and so hot at my shin it’s as if the room is trying to start a chemical reaction with me at the epicenter. I couldn’t guess at the smells before.

Most rooms, all I get is bleach and skin and something else, always the same, always the generic wet-wool scent of a life spent in borrowed spaces.

But now, with the blindfold on, it’s all I can do not to choke on the cloud.

There’s Killian’s scent, so sharp and metallic it’s almost taste, clean iron and the kind of cold that leaves your teeth ringing. Beneath that is Nikolai, and that one is both easy and impossible to parse: he’s every rink I’ve ever bled on, every puck I ever lost sight of because someone else was faster, but also skin, spiked with something green and alive—peppermint, maybe, or the kind of mint that grows wild and tries to take over the yard.

It’s sweet when he’s next to my face, and something different when he’s behind me, almost animal, almost blood.

And I smell myself…a unique shift in my aroma.