Night of Cake and Puppets (Daughter of Smoke & Bone, #1.5)

by Laini Taylor

You cannot defeat the Excited Maniac. You can only provoke her.

I want to warm my face against her neck and steam her up like a mirror and write my name on her with my fingertip.

At first, okay, there wasn’t so much softness as frozen-faced numbness, but really it just made me that much more aware of our breath, because our breath was warm and every second that our lips moved near and against each other in this feather-light way, I could feel more. It was like something coming into focus. I couldn’t say at what point I could feel fully, just that we got there. We got there slowly and exquisitely, our breath touching more than our actual lips, so that each small brush of contact was wrapped in longing for the next, and I learned this: The eye’s perception of texture is pale compared to the lips’, and I didn’t know what velvety was until I knew it with my lips.