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The more I pretended like she was mine to tease like that, the more it felt like she really was.
I wanted her. I wanted her so badly my chest had a gaping hole in it whenever I wasn’t with her.
I’d take every stolen moment, every fake kiss, every lesson she’d let me teach her. I’d grind myself down to sand and let her leave me behind in the end if it meant I got to soak up everything that she was right now.
A fool, that’s what I was. A fool who wouldn’t stop playing the game he knew he’d lose.
“I couldn’t eat,” he started, knee still bouncing. “Couldn’t train, couldn’t sleep, couldn’t do anything other than make myself sick thinking about him touching you.”
“I have thought of nothing and no one but you since that night on the observatory tower.”
“I want you,” he repeated on a raspy breath. “And I don’t want to pretend anymore.”
“You don’t want to be someone’s muse,” Clay rasped. “You want to be someone’s undoing. And let me tell you, Kitten…” His voice rumbled against my ear before he sucked the lobe between his teeth. “You’re mine.”
“You read my books,” I breathed, a question and a disbelief all at once. “Fuck yeah, I did.” “Why?” Clay swallowed, brushing his knuckles along the side of my cheek. “I told myself it was to help you get Shawn,” he said. “But in truth, it was to help me please you.”
In all my favorite movies, and in all my favorite books, there’s this moment that I like to call the cotton candy cloud moment. It’s usually at the beginning, but sometimes a little toward the end, when everything is working out perfectly for the main character. They’re high on life, everything going their way, and they bear an impenetrable smile as they seemingly float through every day on a cloud of fluffy pink and purple sugar. It usually happens right before everything crashes down. That was me. I was having my cotton candy cloud moment.
Just like that, my cotton candy cloud moment was over. And no matter how I braced for it, I knew I’d never survive the crash to the ground.
“That’s the thing about love,” he said, kissing my hair. “It doesn’t need to be reciprocated to be real.”
“Pinky promise you won’t tell a soul what I’m about to tell you?” Her eyes lit up, complete seriousness washing over her as she hooked her digit around mine. “My lips are sealed.”
I never wanted to lose those stinging lashes of pain, never wanted to forget how it felt to be held by him, touched by him, kissed by him. Loved by him. Maybe I didn’t get to have him forever. But I’d hold on to every little piece of him that he gave me for the rest of my life. And after, too.
