Chapter 596 | Something You’re Going to Like

Chapter 596: 596 | Something You’re Going to Like

The air in the reference stacks had gone thick with her heat. I could feel it on my face like standing too close to an open oven, and the shelf behind Blair’s shoulder had started to sweat condensation where the warmth met cold wood.

I looked at Blair Davenport.

She stood with her thumb on her third button. Ice-blue eyes locked on mine. Lower lip caught between her teeth. The burn scar crawled pink from her collarbone down beneath the crew neck she’d stolen from me, disappearing under grey cotton that still held the shape of my shoulders. The bleach spot on the cuff sat at her wrist like a permanent stain neither of us could scrub away.

Her red hair caught what little light filtered between the stacks, turning it copper at the edges. In this narrow corridor between dead encyclopedias and forgotten atlases, Blair looked nothing like the girl who’d tried to buy my silence with a stack of cash. That girl had stood in Misato’s kitchen, which smelled like expensive cleaning products, armed with the contempt money could buy. That girl had been confident in the fortress she’d spent eighteen years building, every wall perfect, every defense tested.

This girl had walked across campus in housekeeping shoes. This girl had unbuttoned her shirt one button at a time, each one a deliberate choice to tear down another piece of the walls. This girl stood at her own drawbridge now, waiting for someone stupid enough to walk through while she held the chains that could drop it.

I was exactly that stupid.

"Blair." I said her first name because she needed to hear it without the Davenport. "Can I touch you?"

Her thumb pushed the button through. The shirt parted, and black lace filled the gap, expensive and perfect and completely at odds with the housekeeping shoes on her feet. Her chest rose and fell beneath it, and I watched a bead of sweat roll down her throat and disappear into the hollow of her collarbone where the burn scar started.

"Yes."

One word. No qualifiers, no addendums, no Clause Eleven subsection B. Just yes.

I stepped forward and Blair’s spine hit the shelf behind her. My right hand found the curve of her waist through the open shirt, and the heat coming off her skin soaked through the cotton like a fever. My left hand came up to the side of her face, and I tilted her chin with my thumb until she had nowhere to look but directly at me. Her pupils were enormous. Her breath came in short, hot bursts against my mouth, and each one tasted like mineral water and terror.

"I’m going to tell you something," I said. "And you’re going to listen without setting anything on fire."

"I make no promises about fire." Her voice was barely held together. "It has its own opinions."

"I look at you the way I look at Love."

Blair went absolutely still.

"I’ve been looking at you that way since the cave," I continued, and her fingers found the front of my shirt and twisted into the fabric over my sternum, right above the graft. "I looked at you that way when I jumped off a cliff with you in my arms. I looked at you that way when you burned through a guardian’s skull for me. I looked at you that way this morning when your father stood six feet from you and you didn’t move. I have been looking at you, Blair. You just kept running before you could see it."

The shelf behind her made a groaning sound as the wood expanded from her body heat. Two atlases fell off the top shelf and hit the floor with fat paper thuds, and neither of us looked down.

Blair’s mouth opened, then closed. Her lower lip trembled once. The third button of her shirt had already come undone, and the fourth hung by a thread as her chest pushed against the fabric with each breath. Her hands on my shirt tightened until her knuckles went white, and I could feel the heat of her palms through the cotton, hot enough that the threads would leave tiny scorch marks I wouldn’t find until laundry day.

"Say it again," she whispered.

"I look at you."

Blair pulled me down and kissed me with her entire body. Her back arched off the shelf and her chest crushed against mine and her hips pressed forward until I felt the heat of her through both our uniforms, and her hands climbed from my shirt to my shoulders to the back of my neck where she gripped hard enough that her nails broke skin. The kiss was desperate and messy and tasted like salt because Blair Davenport was crying, silently and furiously, tears rolling down her cheeks while she kissed me with enough force to rock the entire reference stack backward an inch.

The graft behind my sternum went supernova.

Seven rings burned in the back of my skull. Six of them steady, familiar, anchored to the women who had chosen me over six impossible weeks. The seventh ring, the one that had flickered at the edge of Blair’s uncertainty since the ferry, caught fire. The flickering stopped. The question marks in my peripheral vision dissolved one by one. Blair’s devotion counter climbed past forty-five, past fifty, past fifty-five, and kept climbing as her tongue found mine and her body curved into me like she was trying to occupy the same physical space.

I pinned her against the shelf with my hips and she made a sound into my mouth that I would remember on my deathbed.

My hand slid from her waist down to her thigh, hiking the hem of her skirt up three inches, and her leg came up to hook around the back of my calf with a flexibility that her ballet training had apparently preserved despite years of pretending she’d forgotten it. Her skin was so hot against my palm that I felt the Euphoric Feedback kick in automatically, converting the sting into a slow warm ripple that traveled up my arm and settled in my chest. Blair felt it too. Her body jerked against mine, and she broke the kiss with a gasp.

"What was that?" Her voice came out wrecked.

"Something you’re going to like."