The Heart's Ashes
Page 179

As our lips touched, I tried to wash the smile from my face, unable to kiss and laugh at the same time, but an energy surged in me so strongly my fingers went tight and numb; David pulled back slightly. “What is that—it’s warm?”
“I can use static energy.” I held my hands up—showing him the awesomeness of snake-like electricity, thrashing about over my fingers. “Whoa. It’s never done that before.”
David watched intently as the blue-white light danced around my hands, then receded into my fingertips. He grabbed my wrist. “Kiss me again.”
“Happily.” I stood on my toes and he leaned down slightly, holding my neck firmly in one hand, my wrist in the other, his eyes cast to the side, watching my hand. “Why is nothing happening?”
“I don’t know. I don’t really know how it happens, I just...” I let a breath out.
“What do you think about when it happens?”
“Hm.” A thought warmed my entire body. “You.”
David laughed breathily, and with his cheeky smile, a warm charge started in my centre, branching out across my chest, into my arms, down the bone in my wrist, coming out the tips of my fingers like a bad need to touch. I dug my hands into his hair at the base of his neck and pulled his lips to mine again.
“My hairs are on end,” he whispered through the kiss. “It feels like a rush of excitement.”
I could feel it too, making me breathless, energetic. He dropped my wrist, obviously no longer interested in the flaring electricity, and ran his hands under my shirt—lifting it; his skin cool against mine, so welcome yet so unfamiliar it made me take another breath. The touch of lust filled me with new ideas, new hopes, things I’d not thought of for such a long time.
His unwelcome leather jacket fell to the floor and I reached for his shirt buttons, wanting his body on mine, his hands everywhere, anywhere, on every inch of my craving flesh.
“Craving flesh, huh?” David drew back and laughed.
“You heard that?”
“Like a speaker in my ear.”
“Holy crap. So, why can you hear me?”
David raised my hand by the wrist and his smiling eyes narrowed. “Might be something to do with this. I mean, brainwaves are just electrical signals.”
“David?” I had to exhale heavily, so excited, that I’d been holding my breath. We should consummate our wedding vows.
The old guy in him responded with shock, a laugh, but the David I loved so well, the boy from school, my husband, ran a hand across his mouth and shook his head, then picked me up, like I weighed nothing, and we landed in the plush green grass with a very human jolt.
The electricity in my fingers hummed as I smoothed my hands along his shoulders—between fabric and skin, and his strong body, so like the David I married, held me under him, pressed between my legs, wanting me once more, the way only he could.
“Ouch.” He looked down at my hands on his hard arms.
I looked too. “Oh my God. I’m sorry—I’m not used to these nails yet.” I pulled my fingers away and his skin healed shut, the four flat indents closing like vines over a fence. “I only discovered them because I took the fur of Petey’s head a few weeks ago.”
Motionless, he watched himself heal, then turned and looked at me. “I’m going to have to teach you some self-control, it seems.”
“I don’t think you really want to do that.” I tilted my head to my shoulder and winked at him.
He took a breath through lips shaped for a vowel and let it out again very slowly. “I doubt I’m in any position to be teaching you self-control, anyway, when I have nothing but less than honourable intentions.”
The girlie giggle of my past came back to make me sound like a pathetic schoolgirl for a minute. “We’re married now, David, you don’t need to be honourable.”
He shook his head, his hands travelling up my denim skirt. “I had no intentions of that.” And his emerald eyes glistened in the sunlight, his dimples pushing in with his cheeky, unreadable thoughts. In one gesture, he rose up on knees, unzipped his fly and sunk himself inside me, leaving me gasping, tangling my fingers in my own hair. The most pathetic sounds came from my lips, and I just knew the birds in the trees would be laughing. But I smiled, enjoying the feeling of David being a part of me once more, and rolled my head to look over at the lake, catching sight of my underwear as I did.
“David?”
“Yes, my love,” he said right into my ear, his shoulder against my lips, his hands pressed flat to the ground beside my ribs.
“I know this sounds kinda corny but—” I wrapped my legs over his hips, “—it’s like, when we’re connected like this, I feel like—”
“Like?” he said, almost laughing.
“Like we’re kind of one person. But not in the cheesy, romantic way. I really feel like, if I held my breath, you wouldn’t be able to take one.”
The moon shape indent above his lip showed. “That’s how I’ve always felt. We are one, Ara. Two souls, one heart—for always.”
“Always.” I felt it all around me then, what eternity felt like, what it meant to love only one person for all the years you could exist. It not only scared me but made me shaky and so happy I felt a tickle in my chest, like a cough, or maybe like I needed to laugh. There was nothing in the world that could feel more right, more complete than when two souls touched.
“Ara. Can you feel that?” David gasped, moving his hips faster.
“Feel what?” I looked up at him and squealed, pushing him off me as I backed away. “What the hell.”
“Ara, what’s wrong?”
“Your eyes!” I looked at my hands, then at his eyes again as the bright, electric blue fizzled away, and they turned back to green. “They—” I pointed to his face, “—they were blue.”
“They were?” He rubbed his face, then sat down, breathless.
“Are you okay?”
“I felt you—inside me. Like a flame—but a good flame.” His lips spread wide across his face and his eyes lit up. “A very good flame. Not burning, more, warming.”
I covered my mouth. “I could’ve hurt you.”
“No.” He rose to his knees, zipping his jeans. “My love, I felt no pain. It was intense—you—I don’t know how, but you were in my head. I could hear everything you were thinking.”