Page 95 of Shadows in Bloom

And just like that, I am lost.

“Winnie,” she sighs, tilting her head, lips rising into the kind of smile I haven’t seen her wear in years. One that meets her brown eyes, just like now. One that is soft and genuine and not attached to harsh narrowed looks and a steely jaw.

Somewhere under the daze blanketing over me, I can vaguely register those warning bells from before now screaming. But they might as well be an echo from the distant Heavens.

Not tearing her gaze from mine, Ophelia raises her hand, and I glance over to find thick streams of blood running down her arm, droplets splashing off her thigh. And the next thing I know, I find myself pushing up on my knees, and lifting my own wounded hand, mirroring her position.

Without a word—without any hesitance—as if compelled by some outside force, our palms crash together in a silent, yet deafening boom of thunder, one that shakes the world around us.

And for one hot, agonizing second where I can feel the sharp pain pulsing in my palm, I remember that I’m afraid.

My mouth opens—on her name? A plea? a scream?

I’ll never know.

Because as soon as I go to rip my hand away and scramble away from her, she surges forward, crushing her lips to mine, pushing her tongue into my mouth.

And I’m frozen.

A low guttural sound that is more beast than human claws its way into my mouth and down my throat, reverberating in my chest. Drawing a shiver from me.

Ophelia…

Tipping her head back, she lashes the tip of her tongue over the roof of my mouth, flicking my teeth, before ripping away from me with a harsh exhale. Causing me to lurch forward with a gasp, as if she threw a rope around my ribcage and tugged it.

Slumped forward, I watch through hooded eyes as she throws her head back, tendons straining against her flawless, creamy throat. Her ink-black hair falls behind her like a waterfall, and before I even realize what I’m doing, I’m leaning forward and reaching around her, scooping it up in my fist, and yanking her head back all the way.

Her breath hitches sharply, and just before I dip my head, gunning my mouth for her neck, I catch the wicked tilt of a smile.

Hot sticky hands find my back at the same time my tongue lashes over her throat, slim fingers splaying over the thin material of my nightgown. She yanks me against her and my mouth yawns open on a gasp against the hollow of her throat. Teeth glancing off her skin.

I’m vaguely aware of my bloodied hand sliding down her arm, stroking along her bare back. The tang of iron in the air is cloying, and yet, if anything, it spurs me on—spurs us on. There’s no room for questions or disgust.

I’m no longer me… just pure, unadulterated need twisted into a version of myself I don’t recognize.

A version I feel like I have no control over. One that was forged from a culmination of three year’s worth of repression and denial and heartache. And fear.

Fingers claw at my waist, bunching the hem of my nightgown to drag it up my body and over my head. Leaving me in nothing but my underwear.

Somewhere in the back of my mind, reality threatens to set in. What am I doing? How did we get like this?

But then Ophelia’s beaded nipples are brushing my chest, glancing off my own hardening buds, and I find myself sinking back into the lulling, suffocating haze that is my desire for this girl.

A desire I can’t for the life of me, in this moment, understand how I ever thought I could deny. Escape.

I’m blinded by it.

My hunger for her.

Consumed so terribly, that I know there will be no taking this back.

Will I even want to?

Ophelia reaches around me, fisting my hair that is just as long and untamed as hers, and forcibly rips my mouth away from her throat where I was leaving a trail of biting, sucking kisses.

With her free hand, she reaches up between us to clutch my jaw, forcing me to release her hair to grip her shoulders instead. Dragging my swollen, parted lips back to hers with bruising force.

We oscillate between plush, crushing kisses and ravenous open-mouthed gulps. Tongues wrestling, fighting for some sort of upper hand. While our teeth knock together, warring for some sort of unnamable union that has my nails biting into her skin.

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