Page 121 of Possess Me! (I Want You To)

When he’d collapsed onto the hotel mattress, with his eyes full of stars.

Every time he answered my trauma with understanding, his smile gentle.

The ones now, shared with me like we had a secret—which I supposed we did.

I wasn’t sure what had come over me earlier when I’d called myself his boyfriend. Maybe it had been the memory of the men at the club. The way they’d eyed him hungrily, and I’d had no claim to him.

No matter the cause, I was glad I’d done it. Because now he didn’t have to hold back. He touched me. Constantly. Every brush of his fingers, every tease of his thigh against mine painted a picture of domesticity in my mind that had me so light-headed I nearly floated away. If I’d thought those days spent drifting around his apartment had been sitcom-worthy, this was a fucking Disney movie in comparison.

By the time we headed upstairs for the night I hardly felt like myself.

All the illusions of life that the Companion Spell had given me—the sweat, the heartbeat, the butterflies—felt real.

I’d fallen into an alternate dimension.

A world where people truly were as promising as Luca had sworn they could be.

I couldn’t take my eyes off of him. Not when he changed the sheets on his childhood bed. Not when he hopped into the shower for the second time that day. Not when he brushed his teeth, foam spilling down his chin as his eyes crinkled with amusement when he met mine in the mirror’s reflection. Not when he led me into the bedroom, locked the door, and began rifling through the overfull closet.

He was wearing Adam’s clothes. White t-shirt. Gray shorts.

Which I never would’ve known, considering the fact they had the exact same sense of style. Which was to say was absolutely none. Water droplets trickled down the back of that long, elegant throat, the bruises from my touch pale yellow and nearly gone.

I hated that the ones I’d left behind were disappearing, and yet the ones from his attack remained. I clenched my hands into fists as I forced back my anger he’d been hurt in the first place. Before, when we’d been surviving in the wild, there hadn’t been time to process all of this. In fact, I hadn’t known there was anything to process at all.

Apparently now that we were safe, feelings…were appearing left and right.

I’d never felt so much.

It was…

It was…

It was scary.

“What are you doing?” I asked, to distract myself. The rest of the house was silent, and the blue-ish silver of moonlight streamed through the open window as a breeze rustled the posters that hung on the wall. Stupid nerdy shit I didn’t recognize. Sports. Ugh. The whole room was illuminated by a single sad night-light half hidden by a desk pushed up against the wall.

“Grabbing—Some—” Luca waved me off distractedly, his ass wagging in the air as he hunted through the cluttered closet floor. He crowed in triumph when he found what he’d wanted, popping back up with a happy grin as he tossed the item at me expectantly.

I caught it, then inspected it in confusion.

A paintbrush set.

When I glanced back up he was wiggling through the closet again. Several more minutes of this, and he had a nice pile of art supplies formed in the middle of the spaceship rug on the floor. It was paint-splattered—as paint-splattered as the unfortunate carpet it had done a poor job of protecting.

Luca sat down cross-legged with a happy hum, picking through his bounty with enthusiasm.

He peeled the plastic off of a canvas, then grabbed a jar of gesso and liberally coated the whole damn thing. The scent of acrid paint in the air shocked me to life as I slipped to the floor across from him, the paintbrushes he’d thrown at me still clutched in my grip.

“We’re painting,” he told me. Didn’t ask. No. Told.

“I thought you…” I was still feeling wrong-footed from earlier. That was the only reason my words seemed incapable of carrying their usual bite. Luca smiled at me. A new smile. One I coveted away with the rest as he chewed on his full pink lip, and his eyes crinkled with affection.

No one had ever looked at me like that before.

“I know I said I couldn’t paint,” he said softly, reaching over the still drying canvas to grab my hand. “But I was wrong.”

Butterflies danced in my belly as his warm fingers wrapped around my own and he gave my hand a gentle squeeze. I was getting addicted to his hand squeezing.

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