Page 103 of Saint

Spots of light.

“Come for me.” Kole releases my mouth, and I gulp in a breath.

Air rushes my chest, burning the path to my lungs as my body shatters.

I’m coming, choking, desperate. And he holds me through every vibration as my bones shake and my insides pull apart. I’m a mess, while his arms are all that hold me together.

“Kole.” I tip my head back against his hard chest and close my eyes, trying to catch my breath.

The room is spinning as oxygen floods my lungs, and I come back down from the high he held me at.

Kole doesn’t say anything as I grip his thighs and try to steady my racing heart. He wipes his palm over my sweaty forehead and brushes my hair back. He rakes his fingers through the strands.

The gentle side of him that shouldn’t exist comes out. The side that sends my morals tumbling. The side that has me justifying everything he does.

I close my eyes and try to rationalize the fact that I feel safe in a killer’s arms. That everything he just whispered in my ear only intensified my orgasm. Kole’s demons speak to me, and there’s no running from that.

Blinking my eyes open, the movie is still playing, but I’m no longer focusing on it. All I can see and feel is the man in my bed. Someone who isn’t scared to show me his true self, no matter how evil it is. Because he trusts me with it.

So many people have darkness that lives inside them. Some hide it; some let it show in pieces. Kole spills his out for me. He takes a knife to my ribs and forces me to show him my own.

So many people bury who they are, but not him. He shows me his whole self, and it makes me want to do the same.

Sitting up, I spin around and straddle him. And he watches as I pull my T-shirt off and plant myself in his lap. I wrap my arms around his neck and play with the hair at the back of his head. Raking my nails along his skin and loving that it softens his expression.

“What are you thinking?” Kole asks.

I let out the exhale I feel like I’ve been holding my whole life. “I was thinking about my dream.”

“How so?”

Earlier, when he asked me about my dream, there was a playfulness to his tone. But now, he senses the darker current in the air, and his voice is steady—serious.

“I almost drowned once,” I admit, my lungs burning at the reminder. “My mom was working eighty-hour weeks, so I practically lived at the hospital when I wasn’t at school. But I’d get bored, and so sometimes I’d sneak off to one of the rehabilitation pools to go for a swim.”

Kole plants his hands on my bare thighs, listening. And I’m not sure anyone has ever paid attention to me the way he does. Without interruption. Like every word I have to say matters, even if it doesn’t.

“It was empty that late at night. And I didn’t see the puddle on the tile.” My heart races, remembering how my feet slipped against it. “I fell in, hitting my head on the way down.”

I press my fingers against the scar on the back of my head. It’s buried by my hair, but the ridge still exists if you know where to press.

“Everything was so foggy. I couldn’t remember how to swim or breathe. I was just… sinking.” Once more, I wrap my arms around Kole’s shoulders, and he pulls me closer. “I was floating in the water, and for a moment, I thought it would just be easier to let go. To let the water take me.”

“Then what happened?” he asks, rubbing my thighs with his palms.

“Someone found me. I don’t know who. Someone who worked there, I guess. One moment I was underwater, and the next, I opened my eyes, and my mom was standing over me in that hospital room. I’ve never seen her so scared.”

“You were okay though.” He wipes the tears from my cheeks when I don’t even realize I’ve started crying.

I shake my head. “But I wasn’t. I gave up. I drowned in every sense of the word that day, even if they pulled me out. My whole life has felt like this struggle of not wanting to admit who I am. Of fearing the thoughts that live in my head. I’ve always had this interest in things I don’t understand, and I know that makes me sick, but I don’t know how to cure it. So that day in the pool, I let a part of myself drown. I left a part of myself at the bottom because I was too scared of what would happen if I gave her air.”

“There’s nothing wrong with you, Violet.” Kole pulls my chest to his, his body heat radiating through histhin shirt.

“Not in your eyes, there isn’t.” I press our foreheads together. “You pulled me out of the water.”

Looking into his eyes, I see every part of him and every part of myself. His pupils dilate and drink me in.

He sees every part I’ve hidden for nineteen years and accepts all of her.

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