Page 72 of It's You
He had initially noticed her in the library during the school year. Arriving a few minutes early on the first day of study hall, he found a seat at a table far from the circulation desk, away and alone. A few minutes later, the door had opened again as more students filed in, taking seats in small groups, joining friends, ignoring the dark-haired newcomer sitting on his own. Jacques, in turn, ignored them back, finding little in common with the white kids in this typical New England town, longing for the comfort and familiarity of his pack at home.
The door opened again, and Jacques looked up in time to see the sun shift sideways in its course so that the angle from which it shined through the library skylight created a spotlight on the entryway and drew his eyes specifically to her. Blinded by the light, he couldn’t make out her form at first, until a cloud passed slowly over the sun. She stood in the doorway in the fading glow, ethereal, like an angel, and Jacques watched her, breathless. Literally breathless. The air in his lungs was slowly expelled from his body until his diaphragm ached with emptiness. He felt his face go slack and his eyes water. He felt dizzy and weak until his body rebelled, sucking in a boatload of air, and sitting up straighter. But he couldn’t look away. She stared straight at him, locking her eyes with his, and he watched her pink lips turn up just slightly, her eyes soften as though in recognition. The mechanics of his heart were deafening in his ears, roaring with the rush of blood coursing recklessly through his veins, pumping at full speed as his eyes held hers.
“Darcy!” Her attention was claimed by a friend at a nearby table, and he watched as she pushed her hair over one shoulderand sat down beside her friend. He stared at her body as she moved. Her larger-than-average breasts, small waist, and long legs made her look less like a girl and more like a woman to him. He watched as she folded her hands in front of her on the table after she’d hung her backpack on her chair, and the graceful way her neck rotated to look at him one more time.
He had looked down quickly so that she wouldn’t see his eyes. He felt the heat of them, and for the first time in Jacques’s life, he wondered if they were burning as he’d seen the eyes of the bound men glow. As alouveteau, a cub, his eyes only glowed at night or while feeding, so until now, he had never felt the blinding heat in his eyes during the day. He risked a glance at the girl’s light orange hair, then looked down quickly as a wave of hunger knocked the wind out of his lungs again. He’d never felt this sort of merciless pounding in his heart, never felt this sort of heightened rigidity in his body, especially in his lap where his erection strained against his jeans, threatening to burst as he felt her turn to look at him. Between concentrating on not shifting and not ejaculating right there in the middle of the library, he didn’t get even a second of studying done. He stared at the table with a fierce determination, waiting until she had left the room before he trusted himself to collect his things and stop off in the bathroom before heading to next period.
He found out later that she was two grades below him, the older child of two in a family only outlasted in Carlisle by the Proctors. Jacques couldn’t care less who her people were. His body burned for her in a way that was confusing and dangerous, but absolutely essential in its power and demand. Darcy Turner, the freckled white girl from the town adjacent to the Southern Bloodlands, was Jacques’s first introduction to spellbinding, devastating lust.
His fingers twitched with the longing to touch her fair hair. His mouth ached to press up against her rosy lips, and herbreasts tortured him at night as he lay in bed, trying to figure out why a human girl should have such an effect on him. After avoiding her eyes and fighting the attraction for weeks, he finally allowed himself to indulge his longing for her, as long as it remained distant and detached, fantasies housed in the privacy of his own mind. He promised himself not to speak with her and definitely not to become involved with her. He could admire her from a distance. He could want her in silence. Anything else wasn’t an option.
And so Jacques watched her. He watched her in the library and in the school hallways. He memorized her schedule so he could watch her move from class to class. He auditioned for this ridiculous play so that he could see her over the summer.
Only once had he broken his promise to himself and spoken to her, but he considered it an exception to his pledge. Following her one afternoon, he watched in horror as she walked distractedly across the parking lot reading a book, and Jacques had grabbed her arm as a speeding car came around a curve. As his hand had touched her skin for the first time, it was like he was made of iron, and she was a magnet, so terrible and forceful was the attraction between them. Every cell in his body stood at the ready to touch every cell in hers, and he’d had to push her arm away forcibly, or he might never have let go. The shock of it had confused him and angered him, causing him to speak sharply to her and stalk away, hoping she didn’t see the painful longing for her written all over his face.
Tonight was the final performance, and tomorrow he would head north. For several weeks, he would meet the eligible girls of his pack and the neighboring packs until he figured out the one to whom he should be bound. They would kiss, and if the binding was preordained, they’d know it instantly. She would belong to him, and he would belong to her. They would start their lives together, go to college, or look for jobs together. Some evenstarted families right away. They would inevitably hunt together. Eat, sleep, and drink together. Live free and die together.
At one time, Jacques looked forward to the binding with anticipation, for the pleasure he would find with his mate and the completeness her partnership promised him. But lately, he couldn’t think of anything or anyone but Darcy Turner, and he started to wonder if even the binding would be able to banish her from his heart and mind. Of course it would. It was the most powerful bond known to his kind. It was just that what he felt for Darcy was so all-consuming that he had trouble imagining how much different and more intense the binding could possibly feel.
Jacques finally got his body under control and followed the rest of the cast to the area behind the stage, where they changed into their costumes before the performance. He put on the white pants and striped jacket quickly and went to stand at his favorite place on stage right. He felt her standing there watching him every night, saw her hopeful smile out of his peripheral vision as she tried to catch his eyes. He pressed his nose against the musty velvet curtains and inhaled, picking through decades of DNA to find hers and savor it.
A short time later, Jacques found himself on stage singing “It’s You” for the final time when he felt a deep and sudden stirring inside. His body stood on stage singing, and if he had a soul, it would have felt the desperate, poignant melancholy of his dwindling time near Darcy Turner.
He thought of her walking into the library that first day, a beautiful, pale angel of blinding light walking into the murky, brooding darkness of Jacques Beauloup’s Roux-ga-rouxworld. For the first time in his life, he admitted to himself that he despised that soulless part of who he was. The hunter. The killer. The monster. He cursed the unfairness of his birth. He wished for a moment that he was a full-blooded human with a right to touch her, kiss her, take her out on a date, marry her, and fatherher children. Unlike others of his kind, he struggled against the weight of his dark destiny when he wanted her light in his life so terribly. He wanted her light. He wantedher.
His thoughts pressed further, and he had a rash, passing notion, standing on that stage, that he would doanything to have her, anything—as impossible as it was to even dare to dream—to be bound toher. I will do anything for the chance to love her and be loved by her.And for that moment, the desperation in his heart echoed and reverberated off the walls of that old high school auditorium as the sheer power of his longing took flight.
The song ended, and he bowed with the others, but something had changed inside of Jacques. As he approached Darcy for the last time, he knew he wouldn’t be keeping his promise to himself tonight. Just for tonight, just for one moment, he would act like a normal, human teenage boy. The binding would commit his heart elsewhere soon enough. Tonight, it beat for Darcy Turner, and he would surrender to his desperate hunger for her in these last moments they’d have together.
He watched as her green eyes lifted to his, twinkling in the near darkness of the stage right curtains. She seemed surprised by his frank attention after months of offering her his cool, disinterested glance. She stepped back as he approached, but once her eyes met his, she never looked away. Not when he breathed her name. Not when he touched the wild fluttering of her heartbeat in her neck. Not until his lips found hers in the darkness. Then he felt them finally close, her lashes fanning softly against his cheek as a single tear escaped the well of her eye.
If touching her arm weeks ago in the parking lot had felt magnetic, touching her lips with his felt like another force of nature altogether. Time stopped. The world around them disappeared. For a prolonged moment, as their lips touched forthe first time, Jacques’s heart stopped beating. He felt it grind to a halt, the valves still and dormant, the blood stagnant in his dying body. Then he kissed her again. And as though his heart sought and found the rhythm of hers, the valves opened again with a whoosh, and his blood started rushing. His heart had been reborn, vibrant, alive…bound.
Though he’d never felt the sensation before, he recognized it with absolute certainty.
Jack drew back in horror to look at Darcy’s face. She was a full-blooded human, and he was a blooded Roux-ga-roux.This is impossible. He couldn’t be bound to her. In the history of time and tribe, he could never recall a story of a binding between a Roug and a being of a different race. The members of his pack were only bound to one another. Never, ever to an outsider, and certainly never to a full-blooded human.
“It can’t be,” he murmured, appalled by the permanency with which his actions, his broken promise, had just impacted both of their lives. But there was no escaping it. As Jack stared at her beautiful face, soft in the half-light, he felt the certainty of their fate. He could feel it. “It’syou.”
He wasn’t the same person he was before he had kissed her. He was no longer a boy with a crush on a girl. He was a man staring at his woman. The deep, unerring, unrelenting longing he felt for her had been requited, had been transfigured into the unmistakable, undying love that accompanied the binding.
I belong to you.
Overwhelmed with tenderness, he gazed at her, allowing himself just for a moment to acknowledge the permanence of their bond and the fullness of his heart. For the first time in his life, he understood the binding as he’d never understood it before. It was the closest he would ever come to understanding what it was to have a soul. He would live for her. He would die for her. Her life was his, and his life was hers.
On the heels of celebration, however, was confusion and fear. He trembled with the weight of the irrevocable contract he now had to her and turned away, but not before finding her hand in the darkness and lacing his fingers through hers. Her flesh pressed against his, cool and familiar, and he couldn’t tell where her body started and his ended. His body accepted hers as an extension of his and only reconfirmed what he already knew.
And you belong to me.
He would have to leave her tomorrow. Now that it had happened, he needed to go home to Portes de l’Enfer in the Faunique des Laurentides, also known as the Northern Bloodlands, to declare the binding to the elders, seek their acknowledgment and ask for their guidance. Surely there was a precedent. Surely he wasn’t the first Roug to bind with a human. Surely they could explain to him how it happened and what came next. He would return to her as soon as he had some answers. His heart wouldn’t let him stay away from her for long. A few days would be painful enough.
She looked up at him, and he met her eyes in the shadows, fighting the urge to kiss her again. There would be plenty of time for that. A lifetime. He couldn’t bear to be away from her for long. He placed her hand on his arm as they skipped onto the stage together.
He would get his answers and return immediately to his woman, to his love, to Darcy Turner.
For what is bound cannot be broken.
1
