Page 16 of Dark Ink

“Everyone knows who I am,” Rian said.

“Well, I don’t,” I insisted. “All I know is that you’ve crossed a line. A really fucking big one. You’ve violated me, you know?”

“That’s all you know?”

“Yes.”

“You know nothing more of me?”

“Nothing.”

“Liar.” He smiled and leaned in. “I think I speak to you. I think my soul calls to yours the same way yours calls to mine.”

I laughed even as shivers went down my spine. “No.”

“You haven’t dreamed of me?”

I couldn’t help the gasp. How did he—?

“Just leave me alone!” I shoved past him, aiming blindly for escape. Anywhere.

I didn’t take two steps when Rian’s hand grabbed my arm.

My portfolio tumbled from my grip and spilled across the stone. My heart dropped as I watched the papers slide loose and scatter like autumn leaves. I could have fallen to my knees to lunge for the drawings. To sweep them against my chest. To try to hide them.

But it was too late. My fate was sealed.

I stood there. Looking down as he looked down. Frozen as he stood frozen.

Nothing moved except the edges of the pages, rustling at the edges.

There were the nude drawings I’d done of Rian when he’d appeared like a tornado without warning into the centre of my class. There was his bare ass, drawn without embarrassment, sculpted with charcoal. I saw each variation there across the marble floor. Rian turning, turning, turning. Rotating toward me. The reveal of his muscular chest. Tattoos unveiled as the shadows receded turn by turn. His cock coming into view. His eyes about to find mine. His gaze about to startle me, confuse me, doom me.

They were all there, the hasty, frantic, desperate drawings from the studio, but there were more. Many more. Rian had been drawing me. Ordering others to draw me. Tattooing me onto flesh, mixing me with blood. But I had been feeding off of him, too. Drawing him into my veins like a drug just the same. I had been yearning to find him as well. Searching for him in pencils and paint. Digging for him on thick pulped paper. Pinning him down on my desk above my clenched thighs.

He was naked. He was clothed. He was turned away. He was looking head-on. He had his eyes closed. He had his eyes open. Wide open. Staring. Seeing. He was curled in on himself. He was beating his chest. He was flinging his arms wide and screaming at the world, at himself, at me. He was in black and white. He was in every shadow of coloured pencil I owned. He was everywhere and everything.

My deepest desires laid bare.

I’d wanted to claim him. To make him mine. To open my very chest for him, crack out my bleeding heart and offer it to him.

I lifted my eyes as Rian did the same. Our gaze met. His pupils were wide. Mine wider. I should have run. But now there was nowhere at all to run to.

When he closed the gap this time, I didn’t move back, I fell into him. His lips crashed onto mine and the world—my problems, my responsibilities—vanished into dust.

I should have known his kiss would be just like him: intense and consuming. Totally unrelenting. His lips were warm and bruising, his tongue insistent as he licked at the seam of my lips, demanding, without preamble, for me to open up for him. I did as he wanted. As I wanted. I opened up. He buried his tongue into my mouth and his fingers into the flesh of my hips and my back and I felt his growl rumble all the way down my spine. The resulting ache pulsing between my legs left my legs trembling. I might have fallen if he wasn’t holding me up, crushing me to him so hard I no longer knew where I ended and he began.

I threaded my fingers through his hair. He walked me backwards as if he were pushing me off the edge of a cliff. We fell together against a door. If he had given me a moment to pause, I might have stopped him. If he had given me a millimetre of breath, I might have said stop.

But he didn’t.

So I didn’t.

The door gave way behind me. And we stumbled back.

Rian

We crashed into desks of the empty classroom. Sent them falling over. Crashing noisily. Tripped over metal chair legs, caught our hips on sharp, hard edges, hit open space like being thrown from a plane and gasped against each other’s mouths. My back collided with the blackboard.

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