Page 80 of Pierce Me

“You… Don’t say that.”

“You hate me.”

“Well, I… hate is a strong word. I don’t…” I push the wet hair out of my eyes impatiently. “Why don’t you kill me while you’re at it? Saying things like that to me and thinking I’ll survive?”

Her honey eyes meet mine suddenly, wide with surprise, and I let her go with a loud splash. Those eyes that pierce my very soul. I never got used to them four years ago. I barely escaped with my life. This time around, I won’t make it.

“If hate is a strong word,” she says, “then you just don’t care. And that’s even worse.”

I swallow.

She did it. She found the one thing that’s worse than hating her: except she is so totally wrong. I am not indifferent.

I am incensed.

“What did you expect?” I ask her instead, trying to keep my tone and face neutral.

“Exactly this,” she says, turning her face away. Her lips are half-parted, wet and plump, and I stare at them, mesmerized. I might just fall into them and drown if someone doesn’t rescue me right now. “I expected that you wouldn’t be able to stand the sight of me. But yesterday at the lake… I thought you were him. But you aren’t, are you?”

“Him who?” My brain has stopped working.

Were her lips always so pink?

Where her arms so long and slender? Her skin like a peach? Did she always have that narrow waist that widened into—? I can’t look anymore. I can do nothing but look.

How did I ever manage to be around her for hours on end and not die of wanting her? How did I keep my hands to myself even for a second? Every single atom in my body is getting hard and stiff with want. With need. My legs go weak and I lower myself in the warm water, trying to gather my thoughts.

Trying to hide my body’s reaction to her—my body’s violent reaction to her.

Trying to breathe. At least I can do that, right? In, out. In, out.

Nope. Not working.

“I don’t know what I was going to say,” she says, her expression closing back up. “I… I lost my train of thought.”

She is looking at every inch of my body, just as I’m looking at her. Heat rises in my throat, choking me.

“Ask me,” I murmur, and I swear, if she asks me to repeat the words I might fall apart right here, in the water, my body inches away from her arms. “Ask me the thing that you want to ask me.”

I barely recognize my own voice. It’s a hoarse, desperate whisper. A drowning man’s rattle.

Ask me, dammit.

Ask me to forgive you. To take you back. Ask me to trust you with my soul.

“Do I know you?” she asks instead. This is so not the question I was hoping for. My head falls back, eyes drifting closed. I cover them with my hand. “Are you still that boy?”

My eyes snaps open. Fury. This is pure fury.

“In case it’s escaped your notice, I am not a boy,” I tell her in a hard voice. “I might be a lot of things, but aboy,” I spit out the words with more bitterness than I thought I had in me, “is not one of them.”

“Isaiah,” she says. “Are you my Isaiah?”

Her words are like razors. I don’t think she even realizes how deeply they cut. How dare she–

I can’t breathe.

How freakingdareshe call meherIsaiah after what she’s done?

---