“Let go of me, Jules,” I repeat. It’s a command this time, the growl before the bite. I trust Julian not to hurt me, but he’s still a man withseveral inches of height and many more pounds of bulk on me who is too sick to know his strength.
This time, he listens. Julian drops my wrist, and I bend back down to dig through my bag. I can feel him watching me, and I duck away from his stare, which has suddenly gone from dazed to hyperfocused. When I find his face again, his smile is gone. It’s as if a breeze has blown through the room and taken part of him with it, and I still, intrigued and unsettled by the abruptness of his shift.
“You’re actually afraid of me,” he croons, so softly that I have to read his lips to make out the words. “Fascinating.”
The breath I’ve been holding comes out in a huff.
“Yeah, well, you kind of freaked me out just then,” I say, finding the thermometer. I hold it to his mouth. “Say ah, you big weirdo.”
Julian obeys, opens his mouth wide, and takes the thermometer like I’ve just fed him something sumptuous. His eyes don’t leave mine until I tear them away to wrap the blood pressure cuff around his upper arm and run it. They result at the same time: 110/74 (normal), 103.6 degrees Fahrenheit (decidedly not).
“You’re burning up,” I mutter. I’m a bit relieved to find that his odd behavior can be attributed to a fever-induced delirium. “Hold up, where’s my stethoscope—”
Before I can bend back down for my bag, Julian reaches for me again, but this time his touch is gentle. I hold still as fingertips skim past my cheek, soft as butterfly wings.
“Can you look at me?” he whispers. “Please?”
I still, then oblige. Julian’s focus can be intense on most days, but today it’s different. He stares at me like a man who has lived in darkness might at his first glimpse of the moon. Like I am wondrous and luminous and terrifying all at once. Moving slowly, he tugs my mask off my ears, then cradles my face in his hand.
“I just don’t understand. You’re here because you want to help me. You came of your own free will.”
I’m even more confused than before.
“Um, yeah,” I confirm. “Lean forward, Julian. Let me listen to your lungs. It’s no chest X-ray, but if I hear something, we’re definitely going to the hospital.”
It’s like he can’t hear me. His thumb drags along my bottom lip, and he watches the flesh fold with great interest, his tongue trailing absent-mindedly along the points of his upper teeth.
The gesture is absolutely mind breaking. Suddenly I’m flooded with heat, the space between my legs clenching with arousal that comes so quick that I have to hold back a gasp. I canfeelmy pupils dilate, watch the world go out of focus and then recalibrate. It’s true that Julian is ill—I haven’t seen a temperature that high in an adult in a minute—but he also oozes sensuality so dense I can taste it. It’s copper sharp, like the air after a lightning strike.
“That’s more like it,” Julian says, still fixated on my mouth. “I was beginning to think I’d lost my touch.”
“Still arrogant as ever,” I mutter, even as my heart races.
Julian’s gaze drops to the throbbing pulse in my neck and stays there, transfixed. Even pressed so close, he seems so far away.
“You don’t make sense, you know,” he whispers. “You refuse to bend to me even one inch. And yet here you are, coming to my aid because youwant to.”
I swallow.
“I don’t really know what you mean by bend,” I say, hesitantly. “But…yes? I do want to?”
Julian leans in until his face becomes a blur, until the tip of his nose brushes mine, until his eyes merge and fill my entire field of vision. They flicker in the shifting light: brown, green, amber. Pupils pinprick small.
“Fascinating,” he repeats. His voice is frayed, more wind than sound, and I inhale it in. He shouldn’t smell so good,tasteso good, right now—should be stale and sickly instead of smoky and sweet—and yet he does. I want to be immersed in him. To burrow under his skin and make a home.
“Why,” I ask, as he wraps his arms around my waist to tug me closer, “do you keep saying that?”
Julian smiles like he’s just told a joke that I’m not privy to. And then he slides his hand to the nape of my neck, pulls his body up to meet mine, and kisses me.
I thought I’d gotten used to kissing Julian, to the way I turn punch-drunk and liquid in his arms. But though the mechanics fit—his mouth clashing hot against mine, hand weaving into my hair to keep me locked in place—what Julian is doing to me should not be described as a kiss. This is conquest. This is his body staking claim to mine, a flag lodged into my lands, an invasion that goes deeper than a plundering of mouths. Julian nips and pulls and sucks and I unravel, the spool of my thoughts spinning loose and free around a center that is him, always him.
“I just want,” he says, dragging his lips down my neck, “a little taste.”
I feel his words ring through my chest like a gong, echoing. All my thoughts, of his sickness and mine, the despair I felt over the last several days in his absence, vanish. I’m empty, and I want him to fill me, to merge us together until I don’t know where he starts and I begin. This taste he wants, I want to give it to him. I smooth my hands over his shoulders, drag them down his chest, reach behind for his back and revel in the solid ripples of muscle that greet me.
“Please,” I gasp.
Julian’s answering groan is guttural, and suddenly everything burns, and my world goes dark.