Total pages in book: 86
Estimated words: 81375 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 407(@200wpm)___ 326(@250wpm)___ 271(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 81375 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 407(@200wpm)___ 326(@250wpm)___ 271(@300wpm)
That’s a grand gesture.
I’m not sure I do those.
It’s her dancing, moving, swaying, and jerking in the most awkward and carefree way. She’s fluid one second, stiff the next. She said I was a good dancer, but she’s literal fucking perfection, copying the moves I’ve seen in hundreds of videos over the course of a lifetime near perfectly and combining them into one big montage that is the hottest thing I’ve ever seen.
What. A. Goddess.
A goddess who looked the world right in the face and chose me.
I don’t know if I’m going to cry or laugh, start dancing with her, or kiss her, but something is going to happen. Maybe all of it. If she wants it.
Neither of us had onions on our subs, and we both laughed about limiting the garlic. But that was a joke. I think.
“I expect at least three random as shit photos a day!” she yells over the music, gyrating her hips and headbanging at the same time.
She tied her long hair into a low, tight knot at the sub shop. But now, the elastic breaks loose, popping off and shooting right past my face. Her hair spills out, long and luxurious, dark and thick. She really goes hard at the moshing, unleashing herself like her hair and swinging her arms until the song stops.
Nothing else plays when it’s over. She raises her head slowly. Her eyeliner is smudged and streaky from earlier, when she brushed most of it away with her hands before we walked into the sub place. The flush on her cheeks and neck, and the sweat beaded at her hairline, shouldn’t be so delectable.
Her shoulders rise and fall rapidly. She just did a hard workout on that bed.
Fuck.
I didn’t mean to think that, and now that I did, there’s no coming back from it. My dick is beyond redemption.
God, what is wrong with my brain tonight? It’s feeding me rapid-fire wrongness like slices of pie.
My heart knocks against my ribs until they hurt from the pummeling, and I catch myself raising my hand there to rub away the sting.
Dulcie holds out her arms. “Come up here and dance with me.”
I shake my head. “No way. Come down here. I don’t want you to get hurt.”
“Okay!” She leaps off the bed, straight at me. I have no choice but to catch her and help support her. Her feet hit the floor, but I have her in my arms.
She looks up at me while I look down at her. What hits me is far too much for someone I barely know. I’m a logical person, and I’ve used logic to defeat the shittier spectrum of emotions that came with my accident. Adam was always pushing me to heal, to be positive, and to think my way out of the holes and dark places I found myself in.
But there’s nothing logical about how badly I want this.
Her.
It’s like that tree falling on her rental car. When it happened, the tree and the car were both irreparably damaged. The tree can’t go back to standing on its own, and the car won’t be able to be rebuilt. Life can’t just go on for them.
Wait.
That’s a shitty comparison.
We also didn’t eat the pie we baked tonight. It’s Dulcie’s favorite. She told me that in the sub shop.
Her warm hand on my cheek stops my brain right in its brain tracks.
My brain is no longer braining.
Unless it’s throwing ridiculous statements like that at me.
She brackets her fingers around the scars, her touch light, not because she’s repulsed by the way my skin feels, but because I’m sure she’s still afraid she could hurt me. “You look like you’re scrambling.”
Scrambling. Drowning. Falling. What words are there that could ever describe that collision of tree and car, lightning and wind? A storm of passion so great that it irrevocably changed those involved in the collision.
It’s not just passion.
It’s everything.
Dulcie is chaos, but she’s also calm. She’s wild and untamed, but she’s also placid waters. She’s the wind, and she’s refuge. She’s the sickness and the cure. The—
“Did you know that when a person looks at something they like, their pupils become large? It’s not just straight-up physical attraction that causes it. It’s the hormones in the brain that make the pupils dilate. It’s more than one emotion,” Dulcie says.
I did know that. I heard it before. Maybe I read it somewhere? “It could also be caused by negative emotions. Like fear. Or rage.”
“Yes.”
“Or changes in light,” I add.
“I haven’t changed the light, Luca. Are you scared or angry right now?”
The terrified part is up for debate, but that’s not it. “I like looking at you.”
“I like looking at you too,” she says.
My first instinct is to snort at that, but how unfair would that be? Allowing myself to find Dulcie beautiful but refusing to accept that she could feel the same way about me is extremely hypocritical. It would be presumptuous to so much as assume that I could dictate to Dulcie what she should think and feel. Total. Asshole. Move.