The Chosen One (The First Book)

Chapter 26

"You're going to go down those head first."

Julian.

His arm was across the front of me. He had taken me back off the top step and turned me around, and he was still holding on, and the whole length of my back had come up against his coat.

Something in me let go.

It was not relief the way relief usually is. It was worse than that. It was my body finding what it had been looking for all the way down that corridor and settling into it before any part of me had been asked.

"That was quite an exit, by the way." He was talking over the top of my head, in that easy voice he uses when he is enjoying himself.

I opened my mouth.

Nothing came out of it.

There were words. I could feel where they were supposed to be. Getting to them was like reaching for something at the back of a high shelf in the dark.

I turned around.

I do not remember deciding to turn around.

He was closer than I expected, and the cold had put color on his face. There was still a little of the dining hall on him, wine and candle smoke.

I stood in it the way people stand in a doorway on a winter night with the fire behind them.

I got my hands into his arms. To take them off me, I think.

I did not take it off me, instead pulled him closer, until our breaths mixed together.

I remember thinking, very clearly, one thing:

This was not a fever.

Fever makes you want to be left alone. Fever makes your own skin feel like something borrowed.

This was the opposite of being left alone.

Whatever was in me wanted, and it wanted with a single-mindedness that had nothing to do with me at all, the way a river wants downhill.

And I was standing in front of the one person in this palace it could aim at.

I knew I need to say something.

I said nothing.

Julian tipped his head.

He reached out, his fingers brushed against my cheek. His touch sent an involuntary shiver down my spine.

"You're very quiet."

He was smiling. It was not a kind smile and it was not an unkind one. It was the one he uses when he thinks he has found something out.

"That's new." His voice was low, almost a purr as he leaned closer.

His fingers trailed down my jawline, then his thumb traced my lower lip before sliding down my neck. I could feel the way my heart pulsed beneath his fingers.

For one second, I tried to remember what I had been doing before I went outside.

They came back to me separately, like pieces of a thought that refused to stay together.

The dining hall. The wine. Eliza. The cold air.

I knew I should step away. I knew that much.

I simply could not make my body agree.

He put one hand flat on the stone behind me and caged me in. His body was nearly flushed against mine as he whispered in my ear.

"Tell me to stop, Aurelia."

I held his gaze for a second too long. Then my hand found the front of his coat.

I did that. Later on, a great deal was going to depend on what was mine and what was not, and that was mine. My hand, my fist in the wool, my pull.

He came.

He did not even pretend to be surprised. By the time his lips found mine, the back of my head had already found the wall.

His other hand moved to my waist, gripping it possessively.

Then there was a piece missing.

I know the wall was cold. I know that at some point the cold stopped registering as cold and started registering as the only good thing in the world. I pressed the back of my hand against it. Then my wrist, then gave up on that because there was somewhere better to put my hands.

I could feel the heat radiating from him and the way my body trembled against his.

I know he laughed against my lips once, low, pleased about something.

I do not know how his coat got open. I do not know how long any of it took. There is no length to it in my memory at all.

His hands went lower, his fingers traced down to my thigh. His touch was deliberately slow and teasing.

I kept trying to find the moment when this had stopped being a choice and started being something else. Every time I reached for it, there was only another moment before it.

His fingers finally reached the edge of my dress, playing with the fabric at first.

Then his fingers slipped beneath the hem and started tracing patterns on my bare skin.

His touch sent shock waves through my body, despite my efforts to suppress it. I felt the goosebumps rising on my skin, the way my breath became shallow and rapid.

I tried to count.

Counting had held all night.

One.

His fingers slid between my legs, and he groaned at the wetness he found there.

Two.

His fingers began to move, circling my sensitive flesh with expert precision.

I got to two.

I could have said no.

The word existed, and that I knew where it was, and that some part of me was standing at the bottom of that dark shelf reaching up for it with both hands.

I did not say it.

I said his name once, and it came out as an encouragement, because everything I did that night came out as an encouragement, and he took it as one. Why on earth would he not?

"God, you're burning."

He said it against my collarbone, half a laugh in it, delighted.

Eliza had said the same words two hours ago with her fingers on my cheek and her face gone worried.

It's the room, I had told her.

There was no room out here. There was a stone landing, six steps down to a frozen garden, a sky with nothing in it.

I was burning in the middle of all of it.

He said something else. A question, I think. His voice had that turn up at the end.

I did not answer it.

He did not ask again.

I had my hands under his shirt at the back by then. His skin was cooler than mine, which struck me as the single most important fact I had ever learned.

I remember pulling him harder against me for no reason except to have more of it.

I remember him making a sound and stopping being careful.

His mouth was under my ear and one of his hands hooked into the waistband of my underwear, slowly beginning to pull them down.

The cold air made contact with my skin and a broken voice escaped my lips.

At some point, I heard a sound and understood, a moment later, that I had made it.

"Careful."

He leaned in, his lips brushed against my ear. There was laughter under it.

"Somebody's going to come out that door."