When Darkness Embraces Forbidden Fruit

"She woke up different and had no word for what she'd become."

POV: Eve

She woke up wrong.

Not wrong like sick, not wrong like something had been taken from her. Wrong like something had been added, something large and warm and insistent that her body did not have a category for yet, that was sitting inside her skin and humming and refusing to be ignored no matter how still she lay.

Adam's breathing moved in and out beside her, steady and slow and perfectly rhythmic the way everything about Adam was perfectly rhythmic, because Adam had never once in his existence had a night that left him jangled and overheated and wide awake at dawn with his pulse doing something that had nothing to do with exertion.

She lay on her back and stared up at the canopy of Eden's sky and took careful inventory of herself.

Her skin was too sensitive. That was the first thing. The silk they slept on, which she had never once noticed the texture of because it was simply there, simply comfortable, the way everything in Eden was simply there and simply comfortable, was registering against every inch of her like a conversation. The whisper of it across her breasts made her breath catch. She shifted slightly and the slide of fabric against her n*****s sent a sharp little current through her that made her press her lips together and go very still.

She did not understand what that was.

She understood it was not nothing.

Between her thighs there was a warmth that had its own pulse, a slow deep throb that matched her heartbeat and also somehow exceeded it, more present than her heartbeat, more demanding. A wetness that she had no framework for, that her body had apparently decided to produce without consulting her, that felt simultaneously embarrassing and like the most honest thing she had ever experienced.

She pressed her thighs together very gently.

The friction that produced made her exhale in a way that she was glad Adam was still asleep for.

She had dreamed of him. The golden one, the one with the dark wings and the silver fire and the eyes that looked at her like she was the answer to something enormous. She had been reaching toward him and he had been reaching toward her and the air between their almost-touching fingers had been so charged, so full of everything about to happen, and then it had shattered and she had snapped back into herself and now she was here, in Eden, in her body, which was apparently a completely different body than the one she had gone to sleep in.

She turned her head and looked at Adam.

He was beautiful. She had always known that, it was simply a fact about him the way the sky being bright was a fact, not something that required feeling, just something that was true. Nyx had made him with evident care, every line of him deliberate and considered, his face in sleep open and unguarded and genuinely sweet. She felt tenderness looking at him. She did feel that. She wanted to be honest with herself about what she felt and what she didn't.

What she didn't feel was this. This humming, this heat, this specific and urgent wanting that was currently making it very difficult to lie still. Adam had never made her feel this. His touch was gentle and reverent and she had always received it that way, as something given to her carefully, something she was meant to accept with grace. It had never occurred to her to want more than that because she had not known more than that existed.

She knew now.

She wasn't sure if that was a gift or a sentence.

She sat up slowly, the silk falling away, and the morning air of Eden moved across her bare skin and she felt that too, felt it in a way she never had before, every breath of warmth a separate thing with its own texture. The garden was waking up around her, that familiar soft luminescence spreading through the leaves and the grass and the flowers, everything in Eden rising together in the gentle coordinated way that things in Eden always did.

It should have been comforting. It was the same morning it always was.

It felt like a cage she was only just now noticing the bars of.

She pressed her hand flat against her sternum and felt her own heartbeat, faster than it should be, uneven in a way that Eden's perfect rhythm had no explanation for. Something had changed in the night. Something fundamental and irreversible, a before and after with a very clear line between them, and she was standing on the after side with no map and no vocabulary and a body full of wanting that had nowhere to go.

She thought about his eyes.

The way they had found hers like they had always known exactly where she was.

She thought about her own hand, extended, trembling. She had done that. She had chosen that. In the Dreamveil with the air crackling around them and every rational thought dissolving in the heat of his presence, she had been the one to reach first. That mattered. She turned it over in her mind, that small fact, and found that it did not frighten her the way it probably should have.

It felt like the truest thing she had ever done.