Restore Me (Shatter Me #4)(51)

“I love you,” I whisper

even as I feel my mind detach from my body

even as stars explode behind my eyes and heat floods my veins and I’m overcome, I’m stunned and overcome every time, every time

It’s a torrent of feeling, a simultaneous, ephemeral taste of death and bliss and my eyes close, white-hot heat flashes behind my eyelids and I have to fight the need to call out his name even as I feel us shatter together, destroyed and restored all at once and he gasps

He says, “Juliette—”


I love the sight of his naked body.

Especially in these quiet, vulnerable moments. These brackets of time stapled between dreams and reality are my favorite. There’s a sweetness in this hesitant consciousness—a careful, gentle return of form to function. I’ve found I love these minutes most for the delicate way in which they unfold. It’s tender.

Slow motion.

Time tying its shoes.

And Warner is so still, so soft. So unguarded. His face is smooth, his brow unfurrowed, his lips wondering whether to part. And the first seconds after he opens his eyes are the sweetest. Some days I’m lucky enough to look up before he does. Today I watch him stir. I watch him blink open his eyes and orient himself. But then, in the time it takes him to find me—the way his face lights up when he sees me staring—that part makes something inside of me sing. I know everything, everything that ever matters, just by the way he looks at me in that moment.

And today, something is different.

Today, when he opens his eyes he looks suddenly disoriented. He blinks and looks around, sitting up too fast like he might want to run and doesn’t remember how. Today, something is wrong.

And when I climb into his lap he stills.

And when I take his chin in my hands he turns away.

When I kiss him, softly, he closes his eyes and something inside him thaws, something unclenches in his bones, and when he opens his eyes again he looks terrified and I feel suddenly sick to my stomach.

Something is terribly, terribly wrong.

“What is it?” I say, my words scarcely making a sound. “What happened? What’s wrong?”

He shakes his head.

“Is it me?” My heart is pounding. “Did I do something?”

His eyes go wide. “No, no, Juliette—you’re perfect. You’re—God, you’re perfect,” he says. He grips the back of his head, looks at the ceiling.

“Then why won’t you look at me?”

So he meets my eyes. And I can’t help but marvel at how much I love his face, even now, even in his fear. He’s so classically handsome. So remarkably beautiful, even like this: his hair shorn, short and soft; his face unshaven, a silver-blond shadow contouring the already hard lines of his face. His eyes are an impossible shade of green. Bright. Blinking. And then—

Closed.

“I have to tell you something,” he says quietly. He’s looking down. He lifts a hand to touch me and his fingers trail down the side of my torso. Delicate. Terrified. “Something I should’ve told you earlier.”

“What do you mean?” I fall back. I ball up a section of the bedsheet and hold it tightly against my body, feeling suddenly vulnerable.

He hesitates for too long. Exhales. He drags his hand across his mouth, his chin, down the back of his neck—

“I have no idea where to start.”

Every instinct in my body is telling me to run. To shove cotton in my ears. To tell him to stop talking. But I can’t. I’m frozen.

And I’m scared.

“Start at the beginning,” I say, surprised I can even bring myself to speak. I’ve never seen him like this before. I can’t imagine what he has to say. He’s now clasping his hands together so tightly I worry he might break his own fingers by accident.

And then, finally. Slowly.

He speaks.

“The Reestablishment,” he says, “went public with their campaigns when you were seven years old. I was nine. But they’d been meeting and planning for many years before that.”

“Okay.”

“The founders of the The Reestablishment,” he says, “were once military men and women turned defense contractors. And they were responsible, in part, for the rise of the military industrial complex that built the foundation of the de facto military states composing what is now The Reestablishment. They’d had their plans in place for a long time before this regime went live,” he says. “Their jobs had made it possible for them to have had access to weapons and technology no one had even heard of. They had extensive surveillance, fully equipped facilities, acres of private property, unlimited access to information—all for years before you were even born.”

My heart is pounding in my chest.

“They’d discovered Unnaturals—a term The Reestablishment uses to describe those with supernatural abilities—a few years later. You were about five years old,” he says, “when they made their first discovery.” He looks at the wall. “That’s when they started collecting, testing, and using people with abilities to expedite their goals in dominating the world.”

“This is all really interesting,” I say, “but I’m kind of freaking out right now and I need you to skip ahead to the part where you tell me what any of this has to do with me.”

“Sweetheart,” he says, finally meeting my eyes. “All of this has to do with you.”