The Winner's Kiss (The Winner's Trilogy, #3)(51)

She looked at the green liquor left in the glass. It was green. It was liquid. This was a glass. To hide from her would break him. Simple things, so apparent, so not anything other than what they showed themselves to be. She dipped a finger into the liquor’s dregs and touched it to her tongue. It burned.

Arin made a sound.

She glanced up. She didn’t know where her voice had gone. She was nervous. Her flesh was resonant with the knowledge of what she wanted to understand and what she’d come here to find out. It was much riskier than what she’d already asked. She stood.

He watched her pace toward him.

She stopped just short of his chair and looked down at him. Her loose hair slipped over her shoulder. “I remember something. I’m not sure if it happened or not. Will you tell me?”

“Yes,” he whispered.

“I remember lying with you on the lawn of the imperial palace’s spring garden.”

He shifted. Lamplight pulsed over his face. He shook his head.

“I remember finding you in your suite.” This memory was coming to her now. It had a similar flavor as the last one. “I promised to tell you my secrets. You held a book. Or kindling? You were making a fire.”

“That didn’t happen.”

“I kissed you.” She touched the hollow at the base of his neck. His pulse was wild.

“Not then,” he said finally.

“But I have before.” There was a rush of images. It was as if the melody she’d imagined while lying in the dark had been dunked in the green liquor. All the cold stops gained heat and ran together. It was easy to remember Arin, especially now. Her hand slid to his chest. The cotton of his shirt was hot. “Your kitchens. A table. Honey and flour.”

His heart slammed against her palm. “Yes.”

“A carriage.”

“Yes.”

“A balcony.”

Breath escaped him like a laugh. “Almost.”

“I remember falling asleep in your bed when you weren’t here.”

He pulled back slightly, searched her face. “That didn’t happen.”

“Yes it did.”

His mouth parted, but he didn’t speak. The blacks of his eyes were bright. She wondered what it would be like to give her body what it wanted. It knew something she didn’t. Her heart sped, her blood was lush in her veins.

“The first day,” she said. “Last summer. Your hair was a mess. I wanted to sweep it back and make you meet my eyes. I wanted to see you.”

His chest rose and fell beneath her hand. “I don’t know. I can’t—I don’t know what you wanted.”

“I never said?”

“No.”

She lowered her mouth to his. She tasted him: the raw burn of liquor on his tongue. She felt him swallow, heard the low, dry sound of it.

He pulled her down to him, tangled his hands in her hair, sucked the breath from her lips. She became uncertain whose breath was whose. He kissed her back, fingertips fanning across her face, then gone, nowhere. Then: a light touch along the curve of her hip, just barely. A stone skipping the surface of the water. “Strange,” he murmured into her mouth.

She wasn’t listening. She was rippling, the sensation spreading wide. Stone on water, dimpled pockets of pressure. The wait for the stone to finally drop down.

Suddenly she knew—or thought she knew—what he found strange as he traced where a dagger should have been. To see a part of her missing. She felt her missing pieces, the stark gaps. She was arrested by the thought (it pierced her, sharp and surreal) that she had become transparent, that if he touched her again his hand would go right through her, into air, into the empty spaces of who she was now.

She didn’t want to be empty, didn’t want to vanish. She wanted to be whole.

She said, “I want to remember you.”

An emotion flared in his face. He braced her hips, tugged her closer. His lids were heavy, eyes dark. His mouth was a wet gleam. She didn’t recognize his expression. It was new. She leaned in and drank the newness of him.

Their kiss turned savage. She made it so. She felt his teeth, reveled in the sure knowledge that it had never been like this between them. Yet at the same time, she felt each kiss they’d shared before, felt them live inside this one. His mouth left hers, rasping down her neck. He buried his face in her skin.

She sought his mouth and found that he tasted different now. She was tasting the taste of her skin on his mouth. Coppery. She dipped her tongue into it again.

“Kestrel.”

She didn’t answer him.

“This is a bad idea.”

“No,” she said. “It isn’t.”

He pulled away, closed his eyes, and dropped his head to press his brow against her belly. She felt rich with the words he muttered against her nightdress. His mouth burned through the cloth.

His chair scraped back. He no longer touched her. “Not like this.”

“Yes. Exactly like this.” She tried to find the words to express how this helped, how he somehow mapped the country of herself, showed the ridges, the rise and valley of her very being.

“Kestrel, I think that you’re . . . using me a little.”

She stopped, unpleasantly startled. It occurred to her that what he’d said was another version of what she’d been struggling to say.