Passenger (Passenger #1) - Alexandra Bracken Page 0,117
He was strong enough to pull his hands away by force; her thoughts spun in a dizzying dance of want and confusion and desperation. “Etta—”
He leaned forward and captured her lips, stealing the kiss himself until she had to come up and gasp for breath. Nicholas pulled her back under, and this time she did let go, only to take his beautiful face in her hands, to let his hands tangle in her hair, around her shoulders. If the sky had opened again just then, Etta didn’t think she’d feel the storm at all—not when she was caught so deeply in this. Time was tugging at her back, insistent and demanding, passing faster and faster, but all she wanted was to stay there, to smell the sea on his skin and press her face to that part of his neck where it seemed to fit perfectly, as if it had been made to hold her and her alone. If there was a place to go where time might forget them, she wanted to find it.
He was breathing hard enough that she felt his heart jumping against her ribs, and she knew hers was doing the same. She turned, running her lips along the curve of his ear, her fingers pressed against the solid muscles of his back.
“We can’t,” he said into her hair, half-pleading, “we can’t make this so bloody difficult.”
Too late.
What was she even doing—torturing herself with what she couldn’t have? She could fight this, whatever force it was that dragged her back to him, that knotted their yearning. Attraction. She would go home and he would go home, and whatever kept pulling them back together would be dissolved by distance and time and death.
He’s been dead for hundreds of years by the time you’re born.
They weren’t supposed to have ever met. Maybe that’s why she wanted it so badly—it was impossible, and both of them were too stubborn to let themselves be told what they could and couldn’t have.
Right now, she didn’t care.
Right now, he didn’t care.
Etta wasn’t sure who reached for the other, only that she was kissing him again until her lungs burned and her body ached for him to be closer. Her back collided with the wet stone of the gate, and she imagined she could taste the storm in him, the battering winds of desperation and frustration that met and matched her own, blow for blow.
His lips softened against hers as his hands slid from the nape of her neck to brace his weight against the wall, trapping her against it. She felt Nicholas give in to the slow exploration of her. The tenderness of his touch made her hands curl in his wet shirt. The world dissolved around her, as if she’d stepped through another passage.
Passage.
She pulled him closer, trying to will the world away. Nicholas made a small, hungry noise in his throat.
Astrolabe.
Sliding her hands around his waist, her fingers went searching for the warm bare skin beneath his shirt.
Mom.
“Etta,” he was murmuring, turning her name into a secret, “Etta…we…the passage…”
There’s no time.
“I know,” she managed to say against his lips, “I…”
Etta didn’t have the strength to push him away, to end it, the way they both knew they had to. Even now, the knowledge only filled her with more desperation, made her unbearably feverish beneath her skin. She gripped him tighter, refusing to let go.
No time for this.
This had to stop the same way it had begun. Together. She felt him slow; the lazy, drugging quality of his kisses faded to a ghost of a touch.
No time for us.
She let out a shaky breath and turned her face away. Nicholas leaned down and rested his head against one of his hands, trying to catch his breath.
After a while he said, his voice hollow, “Rather proved my earlier point, didn’t I? We need—we need to go, before Ironwood sends a traveler after us. If he hasn’t already.”
Etta kept her gaze on the wet stones, the winding rivulets of water slipping between them, and nodded. Why this? The thought seared through her. Why him? Why?
“Do you know where we’re meant to go?” he asked quietly. He lifted a hand to touch her face but let it fall away, as if thinking better of it.
“It’s…I think we’re looking for the Elephant Terrace,” she said when she’d found her voice. “That’s what my mom’s painting was of—a view of it from slightly above. I don’t know where it is inside, though.”