Dusk Avenger (Flirting with Monsters #3) - Eva Chase Page 0,54

had sprouted nearby, careful not to detach it from its stem.

“I guess you must need a break from the rest of us sometimes, huh?” I said when the silence started to itch at me. “Always badgering you about things you can’t remember.”

“I would like to remember,” Snap said. “I don’t resent you for trying to help me. It bothers all of you too.” He glanced up at me. “Especially you, I think.”

It wasn’t a question, but I felt the need to address it anyway. “We’d… gotten to know each other pretty well before all this. You’re still you, but the way it happened—I don’t know if that can be replicated. Maybe we’ll never end up in the same place. But that’s okay. It isn’t your fault. If anything, it’s mine.”

He blinked. “What do you mean?”

“Well, I…” I drew my gaze away and tugged at a few tufts of grass near my knee. “The worst part we can obviously blame on the Company assholes. I know that. But they only captured you because you’d gone off on your own, and I think if I’d handled certain things better, you might not have.”

“I’m sure if I left it was for reasons completely my own. You couldn’t have forced me.”

“Of course not, but— It’s hard to explain.” How could he understand how emotionally entangled we’d gotten when the being he was now had reverted back to having no concept of intimate relations? “But, you know, we’ve got bigger problems to worry about. It’ll be however it’ll be.”

Snap considered me for a long moment. “I don’t know what I would have done or said before, but I do know that I don’t like seeing you upset.” He scooted a little nearer to me. With a deliberateness that made me suspect he was bringing to mind a memory of seeing Ruse or Thorn taking the same action and was afraid of getting it wrong, he took my hand in his.

The simple gesture that would have meant so much more a week ago brought a lump into my throat. I swallowed thickly. Maybe it was okay if I just tipped my head slightly to the side so it could rest against his shoulder.

Snap didn’t pull away, but he didn’t tug me closer the way he would have done before. I closed my eyes, breathing in the smell of him, clover sweet with its mossy dark undertone. An ache filled my chest. Was this making things better or worse?

“I miss you,” I couldn’t help saying. The words were too true to hold down.

I supposed Snap with his literal mind couldn’t help his answer either. “I’m here.”

Yes, the most essential parts of him were here: the gentleness, the wonder, and the compassion. Just not the man who’d wanted to claim me as his own, who’d seen me as a shining hero, who’d been both so fierce and so tender in his devotion. The man I’d started to imagine building some kind of life with when all this was over, regardless of what realm he came from.

I’d woken up lust and passion in him, sure, but hadn’t he woken up plenty in me at the same time? I’d started seeing things, enjoying things, wanting things I’d never have thought of before… or maybe that I just wouldn’t have let myself think of.

The ache expanded down to my gut and up to the base of my throat with a more wrenching truth that could have followed my first admission. But what was the point in saying that? This was my chance, from here onward, to pretend it wasn’t true. To step back from the path I’d been hurtling down where my life would have been entwined with my shadowkind lovers far beyond the mission we were on.

Wouldn’t it be better to sever that connection here and go back to some kind of normal human existence as soon as I could?

The question passed through my head, and all of me tensed in rejection of it. I wasn’t a normal human—and whatever I was, it was okay. I’d rather be that than one of the people so afraid of risks and consequences.

I could admit this much: Even if I couldn’t have Snap the way we’d once been together, I wished I could.

I opened my mouth, but the words stuck in my throat. I hadn’t said them to anyone since Malachi, years ago—since the man who’d decided I wasn’t even worthy of a conversation had erased himself from our shared life. A sliver

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