The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue - V. E. Schwab Page 0,172
teeth skating along her bottom lip, the weight and heat of his body pressing against hers.
He tastes like the air at night, heady with the weight of summer storms. He tastes like the faint traces of far-off woodsmoke, a fire dying in the dark. He tastes like the forest, and somehow, impossibly, like home.
And then darkness reaches up around her, around them, and the Cicada Club vanishes; the low music and the crooner’s melody swallowed up by the pressing void, by rushing wind, and racing hearts, and Addie is falling, forever and a single backward step—and then her feet find the smooth marble floor of a hotel room, and Luc is there, pressing her forward, and she is there, drawing him back against the nearest wall.
His arms lift around her, forming a loose and open cage.
She could break it, if she tried.
She doesn’t try.
He kisses her again, and this time, he is not tasting poison. This time, there is no caution, no pulling back; the kiss is sudden, sharp, and deep, stealing air and thought and leaving only hunger, and for a moment, Addie can feel the yawning dark, feel it opening around her, even though the ground is still there.
She has kissed a lot of people. But none of them will ever kiss like him. The difference doesn’t lie in the technicalities. His mouth is no better shaped to the task. It is just in the way he uses it.
It is the difference between tasting a peach out of season, and that first bite into sun-ripened fruit.
The difference between seeing only in black-and-white, and a life in full-color film.
That first time, it is a kind of fight, neither letting down their guard, each watching for the telltale glint of some hidden blade seeking flesh.
When they finally collide, it is with all the force of bodies kept too long apart.
It is a battle waged on bedsheets.
And in the morning, the whole room shows the signs of their war.
“It’s been so long,” he says, “since I haven’t wanted to leave.”
She looks at the window, the first thin edge of light. “Then don’t.”
“I must,” he says. “I am a thing of darkness.”
She props her head up on one hand. “Will you vanish with the sun?”
“I will simply go where it is dark again.”
Addie rises, goes to the window, and draws the curtains closed, plunging the room back into lightless black.
“There,” she says, feeling her way back to him. “Now it is dark again.”
Luc laughs, a soft, beautiful sound, and pulls her down into the bed.
Everywhere, Nowhere
1952–1968
X
It is only sex.
At least, it starts that way.
He is a thing to be gotten out of her system.
She is a novelty to be enjoyed.
Addie half expects them to burn out in a single night, to waste whatever energy they’ve gathered in their years of spinning.
But two months later, he comes to find her again, steps out of nothing and back into her life, and she thinks about how strange it is, to see him against the reds and golds of autumn, the changing leaves, a charcoal scarf looped loose around his throat.
It is weeks until his next visit.
And then, only days.
So many years of solitary nights, hours of waiting, and hating, and hoping. Now he is there.
Still, Addie makes herself small promises in the space between his visits.
She will not linger in his arms.
She will not fall asleep beside him.
She will not feel anything but his lips on her skin, his hands tangled in hers, the weight of him against her.
Small promises, but ones she does not keep.
It is only sex.
And then it is not.
“Dine with me,” Luc says as winter gives way to spring.
“Dance with me,” he says as a new year begins.
“Be with me,” he says, at last, as one decade slips into the next.
And one night Addie wakes in the dark to the soft pressure of his fingertips drawing patterns on her skin, and she is struck by the look in his eyes. No, not the look. The knowing.
It is the first time that she has woken up in bed with someone who hasn’t already forgotten her. The first time she’s heard her name again after the pause of sleep. The first time she hasn’t felt alone.
And something in her splinters.
Addie does not hate him anymore. Has not for a long time.
She does not know when the shift started, if it was a specific point in time, or, as Luc once warned her, the slow erosion of a coast.