And then…big hands on her. Human hands. Warm, strong fingers curled around her upper arms and lifted her into equally strong arms. She knew this smell. She knew this man. She tried to cry and found no tears, just dry, heaving sobs that made her hurt. She clung to him.
“Luke,” Celia said.
“I’m here,” he answered, and then he took her out of the dark.
She needed a hospital, but instead Luke took her home. There’d have been too many unanswerable questions in a hospital, and besides, he knew that if she wasn’t dead, it was because the thing that had taken her had meant to keep her alive, and that meant she would live. She had to.
Showered, her wounds dressed with simple gauze, Celia looked incredibly tiny in her bed. She’d said almost nothing since the moment he’d found her in the same cave where he’d originally discovered the creatures. Now she looked at him from wide eyes, every cut and scratch standing out in stark contrast to her too-pale skin. She was too thin from a week of poor diet and being kept in the dark, and the punctures on her throat would take longer to heal while the rest of the thing’s poison worked its way out of her system, but she would be fine. Physically, at least.
“I knew you’d come,” she said suddenly. “I knew you’d find me.”
Luke wanted to sit on the bed next to her and take her hand, to press it to his mouth. He stayed where he was, a few feet away. “You should never have been there in the first place.”
“But I was. And you came for me. I knew you’d come,” she repeated in a hoarse voice. Her eyes shone.
He didn’t want her to cry. He didn’t want her to hurt. He wanted to take all of this away from her, have it be made undone. But he couldn’t do any of that, he was useless and helpless and worse than that, he was to blame for all of it in the first place….
“Luke,” Celia said, commanding. “Don’t you dare leave me. Don’t you dare.”
Somehow he was kneeling beside her bed, his face against the sheets and her hand resting lightly on the back of his head. She stroked him while he fought against completely losing control. His shoulders heaved, his throat burned and closed against any sort of words. Not that he had anything to say—apologies were worthless. He could never make this better.
“Come to bed,” she murmured, words slurring.
He thought he wouldn’t sleep, but he stripped anyway and slid beneath the covers next to her. Celia, with a small groan, rolled onto her side to pillow her head on his chest. Her hand smoothed down over his belly. Then lower.
He put a hand over hers when it gripped him. “Celia…”
“Shut up.”
In her voice he heard that same dry humor he’d fallen in love with that very first night in that backwoods bar. She stroked him, and unbelievably, his cock rose at her touch. She twisted her palm around the head, and pleasure built.
Celia rolled on top of him, moving slowly. She straddled him, her knees pressing his hips. She took his hands and put them on her bare breasts. She arched with a sigh and rocked against him. When she looked down at him, her hair fell all around her face. When she bent to kiss him, it tickled his cheeks. His hands moved up and over her back, feeling the bones of her spine, too prominent.
“I’m not dead,” she whispered against his mouth. She moved back to slide down on his cock, and the heat and slick clutch of her flesh around him forced a sudden gasp from both of them. She said it again, a low murmur he had no trouble hearing. “I’m…not…dead.”
More pleasure built as she moved. His hands found her hips. He tried hard not to grip too fiercely on her bruises, but she put her hands over his and forced his fingers to curl against her. She rode him faster. He was close already, the feeling of her around him a heaven he hadn’t dreamed could exist.
“I’m not dead,” Celia repeated. “And neither are you.”
“I’m not dead,” he breathed.
She came with a long, low cry, and he matched her. Climax surged out from the base of his cock. Other times he’d experienced orgasm as tumbling into darkness, but not this time. This time, with this woman, he came out of the darkness.
She collapsed on him, her face against his neck. Her lips traced a pattern on his skin. As he fell asleep, the last words he heard echoed in his mind.
I’m not dead.
Celia thought she’d have slept for days in the warmth, comfort and safety of her own bed, but instead she was up when the first light of morning probed her window. She wasn’t surprised to find the bed empty, and she lay there without moving for a couple minutes, just relishing the ache in her muscles that meant she was no longer drugged by whatever it was the thing had put in her when it bit her. Because every creak of her joints and sting of her cuts reminded her that she was alive.
She heard footsteps downstairs and wondered if she’d ever hear that sound without her heart thudding just a little faster in terror before she could convince herself it was no monster down there waiting for her, but Luke. God, she hoped he was making coffee. In the kitchen, she found him at the table. No coffee. Nothing, just…sitting.
She sat across from him. She took his hand. “You didn’t leave.”
“I thought about it.”
“I know you did,” she told him. She squeezed his fingers. “But you didn’t.”
“Not yet,” Luke said.
“Breakfast?” Celia looked toward the fridge where she knew she had eggs and bacon and frozen hash browns, but was unable to force herself to get out of her chair and cook them.
She’d just survived dying at the hands of a monster. Literally. Breakfast seemed so mundane after that.
“Kiss me,” she told him. He leaned across the table and did. Her eyes were still closed when he pulled back, and she left them that way to say, “On second thought, if you’re going to leave, you should do it now before I invest any more time.”
“Celia…”
Her eyes opened. She shook her head. “No. No excuses. You can run away.”
His eyes flashed. “I’m not running away.”
“No?” She got up and went to the fridge. The cold air bathed her suddenly too-warm face. She looked at the eggs, the cheese, the small bowl of broccoli she’d cut up before being taken. It would be wilted by now. No good. “What do you call it, then?”
He was up behind her, not touching her but close enough that he could if he wanted to. “I just think it’d be better if I go. There might be trouble.”
“Worse than being kidnapped by something out of a horror movie and fed upon?” she asked in a flat voice. She closed her eyes again, exhausted. When she turned to look at him, she hated what she saw. “If you don’t want me, just go. I’m tired of begging you to stay.”
“If I don’t…how could you even think that?”
“How could I think anything else?” She tossed up her hands.
Luke looked bleak. “It never would’ve happened if—“
“If what?”
Celia stepped up to him as he backed away. “If I hadn’t met you? If those things hadn’t attacked you in the first place? What, Luke?”
“If I hadn’t gone after them!” he shouted. “Those monsters killed my parents, my sister, her family. They came after everyone I love!”
She opened her mouth to shout back, but stopped, stunned. Tears burned in her eyes at the thought of what he’d lost, how she hadn’t even known. She swallowed the razors in her throat. “I’m so, so sorry.”
He shook his head and moved two steps toward her to take her by the upper arms. Last night he’d been too gentle with her, but now he had no such softness. His fingers pinched, and she winced but didn’t try to get away.
“You weren’t listening,” Luke said. “Everyone I love. That’s you too, Celia. I love you.”
“Then why do you want to keep walking away from me?” she cried. “All you’ve ever done is leave me, over and over, and I understood it when I thought it was something you had to do…because of those things out there. Because of what you’d taken upon yours
elf to do. I thought I could understand, then, but it’s over Luke. It’s all over now.”
“Is it?” He shook his head again, turning on his heel to pace as he ran his hands through his hair. It had grown longer than she’d ever seen it, still too short to do more than stand on end from his rumpling fingers. “That thing that took you. I killed it. But I don’t think it was the very last one, Celia. I can still hear…something. Maybe I’m just crazy, maybe I’ll always just be crazy.”
He looked up at her, eyes red-rimmed, mouth grim. “But what if there are other things out there? Not just like what I found in that cave, but other monsters?”
“Let someone else hunt them!” she shouted, stamping her foot so hard it sent shocks of pain traveling her entire body.
Luke’s shoulders hunched. “It’s my fault you were taken,” he said in a low, broken voice and turned his back on her. “It’s my fault you were almost killed. If I leave, maybe you’ll be safe.”
“And maybe I’ll cross the street tomorrow and get hit by a bus,” she said bitterly. “Can you save me from that? Can you save the world from every bad thing that’s ever happened or ever will?”
He shook his head, but looked at her. “If I can, I have to try.”
“I love you,” Celia said in a steady voice that didn’t shake or quaver, even as she felt everything inside her breaking. “If that means I have to wait for you to come around every few months and worry myself sick in between, then…I guess I’ll have to do that. If the only way to keep you, Luke, is to let you go…then go.”
He nodded sharply. Just once. Then he pushed past her and out of the kitchen. She heard the front door open and close behind him. Celia leaned with both hands on her kitchen counter and again searched for tears that wouldn’t come. She had nothing left, her grief too much to bear while she was still recovering from everything that had happened. Later, she’d cry, she thought. She’d fill the tub with water as hot as she could stand, fill it with lavender bubbles, drink a glass of chilled white wine. She’d cry then, maybe until she made herself sick or sank beneath the bubbles to listen to the sound of her heartbeat in her own ears while the water closed over her head and she could pretend she was a mermaid far under the ocean.
She didn’t hear the door open, but suddenly he was there and she was in his arms. He kissed her, mouth open, tongue sweet on hers. His hands pressed against her back, then one found its familiar place at the nape of her neck. They kissed for a very long time.
When they stopped, he looked into her eyes. “I love you, Celia. I don’t want to leave you. I’m not sure what will happen, but…whatever it is, I want to face it with you.”
She laughed, tipping her face back so he could kiss her mouth again. The motion hurt her muscles all over, but she didn’t care. “Take me to bed,” she told him.
“What about breakfast?”
“Later,” Celia breathed against his lips as he lifted her. “Take me to bed. Now, Luke.”
And he did.
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ISBN: 978-1-4592-0997-8
Out of the Dark
Copyright © 2011 by Megan Hart
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Megan Hart, Out of the Dark
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