This, I think, is the way to die.
I could drown in this moment and I’d never regret it. I could catch fire from this kiss and happily turn to ash. I could live here, die here, right here, against his hips, his lips. In the emotion in his eyes as he sinks into me, his heartbeats indistinguishable from mine.
This. Forever. This.
He kisses me again, his occasional gasps for air hot against my skin, and I taste him, his mouth, his neck, the hard line of his jaw and he fights back a groan, pulls away, pain and pleasure twining together as he moves deeper, harder, his muscles taught, his body rock solid against mine. He has one hand around the back of my neck, the other around the back of my thigh and he wraps us together, impossibly closer, overwhelming me with an extraordinary pleasure that feels like nothing I’ve ever known. It’s nameless. Unknowable, impossible to plan for. It’s different every time.
And there’s something wild and beautiful in him today, something I can’t explain in the way he touches me—the way his fingers linger along my shoulder blades, down the curve of my back—like I might evaporate at any moment, like this might be the first and last time we’ll ever touch.
I close my eyes.
Let go.
The lines of our bodies have merged. It’s wave after wave of ice and heat, melting and catching fire and it’s his mouth on my skin, his strong arms wrapping me up in love and warmth. I’m suspended in midair, underwater, in outer space, all at the same time and clocks are frozen, inhibitions are out the window and I’ve never felt so safe, so loved or so protected than I have here, in the private fusion of our bodies.
I lose track of time.
I lose track of my mind.
I only know I want this to last forever.
He’s saying something to me, running his hands down my body, and his words are soft and desperate, silky against my ear, but I can hardly hear him over the sound of my own heart beating against my chest. But I see it, when the muscles in his arms strain against his skin, as he fights to stay here, with me—
He gasps, out loud, squeezing his eyes shut as he reaches out, grabs a fistful of the bedsheets and I turn my face into his chest, trail my nose up the line of his neck and breathe him in and I’m pressed against him, every inch of my skin hot and raw with want and need and
“I love you,” I whisper
even as I feel my mind detach from my body
even as stars explode behind my eyes and heat floods my veins and I’m overcome, I’m stunned and overcome every time, every time
It’s a torrent of feeling, a simultaneous, ephemeral taste of death and bliss and my eyes close, white-hot heat flashes behind my eyelids and I have to fight the need to call out his name even as I feel us shatter together, destroyed and restored all at once and he gasps
He says, “Juliette—”
I love the sight of his naked body.
Especially in these quiet, vulnerable moments. These brackets of time stapled between dreams and reality are my favorite. There’s a sweetness in this hesitant consciousness—a careful, gentle return of form to function. I’ve found I love these minutes most for the delicate way in which they unfold. It’s tender.
Slow motion.
Time tying its shoes.
And Warner is so still, so soft. So unguarded. His face is smooth, his brow unfurrowed, his lips wondering whether to part. And the first seconds after he opens his eyes are the sweetest. Some days I’m lucky enough to look up before he does. Today I watch him stir. I watch him blink open his eyes and orient himself. But then, in the time it takes him to find me—the way his face lights up when he sees me staring—that part makes something inside of me sing. I know everything, everything that ever matters, just by the way he looks at me in that moment.
And today, something is different.
Today, when he opens his eyes he looks suddenly disoriented. He blinks and looks around, sitting up too fast like he might want to run and doesn’t remember how. Today, something is wrong.
And when I climb into his lap he stills.
And when I take his chin in my hands he turns away.
When I kiss him, softly, he closes his eyes and something inside him thaws, something unclenches in his bones, and when he opens his eyes again he looks terrified and I feel suddenly sick to my stomach.
Something is terribly, terribly wrong.
“What is it?” I say, my words scarcely making a sound. “What happened? What’s wrong?”
He shakes his head.
“Is it me?” My heart is pounding. “Did I do something?”
His eyes go wide. “No, no, Juliette—you’re perfect. You’re—God, you’re perfect,” he says. He grips the back of his head, looks at the ceiling.
“Then why won’t you look at me?”
So he meets my eyes. And I can’t help but marvel at how much I love his face, even now, even in his fear. He’s so classically handsome. So remarkably beautiful, even like this: his hair shorn, short and soft; his face unshaven, a silver-blond shadow contouring the already hard lines of his face. His eyes are an impossible shade of green. Bright. Blinking. And then—
Closed.
“I have to tell you something,” he says quietly. He’s looking down. He lifts a hand to touch me and his fingers trail down the side of my torso. Delicate. Terrified. “Something I should’ve told you earlier.”
“What do you mean?” I fall back. I ball up a section of the bedsheet and hold it tightly against my body, feeling suddenly vulnerable.
He hesitates for too long. Exhales. He drags his hand across his mouth, his chin, down the back of his neck—
“I have no idea where to start.”
Every instinct in my body is telling me to run. To shove cotton in my ears. To tell him to stop talking. But I can’t. I’m frozen.
And I’m scared.
“Start at the beginning,” I say, surprised I can even bring myself to speak. I’ve never seen him like this before. I can’t imagine what he has to say. He’s now clasping his hands together so tightly I worry he might break his own fingers by accident.
And then, finally. Slowly.
He speaks.
“The Reestablishment,” he says, “went public with their campaigns when you were seven years old. I was nine. But they’d been meeting and planning for many years before that.”
“Okay.”
“The founders of the The Reestablishment,” he says, “were once military men and women turned defense contractors. And they were responsible, in part, for the rise of the military industrial complex that built the foundation of the de facto military states composing what is now The Reestablishment. They’d had their plans in place for a long time before this regime went live,” he says. “Their jobs had made it possible for them to have had access to weapons and technology no one had even heard of. They had extensive surveillance, fully equipped facilities, acres of private property, unlimited access to information—all for years before you were even born.”
My heart is pounding in my chest.
“They’d discovered Unnaturals—a term The Reestablishment uses to describe those with supernatural abilities—a few years later. You were about five years old,” he says, “when they made their first discovery.” He looks at the wall. “That’s when they started collecting, testing, and using people with abilities to expedite their goals in dominating the world.”
“This is all really interesting,” I say, “but I’m kind of freaking out right now and I need you to skip ahead to the part where you tell me what any of this has to do with me.”
“Sweetheart,” he says, finally meeting my eyes. “All of this has to do with you.”
“How?”
“There was one thing I knew about your life that I never told you,” he says. He swallows. He’s looking into his hands when he says, “You were adopted.”
The revelation is like a thunderclap.
I stumble off the bed, clutch the sheet to my body and stand there, staring at him, stunned. I try to stay calm even as my mind catches fire.
“I was adopted.”
He nods.
“So you’re saying that the people who raised me—tortured me—are not my real parents?”
He shakes his head.
“Are my biological parents still alive?”
“Yes,” he whispers.
“And you never told me this?”
No, he says quickly
No, no I didn’t know they were still alive, he says
I didn’t know anything except that you were adopted, he says, I just found out, just yesterday, that your parents are still alive, because Castle, he says, Castle told me—
And every subsequent revelation is like a shock wave, a sudden, unforeseen detonation that implodes within me—
BOOM
Your life has been an experiment, he says
BOOM
You have a sister, he says, she’s still alive
BOOM
Your biological parents gave you and your sister to The Reestablishment for scientific research
and it’s like the world has been knocked off its axis, like I’ve been flung from the earth and I’m headed directly for the sun,
like I’m being burned alive and somehow, I can still hear him, even as my skin melts inward, as my mind turns inside-out and everything I’ve ever known, everything I ever thought to be true about who I am and where I come from
v a n i s h e s
I inch away from him, confused and horrified and unable to form words, unable to speak
And he says he didn’t know, and his voice breaks when he says it, when he says he didn’t know until recently that my biological parents were still alive, didn’t know until Castle told him, never knew how to tell me that I’d been adopted, didn’t know how I would take it, didn’t know if I needed that pain, but Castle told him that The Reestablishment is coming for me, that they’re coming to take me back
and your sister, he says
but I’m crying now, unable to see him through the tears and still I cannot speak and
your sister, he says, her name is Emmaline, she’s one year older than you, she’s very, very powerful, she’s been the property of The Reestablishment for twelve years
I can’t stop shaking my head
“Stop,” I say
“No,” I say
Please don’t do this to me—
But he won’t stop. He says I have to know. He says I have to know this now—that I have to know the truth—
STOP TELLING ME THIS, I scream
I didn’t know she was your sister, he’s saying,
I didn’t know you had a sister
I swear I didn’t know
“There were nearly twenty men and women who put together the beginnings of The Reestablishment,” he says, “but there were only six supreme commanders. When the man originally chosen for North America became terminally ill, my father was being considered to replace him. I was sixteen. We lived here, in Sector 45. My father was then CCR. And becoming supreme commander meant he would be moving away, and he wanted to take me with him. My mother,” he says, “was to be left behind.”
Please don’t say any more
Please don’t say anything else, I beg him
“It was the only way I could convince him to give me his job,” he says, desperate now. “To allow me to stay behind, to watch her closely. He was sworn in as supreme commander when I was eighteen. And he made me spend the two years in between—
“Aaron, please,” I say, feeling hysterical, “I don’t want to know—I didn’t ask you to tell me—I don’t want to know—”
“I perpetuated your sister’s torture,” he says, his voice raw, broken, “her confinement. I was ordered to oversee her continued imprisonment. I gave the orders that kept her there. Every day. I was never told why she was there or what was wrong with her. I was told to maintain her. That was it. She was allowed only four twenty-minute breaks from the water tank every twenty-four hours and she used to scream—she’d beg me to release her,” he says, his voice catching. “She begged for mercy and I never gave it to her.”
And I stop
Head spinning
I drop the sheet from my body as I run, run away
I’m shoving clothes on as fast as I can and when I return to the room, half wild, caught in a nightmare, I catch him half dressed, too, no shirt, just pants, and he doesn’t even speak as I stare at him, stunned, one hand covering my mouth as I shake my head, tears spilling fast down my face and I don’t know what to say, I don’t know that I can ever say anything to him, ever again—
“It’s too much,” I say, choking on the words. “It’s too much—it’s too much—”
“Juliette—”
And I shake my head, hands trembling as I reach for the door and
“Please,” he says, and tears are falling silently down his face, and he’s visibly shaking as he says, “You have to believe me. I was young. And stupid. I was desperate. I thought I had nothing to live for then—nothing mattered to me but saving my mother and I was willing to do anything that would keep me here, close to her—”
“You lied to me!” I explode, anger squeezing my eyes shut as I back away from him. “You lied to me all this time, you’ve lied to me—about everything—”
“No,” he says, all terror and desperation. “The only thing I’ve kept from you was the truth about your parents, I swear to you—”
“How could you keep that from me? All this time, all this—everything—all you did was lie to me—”
He’s shaking his head when he says No, no, I love you, my love for you has never been a lie—
“Then why didn’t you tell me this sooner? Why would you keep this from me?”
“I thought your parents had died a long time ago—I didn’t think it would help you to know about them. I thought it would only hurt you more to know you’d lost them. And I didn’t know,” he says, shaking his head, “I didn’t know anything about your real parents or your sister, please believe me—I swear I didn’t know, not until yesterday—”
His chest is heaving so hard that his body bows, his hands planted on his knees as he tries to breathe and he’s not looking at me when he says, whispers, “I’m so sorry. I’m so, so sorry.”
“Stop it—stop talking—”
“Please—”
“How—h-how can I ever—ever trust you again?” My eyes are wide and terrified and searching him for an answer that will save us both but he doesn’t answer. He can’t. He leaves me with nothing to hold on to. “How can we ever go back?” I say. “How can you expect me to forget all of this? That you lied to me about my parents? That you tortured my sister? There’s so much about you I don’t know,” I say, my voice small and broken, “so much—and I can’t—I can’t do this—”
And he looks up, frozen in place, staring at me like he’s finally understanding that I won’t pretend this never happened, that I can’t continue to be with someone I can’t trust and I can see it, can see the hope go out of his eyes, his hand caught behind his head. His jaw is slack; his face is stunned, suddenly pale and he takes a step toward me, lost, desperate, pleading with his eyes
but I have to go.
I’m running down the hall and I don’t know where I’m going until I get there.