I blink while my breath catches in my throat. I’ve never seen so many stars. Millions of them scatter the sky, twinkling and glittering. They sparkle and dance around a bright swath of milky haze that seems to stretch across the atmosphere. Nothing I’ve seen in my life compares. Not the ocean or the mountains. “There are so many,” Ibreathe.
“Only a few places in the world exist where you can see the stars like this.” He kisses my neck. “All skies are not the same, Demi. We all see something different when we look up.” When he tucks my hair behind my ear, my throat tightens. “You’re more than enough. So much fucking more.” He turns me around to face him, and it’s all I can do to breath. This means so much. His words, these stars. He’s just taken the ugliest part of me and painted it with beauty. “From now on, when you look at the stars, I want you to remember there are people who would give up everything for you instead of giving you up for everythingelse.”
My heart hammers against my ribs. The breathtaking view grows blurry. Dear God, I’m about to cry.Stop it, Charlie. Pull yourself together.This isinsane.
There are ten-thousand things I could say, but the only words I can force out serve more as a warning, or maybe a plea for him to be gentle with my heart. “You leave in a few weeks.” I blink away the tears silently accepting that this is slowly growing tooreal.
“Let me forget, because this feels so right,” he whispers against my mouth. He just took any remaining thread of strength I possessed and snapped it in two like a well-worn piece ofthread.
I know this is a dead end. One on a cliff with a barricade up to warn me off the impending danger, yet here I stand, hurdling myself right over the edge with nowhere safe toland.
Rationality is not a forte of the heart and soul, and those are the two things of mine that want Elijah the most. There is no winningthis.
He kisses me deeply and desperately. I claw at his shirt wanting nothing more than to undress him under these stars and let him have every last piece of me. His hands roam my body, pulling and tugging at my clothes while he backs me toward the car. I imagine him doing exactly what he promised weeks ago: throwing my face down on the hood and taking me from behind. At that thought, I scratch my fingers through hishair.
“You have no idea how badly I want you,” he whispers. “The control it’s taken for me not to fuckyou.”
My legs hit thebumper.
The rasp of our uneven breaths drowns out the hum of the insects when he picks me up and sets me on the hood. He steps between my thighs, but there’s too much separating us, the lace of my panties, the thick material of hisjeans.
“Since I first saw you, I knew you were different.” His hands glide up my thighs. “I wanted something so much more from you than I’ve ever wanted from awoman.”
My heart hammers in my chest when he grabs the waist of my panties and inches them down, and suddenly I’m terrified to cross this line with him. Sure, I may have let him fuck me in Mexico, but that was before—before he meant something. Everything to me. And he is leaving, sooner thanlater.
If I believed he would fuck me and leave me feeling like a cheap whore, I’d gladly let him do it. But instead, I’m afraid he’ll fuck his very soul into me, and as connected as I already am to him, I don’t need anything else tethering me to him when I’m forced to saygoodbye.
I can’t have his ghost haunting me like that when he’sgone.
The bulge in his jeans presses against me. “Let me have you,” he pleads while biting at myear.
My walls are crumbling, bit by bit. “Elijah…” I whisper, his lips still at my throat, his hands between my thighs. My heart and body war with one another, one wanting this for the emotions and meaning, the other only after the carnalpleasure.
“Demi…” And that’s all I need to hear. The brakes slam on. I’m not Charlie to him. I’m Demi. This has all been built on a pretty little lie because it wasmeant to gonowhere.
“I… I can’t.” I pull away, sliding off the hood and putting some needed distance between the two of us. “Nothere.”
I watch his chest rise andfall.
He nods before walking to the passenger side of the car and opening my door. “I’m a very patient man,” he says. “I’ll wait as long as ittakes.”
