It’s mixed with fear, but leavened with a nascent, burgeoning, swelling sensation of a nebulous, boiling thing I know will become love, once I allow myself to examine it—once I can feel anything but a need for Jamie.
For comfort.
For his arms. His lips.
Jamie feels my tears end, and pulls away to look at me, gauging where I am, trying to parse what I may be feeling.
“Elyse, I hope you don’t think I—”
My lips slash across his, and I feel our teeth clack together and our noses bump, and then he tilts his head and cups my face and tilts mine so that our lips align and his breath is my breath and, just like that, I’m lost in him, kissing him in a futile attempt to express the sudden, white-hot explosion of need I feel.
There is no expressing it. No encapsulating it. No containing it.
All I can do is kiss him and let the fire consume me.
