Free Web NovelChapter 337: Two strange animals
NICK
I lay on the concrete beneath him, the water pooling around my ears, entirely lost.
"What?" I muttered, the blood copper in my throat. "What’s so funny?"
Cyan kept laughing for a few more seconds, his shoulders shaking against mine.
Then he snapped his head back down, his eyes bright as he looked at me again. He let go of my collar, but instead of pulling away, his hand moved up to the side of my face.
His palm was wet and cold against my skin, and his thumb reached out, wiping the blood away from my split lip with a casual, matter-of-fact roughness.
He didn’t look at the blood like it was an injury; it was just something that needed to be cleaned up. fгeewebnovёl.com
When his laughter finally settled, the lethal, distant look he had been carrying through the hospital halls was completely gone.
His face looked entirely different now, softer, alive, carrying an unexpected warmth that didn’t seem possible a minute ago.
He gave me a bright, wide smile, a look so sharp and striking that for a second, I could swear the heavy rain had started to slow down, as if the weather couldn’t even keep up its own argument against him.
He leaned down a little closer, using his other hand to push his wet pink hair away from his eyes.
"It seems," he murmured, the lingering amusement still vibrating in his voice, "I’ve attracted a very strange animal. Even by my standards."
His head tilted, his thumb lingering near the corner of my mouth. "That’s almost impressive."
I opened my mouth to say something... to defend my intelligence, to establish some kind of order but I never got the sentence out.
Because Cyan didn’t give me the chance. He closed the remaining inches between us and pressed his mouth directly against mine.
It wasn’t a transition I could have predicted if I had been given a thousand years and a textbook on human behavior. My brain completely stalled.
His hands came up to frame my jaw, his fingers surprisingly careful around the places where his knuckles had just left bruises.
But the kiss itself wasn’t careful at all. It wasn’t a kind offer or the careful starting point of someone who was unsure of their welcome.
It was hard, deliberate, and heavy.
Instinctively, my hands flew up to his chest, my fingers curling into his wet shirt to push him away, the automatic self-defense mechanism of a man who felt his entire world tilting off its axis.
But my arms didn’t push.
They just stayed there, my fingers locking into the fabric as Cyan leaned his weight entirely into me, his tongue sliding deeper into my mouth with the unyielding certainty of someone who had made a decision and had absolutely no intention of revising it midway through.
What happened to my internal systems in that moment wasn’t something I could find in any medical journal I had ever read, despite the years I had spent memorizing them.
The resistance lasted for maybe four seconds. Which was exactly three seconds longer than it would have taken if I had been capable of a single honest thought since dawn.
Then, without any instruction from the thinking part of my brain, my hands let go of his shirt and slid down to his waist, my fingers gripping the wet leather of his belt to pull him down against me.
The shift was immediate. Cyan moved his hips, sliding further up my thighs until his weight was pressed directly into my groin.
The physical consequence of that movement arrived in my blood long before my brain could even process the notification; I could feel the sudden, sharp ache of my own arousal pressing hard against the fabric of his jeans.
A wave of intense, suffocating heat rushed into my face. I told myself right then that it was the 38.9 fever. I would tell myself it was the illness when I thought about this later in my room... if I survived the thought of it at all.
The panic arrived right on schedule, sharp and terrifying. My hands gripped his waist tighter, my mind turning into a chaotic mess as I tried to decide whether to yank him closer or shove him into the gravel, ending up doing absolutely neither with any kind of real conviction.
Cyan pulled his mouth away just an inch, his breathing as ragged as mine.
The rain was dripping from the tips of his pink hair straight onto my eyelids, but his expression was entirely pleased, the specific, smug satisfaction of a scientist who had just seen his hypothesis proven correct in the lab.
I looked up at him, my chest heaving, my face burning with a heat that had nothing to do with the storm. "You’re an extremely odd individual," I said, the words coming out breathlessly. It was humiliating, but my lungs wouldn’t give me anything better.
"Right back at you," Cyan said simply. He looked down at me, his eyes dark and satisfied, like a man who had just found a valuable piece of gold in a pile of gray rocks where he hadn’t expected to find anything at all.
I opened my mouth to deliver the next sentence, though I hadn’t actually figured out what the words were going to be.
But my body chose that exact second to quit.
The cold rain, the wet concrete, the boiling fever, the three weeks of sleepless nights, the bruises on my jaw, and the sudden, terrifying weight of that kiss, all of it landed simultaneously on a physical system that had been running past its absolute limit for longer than was medically defensible.
The edges of the sky began to blur. The low hum of the ventilation units faded out into a distant, hollow echo.
"You’re—" I started, my tongue feeling heavy and useless against my teeth. "Incredibly—"
The dark didn’t roll in; it dropped like a curtain, total and complete. The rain was still falling against my skin, and Cyan’s face was the very last image left in my head before everything went quietly, entirely black.
