Unseen Read Online Free Page B

what the humans said was correct, I would float, not fall. But all my instincts went against it.
    I reached over and touched my fingertips to his cheek. It felt rough against my skin, stubbled with a day’s growth of beard, and the sensation roused all kinds of odd feelings inside me—instinctive feelings, nothing summoned by my conscious mind. Curiously powerful rushes of chemicals in my bloodstream that overrode, for the moment, all that caution and hesitation.
    He looked over at me, startled. The contrast of my pale fingers resting against his dark bronze skin made my heart run faster. I held his gaze this time, and the wall I’d put up weakened, melted, and was gone. “Now can you see?” I asked him very quietly. “There’s much between us, good and bad, but can you see past all that, to what I feel?”
    He put the bottle down. I mirrored him, without stopping the slow caress of my fingers across his cheek, down the warm, damp column of his neck, the harsh rasp on his chin, the startlingly soft skin of his lips. They parted under my fingers, cool from the beer. “Hey, Cass?” he asked, and his voice had taken on shadows, weight, deeper registers. “Are you sure you know what the hell you’re doing?”
    “No,” I said, with complete honesty. “I trust you to tell me when I do it wrong.”
    “Jesus,” he whispered, with an odd expression of utter concentration. “Seriously. You know what you’re not exactly talking about, here? Because I’m not sure you do.”
    I stared straight into his rich brown eyes and said, “I want to make love with you. Is that not what you want, as well?”
    “Oh,” he said, after a second’s stunned silence. “I guess you do know what you weren’t talking about. Sorry. Just didn’t want to get that wrong, and madre , Cass, I still don’t know if you—”
    I stood, turned, and straddled his lap as he sat on the couch, kneeling on the cushions to either side. At that distance, there was no possibility of barriers or mistakes for either of us. And I kissed him.
    There was something so astonishingly sweet to the taste of him, sweet and spicy together, heady and overwhelming and powerful in ways that I could only dimly grasp. Kissing him seemed to temporarily still a howling hunger inside me, but it only moved to a different place to set up new, strange aches. While our lips were sliding together, damp and striving, I couldn’t feel the pressure of the world around us, the weight of all that responsibility and fate and desperation.
    All I felt was light, and silence, and a trembling, silvery sliver of breathless anticipation.
    I pulled back just far enough to breathe into his open mouth, “Is that clear enough?”
    “ Claro ,” he whispered back. He put a finger to my lips and said, “We can’t do this here, querida . Ibby. Come with me.”
    I nodded, and followed him to the bathroom—not the one in the hall, which was close to Ibby’s room, but the one in the master bedroom. He closed the door after me and turned the lock, as I stripped away my white leather jacket. It would need repairs later, a simple enough matter when I had energy to spare, but for now it simply looked grubby and battered. I began to unbutton the soft pink shirt beneath, but Luis reached out and stilled my fingers. “No,” he said. “Wait. I know you already made it pretty clear, but—I just want to put it out there. You sure you want to do this? All the way?”
    “I already said that I did.”
    “Cass—” He shook his head. “Okay. Then slow the hell down, will you? It ain’t a race to the finish line.”
    He took his time at it, slowly slipping each button through its anchoring hole, and tracing warm fingers down over the revealed pale flesh. Three buttons down he uncovered the pale pink of the satin bra I wore, and I felt his heartbeat move just a bit faster. Mine was well ahead of his, heating my flesh to warm ivory, pounding in my temples and veins, pooling heat like sunlight into