Nightfall ✓

Chapter 24

• chapter twenty-four • 

The room was empty. He had pushed all his clothes to a corner. I laughed. This was his concept of cleaning up? My bags were resting against the wall. I started to walk towards them. The door opened suddenly. 

"Hey!" I cried, and reflexively pushed it with one hand.

"Sorry," Liam's voice said from the other side. "I didn't realize you'd come out." He removed his hand from the door, and the pressure lessened.

"Um," I said, biting my lip. It was just the two of us in the apartment. The door hadn't closed completely. I peeked at him through the crack. He smiled at me. I could see him breathing nervously, his muscular chest moving up and down. There he was, wearing just shorts, and here I was, wearing just a towel, and here we were, separated by just a door.

He started to move away. "Liam!" I said, and it took all my guts to say it. This was way harder than I'd thought.

"Yeah?"

"You can... um... come in if you want." I moved away from the door. He paused for a moment, then came in slowly, and looked at me. His gaze traveled down my body. And that didn't make me feel awkward at all. In fact, it felt good. I wanted him to keep looking at me like that, like I was something amazing. He stepped closer to me. My back was already touching the door. He put his hands on my waist, and even through the towel, his touch raised goosebumps on my skin.

"You should wear a towel all the time."

I laughed. "I'll consider it."

Very softly, he placed his lips on mine. I looped one arm around his neck to pull him closer, and used my other hand to clutch the towel to my body. It felt so magnificent that I wanted to cry: this feeling of his body pressed against mine, his chest touching the bare skin on my shoulders. There was a tingling between my legs. I'd thought that I'd never get to kiss him again. He pulled away just for a moment to look at me, tracing the shape of my lips with his thumb, and then kissed me again. His fingers traveled down my waist to the edge of the towel, and stroked my thigh. It made me weak down the knees. I knew his fingers were itching to go higher, but they stayed there.

He pinched the towel and tugged at it— a very soft tug, not enough to yank it off, but just enough to let me know.

My throat suddenly felt dry. I pulled back and looked at him, into his warm, warm, kind eyes, and at once felt foolish. What was I scared of? I put my other arm around his neck. The towel fell around my feet in a pool. 

He caught his breath. His gaze roamed over my body, taking in the scars and the burns. I saw his eyes fill with pain as he imagined what all I'd gone through.  

He smiled and kissed my jaw, his lips advancing down my neck, stopping at my shoulders. I shivered. "You're so beautiful."

He hooked a thumb inside his shorts and pulled them down, and then carried me to the bed, pulling the sheets over us.

  ∞

Some time later, we lay on our sides, facing each other. He twisted a lock of my hair between his fingers.

"And then?" I asked.

"Then they told me that 7 months had passed. I'd been in a coma all this time. I had no idea what was going on in the world. I had no idea about anything. A nurse lent me her phone, and I called you. Your phone was switched off. I called dad. He was okay. He'd thought I had died. Then I called Zack, then Ash. Both of them were fine. I kept calling you...I called you every day, but you never picked up. So I contacted Window to the Soul and got in touch with Sam. She told me you were alive and had searched for me everywhere before going back home. She gave me your parents' number, and when I called them, they told me you were in New York. Then I contacted NYU, but they told me that you weren't there. You'd never gone to the university at all. Then I made a Skype account to search for you. I e-mailed you. You never replied to me, not even once. But Sam kept telling me that you were alive. By that time my book was ready to be published. So I wrote the dedication for you and made sure that the books went to Delhi so that you could see them. I'm sorry I didn't put the address there. I thought you'd remember. Plus, it's not very wise to write your address somewhere and then circulate that thing around the entire world." He paused. "I really wish you were there with me when I got published, you know. I'd always thought we'd share that moment together.  You were the one who made me write my first scene."