Zach grunts, his head bumping against the ground. “Fuck, you’re heavy, Blue.”
I try to scramble off. “Jerk.”
It only makes him laugh and tighten his hold around me. “Relax. I could carry you in my sleep with one hand.”
I stiffen over him. “Are you kidding?”
A small smile is still playing on his lips as he shakes his head once. “Cross my heart.”
Then, he goes and does it.
He makes a little cross on the left side of his chest with his long finger, and I feel it on my chest. The rough pad of his finger dragging lines like I’m making a promise too. Only I don’t know what I’m promising.
“And hope to die?” I breathe out.
One slow nod. “Yeah.”
His whispers are deadly. They are.
And so are his eyes.
I’m finding out that I don’t care though. I’m relieved they’re on me after such a long time.
“You never look at me anymore,” I blurt out.
“Because it hurts.”
His words make me flinch, even though there wasn’t any meanness in them. They held a kind of emotion I’ve never gotten from him before.
It resembles a weird mixture of torture and desperation.
It makes me breathless and shivery for some reason. A little sad for him, too.
“Why does it hurt?” I ask.
His arms wind around my waist and his legs go on either side of me, sort of cradling me into his body. My knees are digging into the grass and so are my elbows but that barely registers, seeing how I’m flung over him.
“Because you look at me like…”
“Like what?”
“Like you don’t hate me anymore.”
My heart’s banging in my chest. He must feel it. He must feel my heart knocking on his chest through mine.
“I do,” I’m compelled to whisper.
And for some reason, I don’t want to even think about how I’m lying right now.
“Good.”
His raspy voice makes the butterflies take flight in my stomach. There are so many of them and they are so wild that if they want, they could fly me away with them.
“You’re going to die soon, you know,” I whisper lamely.
Slowly, amusement comes to line his features. “Am I?”
“Yes,” I explain. “Cross my heart and hope to die? You’re dying. Because you lied.”
“Lied about what?”
I don’t know why I’m going back to his comment but I am. Maybe because I need a reminder of how things have been between us, for years.
How I shouldn’t want this.
“I’m not an idiot. I know I’m heavy. I have a pretty good memory of all the things your minions called me back in school. All the times they made fun of my thighs and my waist and my chest. I remember all of that.”
“I remember that too.”
“Of course, you never said anything. You just watched. You let them say and do all those horrible things to me.”
“I never stopped them,” he whispers, his palms splaying open on the small of my back, that flash of an expression flickering through his features again. The one that I saw when he told me to not be like him.
His low words paired with that expression start up an ache in my belly. It’s not a gentle ache either. Nothing Zach causes in me, in my body, is ever gentle.
I shake my head. “No, you didn’t.”
But then, something occurs to me. Or more like, hits me in the chest, almost making me gasp.
“I wanted you to,” I say quickly. “I-I wanted you to stop them. That’s why I…”
It’s my turn to trail off because I don’t even know how to say it. How to say the words that I’m about to say.
“That’s why you what?”
“That’s why I’d always…” I pause to prepare myself. “I always looked at you. Whenever they said or did mean things to me, I’d always stare at you.”
Why would I look at him when I knew and when he proved over and over that he wouldn’t help me, that he wouldn’t stop them? Why would my eyes find him in my most miserable moments?
“It’s stupid, isn’t it? Me looking at you and expecting you to help me? When I knew you were behind all the pranks in the first place.”
That expression on his face flickers again and for the life of me, I can’t figure out what it is.
“Stupid, yeah,” he says with a clenched jaw.
Weirdly, I want to touch that jaw and see how it feels.
“But that isn’t true now, is it? You, uh, defended me that night. You sent Ashley away,” I breathe out.
His features tighten. Those hands on the small of my back tighten too and I know – I just know – that he wouldn’t admit to it.
He wouldn’t admit to defending me or coming to my rescue.
“Did you find someone else?” I jump topics and ask.
He frowns. “Find someone else where?”
“In New York?” His frown deepens and I explain, “You shouldn’t have blurted out your secret to a room full of maids if you didn’t want it to travel everywhere. Besides, I already knew you weren’t at Oxford. Such a stupid lie. Like you’d ever go to Oxford. To study, no less.”
Something about that melts his body and makes him smile. His palms creep up my back. He pulls back my hood, freeing my hair, and his fingers curl around the strands, playing with them. The gesture is so cozy that something squeezes in my chest.
“So? Did you find someone else in New York?”
“To do what?”
I almost rip out the grass in embarrassment but somehow, it’s imperative for me to know this. “To mess with? Like you messed with me?”
Maybe it’s crazy but I have to know.
In reply, Zach’s hand spreads over the line of my neck. Gently. Only he knows how to be tender with fingers as rough as his.
“No,” he rasps as he sifts his other hand along the strands of my hair. “There’s only one shade of blue unlucky enough to catch my eye.”
I can’t even stop the sigh that escapes my lips and I grow heavy. So heavy that my chest lowers itself of its own volition. Up until now, our upper bodies were kind of floating within touching distance. But my sigh makes me go flush with him.
My breasts smash against his chest.
Zach groans and it’s so rough and needy. It’s… erotic.
So erotic that I’m not even ashamed to shift and drag my breasts across his hard chest.
Turning his face to the side and staring at my hair, he asks, “So what shade is it? It’s different than what it was back in school.”
It is.
Three years ago, I had a gentler shade of blue. This one is louder, pops out more. Suits me more, too.
“Bad Boy Blue.”
His fingers stop sifting and he glances at me. “No shit.”
I shake my head. “No.”
I changed colors just after he went away. I went to the store and as soon as I saw the label, I bought it.
“Fuck me,” he mutters to himself. “Bad boy blue, huh? You’re obsessed with me.”
“In your dreams.”
“What was the other one called?”
I narrow my eyes at him because I don’t trust where this is going. “Voodoo Blue.”
He laughs.
And the sound of it is unpracticed but so free and light that I have to bite my lip. I will not laugh or smile.
“Don’t tell me you bought that after the whole emo shit went down.”
So, yeah. In ninth grade, there was this rumor that went on strong for about a month or so that I was a devil worshiper. I was the only – as they say, ‘emo’ or ‘goth’ chick – at St. Patrick’s.
Of course, his minions had fun with that.
I elbow his side hard and he jerks, grimacing. “Fine. I won’t tell you. And neither will I tell you that I had a voodoo doll with your name on it. I used to stick pins in it.”
His smile goes back to being lazy. “Oh yeah, you’re definitely obsessed with me.”
I elbow him again and jerk up from his body and he’s loose enough to not be able to stop me. But apparently, he still goes after me.
Even drunk, his reflexes are better than my clumsy retreat and he winds his arm around my waist and rolls us on the ground, until he’s hovering over me and his body is settled between my spread thighs.
“Told you I’d snatch you up and get you on your back,” he muses, slurs actually, the syllables thick and bleeding together, and I shudder under him.
“What? We had a deal.” I fist the grass. “I didn’t throw myself on you. You pulled me down.”
“Eh. Whatever.”
Now that the positions are changed, it’s like the spell has broken somehow. I remember where I am. I remember what I am. A maid, and he is for all intents and purposes, my boss.
I glance around. The cottages are still dark. Mrs. S’s cottage is directly opposite to where we are lying on the ground, all entwined with each other. If she happened to look out the window, she’d see us.
“Zach, I’m serious. Let me go. What if someone sees us?”
“Everyone’s sleeping.”
“What if they wake up?”
“What then?”
I frown at him. “They’ll see us. Mrs. S has very strict rules about that, okay?”
“What rules?”
“The staff can’t… fraternize with the family or their guests.”
Zach shifts in between my legs and settles his lower body over mine, his pelvis locking where the juncture of my thighs is. His hard stomach is pushing into my soft belly.
“And this looks like fraternizing?”
“Yes.” I’m breathing hard. “I can’t lose my job. I need this job. I need my house back.”
He studies me. Studies my panted breaths, my flushed face. The sweat on my upper lip, my frown. I’m freaking out right now, I know.