Gasoline and Matches
"Baby, I'm incarcerated and I don't want out;
Baby, we should get related, 'cause there ain't no doubt,
When your heart and my heart attaches-
You and me are gasoline and matches."
Defiance ran thick through her blood, black as corruption and wrong as a lynching. Every finger he pressed against her torso set her body on fire; she had to bite into her lower lip just to keep from crying out loud. He teased her though. He smiled down at her as she squirmed, arms lifted above her head and body searing with sweat and heat. He laughed softly.
"Is this too much for you, baby?"
Her green eyes burst open as she reached up to knot her fingers through his blond curls and yank his head down towards her's. Their lips met in a crashing of tongues and sweat and blood because he had, from the very first, tasted like blood. Maybe that's just who he was. She didn't like to think about who he was right now though; the very idea of who he was made her stomach twist. She buried her insecurities in another kiss. Never in her life, never in a thousand lives, did she think that anyone could make her feel like he made her feel, and the decision now was her's. Did this lust, for the other word for it she refused to even consider, justify breaking every rule and code that she was supposed to stand for? How had she come to this? She felt tainted now, like at any moment her body might crack under the weight of its own runes. How could he make her feel this way?
He kissed a spot between her jawline and neck, a soft spot of skin he had found early on and seemed to claim as his own. "I've had a lot of girls, you know."
"Not the most romantic thing to lead off with. She admitted as she forced her eyes to open and watch him speak even though his hands on her torso burned through her whole being.
"Just a fact," he stroked her cheek and she gasped when his hands dipped down below the belt-line of her low-rise jeans. She was on fire. "Are you listening to me? He checked in and, though her eyes had clamped shut and her lower lip was bleeding from being bitten so hard, she nodded. "Good. Because there is no one on Heaven or Earth that I'd rather-"
And then the door slammed open and she screamed as he was dragged from the bed and everything in her entire world shattered like figurative glass.
Clary had always felt the need to prove herself. First of all, she was short. It might seem like something as simple as stature shouldn't have made a difference in the life of a would-be Shadowhunter, but when your father was well over six feet and menacing as hell, being Clary's miserable height was just depressing at times. Second of all, there was the previously mentioned matter of her father. He wasn't exactly the kind of man who bought you a teddy bear for you sixth birthday. In fact, for Clary's sixth birthday he had given her a dagger that looked like a paper opener. You know how most papers openers looked like daggers? Well, not in Valentine's world. And it wasn't as though Clary resented her father, just the opposite in fact. Perhaps if she had been a different type of person, she would have rebelled. But rebellion, she told herself, just didn't run in her blood. One different from her father there, she was disappointed to note.
Anyway. The need to prove herself most assuredly came from her father's pushing. He had a strange way about him, a way that demanded more and more from her and at the same time encouraged her in an almost soft way. There was never a night when Valentine didn't swear to Clary that if he had to pick any child in the world it would be her, and in every life after. He encouraged her to be the best she could be, yet somehow always seemed to think that it was more than she was giving right then. So she worked hard to live up to his standards that she, in the back of her mind and because she did consider herself just as smart as her father insisted she was, knew were impossibly high.
What she was about to do that evening, just after she had finished supper in her room, was a new level of proof though. It was a challenge that her father had laid before her and that she was determined to meet with the level-headed purity he claimed her capable of. She pulled her red hair up into a tight, high ponytail and adjusted her black tank top around her lean torso. The runes on her flesh smelt of burning rubber and she liked the mental image of her body steaming as she made her way out to the mansion's stables where the prisoner was being held.
Clary had never been off her father's estate. It didn't bother her; she didn't need or want any friends. Her father was her friend, and her lessons were her life. She felt his training sinking into her like runes on her mind and craved each new goal as though it was her life's desire. It was her life's desire, to become the best Shadowhunter there was, to make her father proud. And this new challenge would test all of that.
Her father had said to be wary of the prisoner. He had been caught sneaking onto the premises by one of the dogs and Valentine had shackled him up in the stables; it wasn't like they had a cell anywhere near their house. Her father had said this prisoner would stop at nothing to corrupt her. He would lie, he would attack, he would say or do anything to get her to release him. Her test was more than not listening to his mad ravings, however. Her test was to successfully extract information from him. This prisoner knew the location of something that Clary's father wanted very, very badly. Valentine wanted the Mortal Cup, an object of no real value to anyone but rather of sentimental value to Valentine. See, as her father had explained to her, the Mortal Cup was actually a cup that had belonged to her mother before she had died at the hands of the Clave. They held the cup as a terrible sign of their power, and Valentine just wanted it back. It was Clary's job to get the information from this prisoner about where the Cup was.
Clary stood outside the stall where he was being held. She took a deep breath and shut her eyes to calm herself, a funny little idiosyncrasy that her father enjoyed. He said it reminded him of her mother. Clary opened her eyes and pushed the stall door to the side to see the prisoner. She didn't gasp out loud but the thought was there.
What she had been expecting was a dirty, mangy looking man with perhaps a beard and definitely the need for a bath pronto. What she got was the exact opposite. The boy shackled to the back wall of the stables was beautiful. He looked everything of a fallen angel. His skin was bronzed and scraped and scarred with rune tears. His golden hair fell carelessly into his downcast eyes which raised to meet her's one her entrance. They were a bronze color, somewhere between gold and auburn, and shown like a lion's. His features were angular and his naked torso was muscled and sleek with a thin layer of sweat coating it. His arms were resting in his lap were manacled by chains to the wall but his wrists were torn up around them and rubbed raw, as though he had been jerking the metal against his flesh for hours.
When he saw her, he smiled lazily like it was her whom he had been expecting this whole time. Clary looked away from his face and shut the stall door behind her.
"Do you come in blonde? I have to say I prefer blondes, though I'm not terribly picking." His voice was expectedly smooth and low as a bass strum. He didn't stand on her arrival, so Clary stood over him, a few feet away.
"What's your name?" She asked him firmly but not unkindly. She didn't know how she wanted to play this yet. She knew her father's method would involve beating the answers from him, but her father had always admired her own set ways of accomplishing things, and Clary was better at coaxing answers then beating them. Besides, something about his posture which was determinedly slumped, like he was putting on an air of laziness, told her that perhaps this boy was not one to torture into a confession.
"Dolly Parton." He looked up at her. "Well, before the sex-change anyway. And feel free to keep standing there; I like a woman on top, you know."
Clary smiled down at him. "You think you're pretty charming, don't you? I was warned that you'd use any means at your disposal to get me to sat you free."
"Oh, we're just laying our cards right out on the table, right like that?" The prisoner feigned surprise. "All right then, my name's Jace. I hate champagne but love pi coladas and am rather neutral on getting caught in the rain."
Clary smirked, arms cross before her. "Get up." She said.
"No." Jace said experimentally, like he was testing to see what she would do. Clary took a knife from her back pocket and, in an instant, had it pressed up against his throat.
"I'm supposed to keep you alive until you tell me what I need to know," she whispered into his ear, "But I can always call your death an accident. I'm a very effective liar."
"Are you now?" Jace murmured, humoring her, but remained very still. "Maybe I would reconsider, if you removed that blade from my throat."
Clary did so. Jace stood then, faster than she had expected, he was grabbing her arm, trying to wrench the weapon from it. She grunted, kicking him hard in the stomach, and ripped her arm back. But Jace was stronger, despite Clary's speed, and had her pressed back against the wall in seconds, her knife still clutched in her fist and her teeth barred. She knew he hadn't won. She new the second he moved a fraction to adjust his stance, and thus removed the pressure of one of his hands from one of her wrists, she would have him on the ground, knife at his throat. He must have known this too, because he didn't move but kept her back pressed against the wall, face close to his.
"So you're Valentine's daughter." Jace smiled slightly, white teeth trickling into it. "I can't believe you're a redhead."
"Why?" Clary breathed, using the full strength of her forearms against his strong hands that clamped around her wrists like organic manacles. "Can't handle a natural girl?"
Jace chuckled, then looked right into her eyes. She tried to avert her's but found them locked. "I never thought I'd want to do this to a redhead." He breathed an honest laugh then leaned in dangerously close. Clary realized what he was going to do but was powerless against it when he kissed her lips, his mouth salty and strung through with the coppery taste of blood. His tongue teased at her lower lip and sent tingles up her spine of an unwanted feeling, of something dangerous, something foreign and something she had not and would never encounter in a lesson. Something that could not be taught but by experience. And when he let up just a fraction on her wrists she almost forgot the slam him to the ground. ...But not quite.
R&R and let me know if I should continue! xoxo