Stephenie Meyer owns all things Twilight.

LovelyBrutal, i love you more than all the coffee, all the stars, all the songs, all the cotton candy and books and flowers and and all the ocean. thank you so much for the careful way you love not just this and me, but everything. je t'aime.

thank you guys so much for reading. this is another short trip, but hold on tight. next week's will be much, much longer.

feed me underwater

pull me into darkness

The Acid: Ghost

VI

The double eternity spent in the back room of Shoot the Moon is nothing compared to waiting for Grim to come home. Hidden low in his closet, higher on his scent than Cassiopeia in the sky, I slide my hand up a thinly knit sweater sleeve and press it to my cheek. Still chanting. Panting. Swearing -

Mine.

My whole body is overwrought with need. My legs ache. My hands ache. My chest. My lips. Everything is sore from so much softening, from resounding the vow my pulse keeps pounding.

Mine.

Mine.

I nestle my nose and cheek against sweater cotton, unable to catch my breath and still seeking more of his scent. Instinct floods me with a fresh hit, overwhelming my senses every time I breathe in. I can't see anything in here, but I can hear for miles, and when the low, low roar of an engine finally fills my ears, my heart rushes so hard I feel it push against my throat.

His car pulls up outside, and I'm all nerve-endings. He cuts the ignition, and I can't keep still. I can't stop touching my lips, my hair, the little swell of beats overflowing where my collar bones meet. Preternatural heat beneath my skin borders unendurable as he opens and closes the vehicle's door, and the clink of his keys and crush of boots against earth are enough to make me shake like one of Cupid's arrows, pulled far too tight to help it.

Then his key is in the lock.

Sliding. Fitting. Releasing.

Then he's inside.

Closing the door. Moving freely. Settling in.

Ask me what it does to the temperature of the whole house as he makes his way deeper into it.

Ask what it does to me, hearing him be so at home, knowing his guard is all the way down and he's touching things I touched.

Ask me if I'm really going to come just listening to him breathe because I can feel every inhale doing exactly what it's meant to.

Addicting him to me.

Urgent little ripples of weighted warmth rise and flow like waves between my legs, up through my belly, into my rib cage. I grab onto flannel shirt sleeves, holding on with one hand and covering my gasping mouth with my other as the tingling tide increases instead of ebbing as it courses through me, making everything better and worse at the same time. It's a fleeting tease of pleasure that's over as soon as it starts, and debauched desire digs even deeper than before. Leaving me fiendish. Volatile.

I can't remember ever being so entirely taken over by my own nature.

Not even as a nestling was my craving this vicious or this lush.

Downstairs, the only man I've ever wanted more than my first unties his boots. Undressing, he starts a shower, and I'm so gone on how wild he makes me feel I almost howl.

The siren in me does.

Even a floor away, the scent of him under hot water inundates my senses. Pulling me like undertow to where he is, but I sink effortfully back into the corner. Struggling, biting my thumb and sucking my knuckles and staying drunk on fantasy to keep from going to him.

Closing my eyes, I think about taking him where he stands. Right there in the shower.

Drink.

Luring him out. Unable to wait. Pressing him to the wall and swallowing him in the moonlight.

Drink.

Being his bed when he wakes, bathed in rising sunshine, watching his eyes open while I drink and drink and drink -

A fresh, cruel current of tingling heat washes over me. I can't tell ecstasy from need anymore. I'm raw with both. Drowning in both.

I don't know how long it is when he finally finishes with a rough sigh. Shutting the water off, he eliminates all sound save for the rumbling rush of his pulse. I don't know how I stay put while he takes his time, looking through mail, checking his phone while he makes a tea that smells like passion flowers and magnolia bark while I wait.

I don't know how much longer I can.

Once his feet are on the stairs, I'm back on my own. Standing with my hand on the door. Desperate. Heedless. Dumb with one thought. One drive. One intention.

Then he's here. In his room. There's nothing but a flimsy barrier of cedar between us, and I was wrong in the shop.

It isn't just gravity.

No force anywhere has anything on him.

From the inside out, from the spiked pit of my infinite hunger to the glow of warmth emanating from my full-body blush, I soften even deeper with no say in how fast or how fiercely softness fills me to the hilt.

If I were any softer, I'd be powder down, swirling across his floor.

Half-mad, half-helpless, basking indulgently in what's happening, I listen as he moves just a few feet away from me. Drinking tea that relaxes his body for sleep. Smoking a few hits that smell like pine trees soaked in summer rain. Stretching into slow, flowing shapes. Breathing slower. Unwinding his pulse and winding me tighter around his nearness with every measured second.

When I can't handle the torture another moment, I press the door open the thinnest hint of a sliver, and peek out to find him deep in cobra pose. Eyes closed. Only a towel on.

I've never wanted to be underneath anyone before, but it's enough to make even Dionysus think twice, how badly I wish I was underneath him right now.

There's an eternity between listening to his last sip of tea and the slide of his legs between sheets. And then another eternity between the start of low pink-noise flowing from the mounted speakers, and the last rustle of his head against the pillows.

He doesn't know it, but he's getting my scent in his hair.

Seeking peace, he wanders unknowingly right into my cage.

With one last forever, his breathing finally changes. Slow and shallow, it adapts to his sedated heartbeats as sleep enfolds him.

It's a tenuous wisp of real rest.

But I can't wait another second.

Leaving my clothes behind, I slip from his closet as bare as I'm made to be, and the scent of him is an assault on my body that I can't stop. It blurs my vision and muffles every sense, making my legs sway like I'm dizzy. Spinning. Spun. It's visceral and violent, the claim his scent lays on me. The pride it takes in my softness. The way it sears my touch-starved skin and opens every tender nerve. The possessive weight of it invades my chest - unrepentant, permanent - piercing every breath I take as his.

His.

I would hate him for this, if I didn't want him so badly.

Then my vision clears and I see it.

All of it.

Everything.

The complete shape of him is hardly concealed under his blankets, and it makes total sense now. His nakedness, his valerians, his herbal tea and his slow yoga and the bass-laden nearly-silent static flowing from his speakers -

Sleep eludes him.

To a terrible point.

Almost laughing, I cover my mouth with both hands.

Oh man, I think, tiptoeing to his bed quieter than anything he could ever fathom.

Oh you precious, naive, snare of a man -

Both of his arms are draped above his head, one bare wrist over one dark wrist like a crown. His jaw resembles a blade even in rest. His pulse calls to me from behind his Adam's apple, while the same moonbeams that run through my veins shine through the windows, splashing across the warning tattooed across his eyelids.

don't wake

I take one more step and crouch down, leaning over him with more caution than I've ever given anything.

Waking you is the last thing I want to do.