Supernova

Chapter Seventy - Long Walk, Short Cliff

A/N: A chapter under 3000 words? Who is she??? 

Anyways, here's a prose and angst heavy mess that officially brings us to chapter 70. Which means we're 5 weeks and 10 chapters out from shit officially hitting the fan. I'm so excited, and I hope you guys are too. 

Something had changed the night of Kanzi's party. Or shifted. Or something. Things were different, and everything felt lighter. I knew it was fake. We were just playing out some weird fantasy where Elias and I could be together, untangled from all of the messy strings of family monarchy obligations and quirk complications, but still. Even after we'd shifted back into our regular bodies in the late morning of the following day, things still felt perfect. I still loved him. Well, okay, maybe I wouldn't go that far. I still wanted to love him. It was easier to pretend that I did.

We spent the whole next day holed up in our room, as if we might open the door and the frigid winds of reality might come sweeping in and ruin everything. We lay in bed, my head in Elias' lap while he read his book to me, which was something or other about the fate of the universe and how some day all the stars would die and there would be nothing left but black holes in the universe and to be perfectly honest, he read many chapters to me and that's all I really picked up from it.

I feel now as if I should have been paying more attention.

We ate our meals at the bar together, holding hands, tingling fingers moving over each other as we held our forks with the other. We showered together, splashing each other and kissing and I felt him. It was the most I'd felt him in a long time and it was as exciting as it was terrifying.

It's not real, Cassie, I told myself. But oh God, how I desperately wished it was.

Something had changed for Demon too. He'd hated the party, straight up refused to talk about it. I'd heard from Needles that he spent the whole night whining. Boobs were horribly heavy and uncomfortable, peeing was a nightmare, and he'd spent twenty minutes trying to figure out how to jerk off before he'd had to give up and go to sleep. Go figure. Maybe it really was a blessing in disguise I couldn't feel him.

But he missed me, and that was delicious.

He wanted to fight. He wanted to play. He wanted to make it a show. He wanted to share one water bottle between matches. He wanted to carry me around campus, through busy hallways, taking the long way around to his room. He wanted to feed me bits of fruit and meat with his long black fingers. He smirked when I nipped at them, half accidentally and half on purpose. He wanted to sit in the bath. He wanted to try again,

It was such a beautiful sight, the sight of him desperate, the sight of him longing. The sight of him trying. The sight of him alone. I knew it was only ever one wrong step away from shattering completely, but that excitement made me like it more. There had never been any doubt on it from my end, no matter how much I pretended otherwise. I loved him, ferally and desperately, in a way that felt impossible to stop.

We were in the bath once, me on his lap, both of us staring out the window, when I heard him kiss me. I knew the sound well. I'd heard it a million times when he'd kissed Elias, both around corners when they thought they were being sneaky and right in front of me in the same bed once they'd given up on trying. Like the sound of one's neck snapping, everyone's kiss is a sound unique entirely to them, and there it was, the sound of Demon's kiss hitting skin, hanging in the air, and I was the only other person there.

The whole world was as still and silent as my body was. He wasn't even breathing in his pause, waiting for my reaction, my approval, my condemnation, and I was waiting for my mind to summon one. I started laughing. He scoffed and shoved my head underwater. I kept laughing, bubbles jumping out of my mouth, Demon's black feet just smudges in my blurry eyeline.