Dead Hearts

Chapter 20 - I Told You So

Mara + Then.

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Chapter 20 

Mara

Then

I felt my cheeks growing red already as Aiden’s eyebrows seemed to pull together, deep in thought. I was slightly dizzy and entranced, taking my time to check him out, attempting yet failing miserably to seem discreet.

This didn’t seem to bother him, or so I thought.

“Like what you see?”

I looked up to his eyes once more, my blush furious and my heart speeding up uncontrollably. I swallowed and managed a slight nod. Then I mentally slapped myself for letting him know just how attractive he seemed to me. He started laughing, his eyebrows resting lightly again above his eyes, his face calm and carefree.

“Are you nervous?” his voice was lower by the second now as he walked towards me slowly, his face a bit scrunched up in confusion. I grinned at his eyebrows and his eyes, finding him adorable in the middle of my growing nervousness.

“No…” I tried to regain my breath and posture, telling myself to have some balls. Aiden laughed again, and I raised an eyebrow, not feeling familiar with that sound at all. It was a different laugh, a new type of laugh, and I found myself thinking that maybe all of the times he’d laughed before were closed up, guarded. It seemed as though he was somewhere else all along, and he’d just gotten back to me. I grinned slightly, feeling all too powerful and heightened to know that I’d brought that unguarded laugh upon him.

“You suck at lying. Please don’t ever try becoming an actress,” he commented, grabbing a piece of my hair between his fingers as his other hand grasped my hip, drawing small, soft patterns on it. I felt a sense of complete alertness as chills started running through my whole self.

Have some balls, I chanted in my mind over and over again.

I could already feel my breath hitching and stopping altogether, and he wasn’t even touching anything but a strand of hair. How was I supposed to become anything even remotely close to seductive? He couldn’t possibly think that I could be that for him. He was Aiden, and I was, well, me.

He raised his fingers up from my hair to my face, and it felt as if he was tracing it, and I wasn’t breathing anymore. It didn’t take long before I noticed that my eyes had fluttered closed, somehow waiting for something. I could feel him now, his lips too close for comfort- that kind of treacherous comfort that blinds you and wraps you up, and you never want to let it go- because it’s that comfort that you’d lose forever with that one person that just seems to make it comfortable to let go.

“Open your eyes.”

I didn’t respond, didn’t move, didn’t dare breathe. I refused to let this one moment slip away.

I felt his nose nudging into my cheek, and I sighed a heavy sigh, opening my eyes to find big, brown, curious ones staring back at me. I swore I could feel him burning holes right through me.

“You’re a really controlling freak, you know that?” I asked, a little out of breath. I raised my arms up to feel his shoulders underneath my fingertips, warm skin, a feeling of wholeness making itself known between us somehow. I stood still, trying to understand how he’d shown up out of practically nowhere, and how we were here now. I tried my hardest not to remember that this house was empty, tried my hardest to not show that I was intimidated and afraid- intimidated of Aiden and how obvious it was that I was the only one innocent here. As far as anything remotely sexual went, I was the latest one in on the subject. I never was one to sleep around- I never found the necessity to just go and do it, not that the opportunity had ever presented itself. Back then, I would’ve shuddered at getting it over with whomever, but now, with Aiden right in front of me and the air full of electricity, I wasn’t so sure.