Jaemin the Icy Prince on Campus - Na Jaemin NCT

46. The Love Letter

A night like this is meant to be shared, remembered, and talked about for years. A sky like this is meant to be kissed under.

Na Jaemin is kissing me.

My blood is roaring through my veins, and my pulse is pounding in my throat, and I can't, I won't pull away if my life depends on it, because Na Jaemin is kissing me like a starving man, like he can devour me all at once.

"Mina," he whispers against my lips, and my name is a quivering, magical incarnation; it moves, coils, swims into life with his breath, releasing and searing upon my heart in a flash of heat and light and savage joy.

The snow falls in sheets around us. His breaths are wispy clouds of white.

His lips are different, and yet so exquisitely familiar. In my head I know I've loved him before, but as he kisses me, it doesn't feel like it anymore. It is better than the first time. It feels like the first time and the last time and the only time all at once. 

I love him. I have always loved him. I will always love him. It is no use fighting it, or denying it. I love him, and my heart loves him, and my mind loves him, and my body loves him. We - my heart, my mind and my body - all of us in me love him. We love him the way the water pulls back and turns over and beats against the sand, trying to wear the earth away. And even though it doesn't succeed, it pulls back and pounds the shore again and again, as if there were no last time and there is no next time and this time is the time that counts. We love him, and that's the way it is, the way it's always been. I know it, we know it, and he knows it.

The lights go off the moment we enter the house. It's a blackout, caused by the snowstorm, no doubt. I stumble a little, and he steps right up to me, and wraps his hands around my waist. I catch my breath and look up at him, my heart thumping in my chest and my skin tingling under his strong hands. He looks at me as softly as a caress.

"Careful now," he murmurs, his breath warm, feathering my face.

"You'll catch me if I fall, right?" I say, a little breathless, swaying into him, giddy and flirtatious and flush with excitement.

"Too late. I've already fallen. Hard." His voice is husky, his lips a bare whisper from mine.

"You're flirting." I say in a throaty voice. I am reckless and restless; the fever is back. I cannot stop staring at his lips. 

"I can't help it." His voice is a low rasp; it crackles and charges the fissure of space between us with electricity. "You know I've always found it extremely difficult to behave as I ought to when I'm with you, Mina."

I feel lightheaded and terribly wicked and powerful. "Are you saying I bring out the worst in you?" 

"The worst, in the best possible way." His words float like a dusty whisper between us. "Sit." He pushes me onto a sofa, his hands lingering on my shoulders. 

Jaemin is busy searching through cupboards, and I hear the rasp of a match, smell paraffin, and see a flare in the darkness. Jaemin is standing there, an oil lamp in his hand, adjusting the wick so that the flame burns bright and clear in the little glass chimney. When it's steady, he slips a frosted-glass globe over it.

"Why would you have a lamp but not a torchlight?" 

"It belongs to my mum," he grins. "I do have a torchlight, but there are no batteries. Why?" He looks at me, smiling a little, and says softly, "Are you afraid?"

"No." I toss my hair. "Why would I be afraid of you?" But my voice is trembling a little, and a thrill of excitement is running all the way down to my toes.