Dependent on You

Chapter 29

Chapter 29

Third Person

When the clock struck two am, Adrian was still lying wordlessly in her bed staring at her fluorescent ceiling concealed with store-bought plastic stars. A night sky of her own her parents had created so she never had to sleep in the pitch dark. Paranoid of the willowy black corners of her room, her shallow but creepy closet, and the void beneath her bed. Even now she despised the dark, not the dark that the night sky brought with the illumination of the moon, but the kind of dark where you were blinded by nothing but pure shadow. The kind of dark that made your imagination run wild and not in a good way.

She had fallen asleep around ten but had woken up an hour after and hasn't been able to sleep since. Maybe it was because she had jolted awake from a seemingly terrifying nightmare and now couldn't fathom the thought of closing her eyes for longer than five seconds. She had dreamed of the fire she and Elliot had set. Save for the fact that her subconscious dug deeper and behind a jammed shut window on the second story, a little boy no more than the age of five was trapped in the burning fumes. His horrified hysterical screams were still resonating in her ears, leaving her unsettled and as hollow as hollow gets. Shaking. She was shaking.

Her mind was a machine with a full tank of fuel, thinking and burning, refilling and churning. Right alongside her nightmare, she thought about the confusing boy who made her heart skip and her blood sing. He told her to kiss him, demanded that she kiss him. He said he wanted her. Those words alone killed her, shattered her. Nobody had ever said that to her and Elliot did. Did he even know how much a simple sentence like that affected her? She wanted him so desperately to care about her, she wanted him to so desperately like her. Because god, she liked him so much, cared for him so much. It was overwhelming, a persistent ache that only his presence took away.

Did he feel it too or maybe it was just all in her head? He was making her like this.

Was she silly to pray for such things? To hope for such things? She had never really felt wanted before, only by her parents and that was different. She had always felt out of place no matter where she went or who she met. She had a difficult time connecting with people, one because she was shy and two because she was an anxious wreck. Elliot made her feel nervous, but in a way that made her skin sheen with layers upon layers of warmth, her toes curl into tight little balls, and her chest ached in a way she couldn't put words to. He made her feel safe too. Her crush on him grew by the day; she wasn't sure if it was possible to like someone as much as she liked him.

He was becoming special. He was special to her. More than she thought anybody ever could be. She didn't know why either, there was no specific reason. He just was.

He was mad at her earlier; he still was. Though it seemed like more than that. Even after she apologized. She felt it when her lips hesitantly pressed against his heavenly ones. How he bit her bottom lip causing her to gasp, how his tongue swarmed her mouth as sweet as honey but violent as a bee sting. How he applied enough pressure to thoroughly shock her stealing her breath, causing her heart to trip over its feet tumbling to an unsteady beat. And when he pulled away, he stared her in the eye as he pushed a section of her hair back, only to then lean in and latch his burning lips to her flushed neck sucking as if she were a lollipop. She felt like one, but she doubted she tasted like one.

She could just remember his intensity, the way he looked at her, how he wouldn't stop looking at her. The way his cobalt irises rippled, the way his mouth was a steady rigid frown, the way his eyebrows creased. She didn't know why his gaze made her feel so beyond guilty, not that she wasn't already but his gaze just intensified it. But when she gazed back at him her whole heart ached and she didn't know why. That same look was stamped in the forefront of her mind now, creeping behind her eyes even after she thought she finally blinked the remnants of it away.