Torment - Lauren Kate [71]
“What’s wrong?” he asked.
Luce felt sick. They could steam up windows with their kisses, but as soon as they started using their mouths for other things—like talking—everything got so complicated.
She turned her face away. “You lied to me.”
Daniel didn’t scoff or get angry, as she was expecting him to—almost wanting him to. He sat down on the sand. He propped his hands on his knees and stared out at the frothy waves. “About what, exactly?”
Even as the words came out, Luce regretted where she was going. “I could take your approach—not tell you anything, ever.”
“I can’t tell you whatever it is you want to know if you won’t tell me what’s bothering you.”
She thought about Shelby, but when she imagined playing the jealousy card, only to have him treat her like a child, Luce felt pathetic. Instead, she said, “I feel like we’re strangers. Like I don’t know you any better than anyone else.”
“Oh.” His voice was quiet, but his face was so infuriatingly stoic, Luce wanted to shake him. Nothing riled him up.
“You’re holding me hostage out here, Daniel. I know nothing. I know no one. I’m lonely. Every time I see you, you’ve put up some new wall, and you never let me in. You never let me in. You dragged me all the way out here—”
She was thinking to California, but it was more than that. Her past, what limited conception of it that she had, rolled out in her mind like the dropped reel of a movie, unwinding onto the floor.
Daniel had dragged her much, much further than California. He’d dragged her through centuries of fights like this one. Through agonizing deaths that caused pain to everyone around her—like those nice old people she’d visited last week. Daniel had ruined that couple’s life. Killed their daughter. All because he’d been some hotshot angel who saw something he wanted and went after it.
No, he hadn’t just dragged her to California. He’d dragged her into a cursed eternity. A burden that should have been his alone to bear. “I am suffering—me and everyone who loves me—for your curse. For all time. Because of you.”
He winced as though she’d struck him. “You want to go home,” he said.
She kicked the sand. “I want to go back. I want you to take back whatever it was you did to get me into this. I just want to live and die a normal life and break up with normal people over normal things like toasters, not the supernatural secrets of the universe that you don’t even trust me with.”
“Hold on.” Daniel’s face had gone completely white. His shoulders stiffened and his hands were shaking. Even his wings, which moments ago had seemed so powerful, looked frail. Luce wanted to reach out and touch them, as if somehow they would tell her whether the pain she saw in his eyes was real. But she held her ground.
“Are we breaking up?” he asked, his voice weak and low.
“Are we even together, Daniel?”
He got to his feet and cupped her face. Before she could jerk away, she felt the heat subside from her cheeks. She closed her eyes, trying to resist the magnetic force of his touch, but it was so strong, stronger than anything else.
It erased her anger, left her identity in tatters. Who was she without him? Why did the pull toward Daniel always defeat anything that pulled her away? Reason, sensibility, self-preservation: None of them could ever compete. It must have been part of Daniel’s punishment. That she was bound to him forever, like a marionette to its puppeteer. She knew she shouldn’t want him with every fiber of her being, but she couldn’t help herself. Gazing at him, feeling his touch—the rest of the world faded into the background.
She just wished loving him didn’t always have to be so hard.
“What’s this business about wanting a toaster?” Daniel whispered in her ear.
“I guess I don’t know what I want.”
“I do.” His eyes were intent, holding hers. “I want you.”
“I know, but—”
“Nothing will ever change that. No matter what you hear. No matter what happens.”
“But I need more than to be wanted. I need for us to be together—actually together.”
“Soon. I promise. All of this is only temporary.