Sacrificed (The Ignited Series) (21 page)

I made a move, but hesitated at the thought of scoring again, and forcing Alec to lose his boxers. The hesitation was enough for him to poke the ball away from me, and sink his own basket. Catching the ball as it dropped through the net, Alec turned to me expectantly.

“I’m not taking anything else off,” I said.

Alec shrugged, undeterred, and took a step toward me. “Okay. I’ll do it.”

My heart wasn’t anywhere near my chest by the time he reached me. I tried to back away from him, but my feet were stuck, frozen under his gaze. And, maybe, a part of me didn’t want to move. He gave me just enough time to stop him if I wanted, but I didn’t, and his hands reached out and caught the hem of my shirt.

His fingers brushed against my skin and involuntary goose-bumps prickled the surface of my stomach. Alec must have noticed because he smiled knowingly as he inched the fabric higher. His hands stopped near my ribcage, where he gripped me tightly. Though his touch felt incredible, I couldn’t prevent the stiffening of my spine and the short puff of air that slipped between my lips. 

Alec’s eyes lifted to mine. “I won’t if you don’t want me to.”

“I don’t want you to,” I said, unable to raise my voice above a whisper.

“Okay.” He let go of my shirt, letting it fall, but his hands remained underneath it, and encircled around my waist. “And what if I were to kiss you?”

I tried to block out the way his thumbs tracing over the spot just above my belly button felt—because it felt amazing. Such a simple motion on his part, but it was doing a hell of a job at tearing down my walls.

“Would you want me to do that?” Alec asked softly.

“No.” The word shook as it came out of my mouth, and didn’t pack the punch I had hoped for.

“I don’t believe you.”

That made two of us.

Knowing I would be at his mercy if I looked into his eyes, I fixed my gaze on his hand as it trailed slowly up my arm and over my shoulder. The goose-bumps his touch left behind sent a shiver up my spine. A good shiver. Definitely a good shiver. Too good, in fact.

“Alec…”

His fingers brushed along the curve of my neck, coming to a rest under my chin. With one finger, he forced my head back. His eyes were aflame, not with evil, but with a desire that melted most of the rest of my resolve. I had to close my eyes to regain my composure.

“I know you want me to.” His mouth brushed against my upper lip, teasing, tempting me.

Oh, I wanted him to kiss me. Physically, my body was responding to Alec the way he wanted it to, the way it has to him before.

But my body didn’t know that my heart belonged to someone else.

“Tell me to kiss you, Kris.” His hand stroked the side of my face, further fogging my thoughts and nearly making me forget the reasons why we shouldn’t be doing this.

I opened my eyes at last, and realized, too late, how bad of an idea that was. He was close. Really close. It would be so easy, so natural, so right in so many ways to give in. I had only a small sliver of willpower left, and I held on to that with all my might.

“I can’t,” I choked. Alec flinched as if I had struck him. Though brief, and quickly covered by indifference, I saw just how much the rejection had hurt him. And I immediately felt horrible. “Alec…”

“It’s fine.” He backed away, offering me a half smile that only broke my heart even more, before stooping to collect our clothes off the floor. He tossed me my pants. “Looks like you won again.”

“Alec,” I tried again, but came up empty on a follow up. None of the words floating around in my head sounded good enough, or worthy enough.

Alec was the image of indifference as he slipped his shirt over his head. “I was getting cold anyway, and it’s getting late. You ready to go?”

“Yeah,” I offered meekly.

I snuck a few glances at him as we redressed. His expression remained blank, and he said nothing. I didn’t like it. I didn’t like knowing that I was the cause of Alec’s suffering. I struggled to think of something to say to him, to repair the rift between us, but again, came up empty.

The thought was planted in the back of mind. I tried to push it away, but as we left the school in strained silence, that annoying voice in my head repeated what I was afraid of.

She, too, thought this rift might not be fixable.

The cascade of hot water was just what I needed to melt away the rigidness in my muscles. After a long, uncomfortable car ride, we had returned to find Tenner and Sara gone for the evening. To avoid prolonging the misery smothering Alec and me, I had formed some excuse about needing a shower.

I finished without having come up with a resolution.

I wanted Nathan. It was that simple. Alec needed to understand that. Most importantly, I needed to avoid temptation with Alec. Because, sometimes, various parts of myself were confused.

My heart knew what it wanted. Even if I couldn’t have him, even if I might never have him…

“Ouch! Damn it!”

My hip caught the corner of the countertop and I stopped to briskly rub the sore spot on my side. Eyeing the scratch on the surface, and already seeing the start of a bruise underneath, I cursed under my breath.

Since when did I start cursing like Alec?

I dressed hastily and let my wet hair cascade loosely down my back. I was still mad—at the counter, at Alec, at everything and everyone at this point—by the time I yanked the door open.

The television in the living room was on some late night program. The crisp hiss of a beer bottle top being twisted off reached my ears, and I knew where I could find Alec.

I stood in the entryway for a moment as his eyes shifted from the television to me. His mouth parted to say something, but my quick tongue stopped him.

“Don’t, Alec,” I interrupted. “Just don’t.”

He shifted and, for the first time since I’ve known him, looked very uncomfortable as I crossed the room to him. His eyes remained fixed on me as I lowered to sit on the edge of the coffee table in front of him.

“Kris…” he started, and leaned forward until our knees touched. “I’m sorry about earlier. I just…” He trailed off, then shrugged in defeat. “Hell, I don’t know what I was thinking.”

“Shut up, Alec.” I edged closer, wedging my knees between his. In one swift motion, I reached out and cupped his face in my hands. I didn’t know what I was doing, didn’t know why I was doing it, but it felt…right. Now, at this moment, it felt like the most natural thing in the world. “I was scared earlier. The way I feel about you scares me sometimes, but I…”

“What, Kris?”

I swallowed.
Here goes…
“I did want you to kiss me. And…I want you to kiss m—”

Alec’s mouth was on mine, burying whatever el
se I might have said under his soft, yet hard, lips. Lips that wasted no time parting mine so that he could dive deeper. Into me. Into whatever reservations I might have had left until they were nothing but a bad memory.

Something happened to me in that moment I opened up to him. Something stirred inside of me. Something I hadn’t realized, or wanted to admit, had been there. Until now.

Whereas other kisses might be sweet, or tender, or full of unspoken meaning, the way Alec kissed me now was nothing like that. It was as if he were kissing away a physical pain. And it pulled at a part of me that wanted nothing more than to cure my own physical ache.

When Alec’s hands traveled up from my knees, across my thighs, and gripped my waist to pull me closer, I did the next best thing. Breaking the connection between us only briefly, I climbed onto his lap, before meshing my mouth to his again, as if that second we had parted had been too much.

If he was surprised by my boldness, he didn’t let on. If anything, he kissed me with renewed urgency, and when his hands slipped under my shirt, I didn’t stop him. Instead, a soft moan escaped my lips as I briefly came up for air.

I’d never made out with anyone like this before, but Alec made it easy, made me forget what I was doing, made me not care about the fact that his hands were inching higher, lifting my shirt up. When his mouth dropped to graze the sensitive spot just above my belly button, I forgot about everything but how good it felt. And that I wanted more.

Which was why it was very hard for me to pull away. Alec looked up at me, his eyes hooded and smoldering hot, with a question in them.

My answer was to take his hand in mine as I slid off of his lap. I wasn’t sure what I was doing
until I did it, and even then I felt as if I were trapped in a stranger’s body. Yet, it felt right as I led him down the hall to his bedroom.

CHAPTER 20

It took less than a second of consciousness, lying quietly, alone in bed
, for it all to come back to me. Faint rays of light peeked through the curtains. It was early, but there was no way in hell I was going to be able to go back to sleep after remembering what I’d just remembered.

It was as if I had been drunk, for crying out loud. I didn’t do stuff like that—make out with guys,
heavily
make out. To the point that I was mortified to piece together the parts of last night that remained foggy.

I had been in Skotadi-mode. That was the only explanation. Why I did the things I did. Wh
y I let those things happen. Why I could barely remember. From the moment I’d first kissed Alec, everything became sort of hazy, with only flashes of images that lit up my memory.

Alec had been willing.
That much I knew. He’d let it happen. And I was pretty sure he hadn’t been in Skotadi-mode.

I bolted ou
t of bed, threw on a pair of baggy sweats, a t-shirt, and stormed out of the room. Alec was in the living room, and I made a beeline straight for him.

My open palm connecting with the back of his head, I thought, did a good job of demonstrating how pissed off I was, and he felt, rather than heard, the level of my anger with him. He turned to me with a puzzled expression on his face, and I tore into him, throwing my shaking body on top of his, pummeling him with my small, but hard, fists. He blocked several blows with his forearms before he managed to take ahold of my wrists.

His arms encircled me, and the only reason he was able to do so was because I had now completely lost it. When he sat up with me cradled in his lap, he couldn’t even be mad about the red welt expanding under his right eye. Even though he was the one who had deceived me—at least that was the way I saw it—I let him hold me there, my face pressed into his neck, because he was also the only friend I had. His hand stroked my hair until I calmed down, and he didn’t have to tell me the guilt I knew he felt.

Even so, my guilt was worse. Far worse.

I was mad at Alec, but I also knew he wasn’t all to blame.

“You’re back?” he asked softly, his mouth nuzzling my ear.

I nodded.

“And you remember?” I nodded again and he tipped my face back to look him in the eyes. He opened his mouth to say something, but the words never formed. He didn’t have to say anything. I
saw in his eyes how sorry he was—about more than what had happened between us. With him, it was more, so much more. It was a different kind of regret he suffered from.

“I can’t do this anymore…” I started to rise, but he held me down. I didn’t have the strength or the willpower to struggle.

“You remember the part where nothing happened, right?” he said to me.

I faltered.
Nothing happened?
But I remembered…

“I mean, we made out,” he amended. “A lot, and it was awesome, but that was it, Kris. You don’t remember that?”

“It’s all kind of fuzzy,” I murmured.

“Yeah,” he said softly. “You had a Skotadi moment. That’s why you can’t remember everything.”

I nodded my understanding and, this time, when I pulled away, Alec let me. I stood and paced to the other side of the room, as far from him as I could get. Even then, I didn’t feel safe. No amount of distance from Alec ever seemed to be safe enough.

The boy had a piece of me firmly in his grasp. I knew that now.

Just like I knew that some of the pieces of last night that were coming to me in flashes were not what I would consider ‘nothing happened.’ Maybe in Alec’s world. Not mine.

“How far did it go last night?” I asked him hesitantly, not so sure I wanted to hear the answer.

He shrugged casually. “Not far. I put a stop to it when I realized you weren’t really you.” He paused and grinned at me. “You were pissed.”

I ignored that last statement, and pressed for what Alec was coyly keeping from me. “At what point did you realize I wasn’t myself?”

He pulled his lip between his teeth as he pondered an answer, then just let me have it. “I started to suspect it when you took off all your clothes, and then started going for mine,” he said.

“I…what!” And then it hit me. The memory. Yep, it had happened. I had taken off my clothes. “Oh, my God.”

“That’s what I said.”

“Alec!” I groaned. This was horrible. No, this was way beyond horrible. I couldn’t believe I had done that. Well, technically, it hadn’t been
me
.

It had still been my body though.

“What? Nothing happened, Kris,” Alec insisted, then he added with a shrug, “I just have the ability to see you naked every time I close my eyes.” With a grin growing on his face, he did just that. He closed his eyes, and his grin grew even more.

I snatched his pillow from the couch and hurled it at him. “Stop that!”

He laughed. “Take it easy. I’ve seen lots of girls naked.”

“Not me!”

He cocked his head to the side with a smile. “Well, technically—”

“Oh, shut up, Alec!” I turned and stormed away.

I didn’t make it to the hallway before he caught up to me. He grabbed my arm and swung me around. “Kris, wait,” he said, his voice suddenly somber. “I’m sorry. Really. I’m an asshole. It’s something I’ve come to expect of myself, but I shouldn’t tease you.”

I wasn’t sure what I was more upset about. The fact that I had stripped in front of Alec, or that I had done something to validate Nathan’s reasoning behind us not being together. He had given me the opportunity to decipher my feelings for Alec, and I did this. I ruined it.

The guilt was eating me up.

“On some level, I think I knew, and I should have put a stop to it sooner,” Alec continued. “I guess I wanted it to be real,
hoped
that it was real. The last thing I ever wanted was to hurt you, Kris, and I’m sorry that I did.”

“I’m just glad you pulled the brakes when you did,” I offered weakly, then a thought came to me. “Why did you? If you wanted it to be real so bad, you could’ve…”

Apparently, I’d been game. And Alec was a guy. It couldn’t have been easy for him last night, to make the call he’d made.

“I might be evil, Kris, but I’m not a monster. I wouldn’t do that to you. I…” He trailed off, letting his next thought hang in the air between us. I could see that whatever it had been was still on his mind, and bothering him.

Or he was really confused.

“What is it, Alec?”

“Nothing,” he said quickly, and not convincingly at all.

“You wouldn’t do that to me because you…?”

He took a deep breath before his unfinished thought burst through, seemingly without his permission, “Because I love you.” He paused like he was surprised by his own admission, seemed to ponder it a moment, and ultimately made up his mind—that yes, he did love me. He nodded his eventual acceptance, even if he looked shocked as hell.

The look on my face likely matched his. “Really?”

He shrugged. “I guess so.” He sounded less than thrilled, and I suspected he’d never said those words to anyone. Ever.

“Since when?” He started to turn away, and I put a hand on his shoulder, stopping him. “Alec. Since when?”

“Since that night on the playground in Boone.”

The night of our first kiss.

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Seriously? Kris, I never had a chance. Nathan came along…” Alec shook his head and muttered under his breath just loud enough for me to hear, “I knew I should have left his ass locked up in that cell.”

Oh, yes. Nathan. The one that had unintentionally stolen my heart from Alec. The one I had fallen in love with. The one that might love me too, but won’t admit it. The one who had insisted all along that I had unresolved feelings for Alec.

The one I had deceived, by proving him right.

“I know how you feel about Nathan,” Alec continued. “I also know what would have happened between us if not for him. As hard as this is for me to admit, I’m glad he came along, because he can give you a chance at the happily ever after that you deserve. I can’t.”

My mouth opened, an incompletely formed argument rushing forth, but Alec shushed me with a finger to my lips. “You deserve the best,” he continued quickly, “and I’m not it. He is. He loves you as much as I do, even if he doesn’t know it yet, and that makes him worthy.”

He hesitated, long enough for me to muster words, though they were mumbled with his finger still pressed to my lips. “I would’ve been happy with you, Alec.”

“Maybe.” He shrugged. “It wouldn’t have lasted. Eventually, we both would have been stuck, unhappy, in a Skotadi-run life neither of us wants. It’s better this way, for both of us. I can see that now. I did a lot of thinking last night.”

“Since when did you become a philosopher?” He gave me a small crooked grin that only made me sad to see. “Alec, I—”

“A part of you loves me,” he interrupted. “I know that, and I think you do too. It sucks because the part of you that loves me is the part that we’re trying to destroy.” He paused and, this time, his grin was more Alec-like. “I’m a little conflicted about the whole thing.”

My only response was a timid smile. Was he right? Was it only my Skotadi-side that had feelings for Alec?

He turned to walk away, leaving me stunned by his words. All of them. All of those wonderfully
spoken, heart-breaking words. They’d torn a big piece of my heart to shreds. A far bigger piece than my inner Skotadi owned.

It wasn’t just her that loved Alec.

“Alec,” I called after him in a whisper.

He turned to face me. As I crossed the room to him, I was sure he knew what I was doing before I knew what I was doing. His voice was cautious. “Kris…”

I shook my head to silence him, then lifted onto my tip-toes to press my lips softly against his. He didn’t pull me into his arms, he didn’t touch me anywhere else. He did nothing but kiss me back gently, like he knew what this kiss really was. 

I wanted to tell him that the part of me that loved him was not just the part we were trying to destroy, that it was more than that, but I choked the words back. Instead, a single tear sl
id down my cheek as a big piece of my heart said goodbye.

Living with Alec after that—knowing that he loved me—wasn’t easy. It bordered on torture. Neither of us wanted to talk about it, and neither of us brought it up again, though sometimes I thought it might have been easier to clear the air.

If only I knew how to do that.

It wasn’t like I’d changed my mind. Even if we might never be together, Nathan was still the one I wanted. I knew that, and Alec knew that.

And Alec accepted it.

I determined that having Alec’s blessing was something I’d needed all along. Hearing him say what he had said, and knowing that he was willing to let me go despite loving me, sealed the deal for me. Nothing was there to hold me back. There were no more unresolved feelings or issues for me to work out.

There was only one big problem now. I had left Nathan. And considering that tonight was the night Alec and I planned to break into the orphanage, there was a good chance I might never see him again.

Alec parked the Tahoe behind the same snowbank as a few nights ago. We made the same walk to the fence in silence, the butterflies in my stomach multiplying with each step. Alec pulled back the same bushes covering the same hole in the fence, and I took a deep breath.

Here we go...

As I stepped forward to climb through, Alec grabbed my arm. “Kris?” I stopped and waited. “We’re cool, right?”

“Of course.”

Despite the reassuring tone of my voice, he looked uncertain. “You sure? All that happened…” He trailed off, grimacing as if the memory was painful for him. “After everything that I said, we’re good? ‘Cause I don’t want to go in there with that between us.”

“Alec…” I stepped closer to him, close enough to see the light in his eyes—only because they were that magnificent, not because they were surging. The words that came to mind didn’t sound good enough, so for lack of anything worthy to say to him, I hugged him.

I pulled him in tight, wrapped my arms around his middle, and really,
really
hugged him. At first, he hesitated, then his arms enclosed around my shoulders, and he held me against him. It was better than words.

I considered letting go after a moment, but I didn’t. It felt good there, snuggled against Alec’s chest. I’d missed him the past few days, and I wanted to bask in this moment because it was the first that I realized that we really were going to be okay.

And I was scared, that after all that we had been through, to lose him now. When I felt closer to Alec than ever.

“Are we going to stand here all night?” Alec murmured in my ear, earning a laugh from me.

But I still didn’t let go, and neither did he. “Maybe.”

“Okay.” I didn’t know how it was possible, but his grip tightened. “I love you, Kris. And I mean that as a friend.”