Free Dreaming Awake by Gwen Hayes Page B

off his words, though I hadn’t stopped him.
    “What? Is this like when you didn’t want me to touch you, but when I did everything turned out fine?”
    “Every time we touch, we get closer to the edge, and that is anything but fine.” Haden rolled onto his back, raking his hands through his hair, disheveling the deep brown waves into an even more tempting state. “It’s a ritual sacrifice when a demon and a virgin . . . It’s not usually consensual.”
    “Okay, not usually, but for us, it is.” It’s not like I would fight him off.
    “That doesn’t matter. It’s not the consent that is of importance to the ritual—it’s the
innocence
.”
    I let his words drift over me, unable to make sense of them. It seemed so ludicrous to me. I had to fight to control my urges to eat mortal souls, but I was innocent somehow. And once again I was reminded of his sacrifice.
    “If you had stayed human, we could have been together, couldn’t we?”
    “If I had stayed human, I couldn’t have saved you, love.”
    I pushed off the bed, the need to move overwhelming. “All you ever wanted was to be completely human, to get rid of your demon half. Because of me, you had to take it back.”
    He blocked my pacing. “That was what I wanted before you. As soon as I laid eyes on you, you were all I wanted.”
    I shrugged. “So now you can’t have either? What happens if we do it anyway?”
    “I would go through a rite of passage of sorts, only instead of becoming a man, I’d become a beast, which may or may not be physical change. I would lose my grip on my humanity, maybe completely. I’d be more like Mara.”
    I shuddered. His mother’s calling in life was to terrorize humanity. She was very, very good at it.
    My heart sank. It just kept falling and falling. “I don’t believe this.”
    “I should have told you sooner. There just was never a right time.”
    I wished I could argue, but he was right. There really hadn’t been an opportune time to sit down and talk about why we could never consummate our relationship. He’d always been very adamant about not going too far. He hadn’t even wanted to touch me at first. That reserve he struggled to hold on to, the one that infuriated me—I guess he had good reason for it.
    I exhaled loudly, wishing to expel all my frustration but knowing it wasn’t going to work. “Are you telling me that the only way we can be together is if I do it with someone else first?”
    The temperature in the room shot up suddenly. “Absolutely not.” His crisp words were delivered very carefully, but the vein in his temple throbbed. He looked very much on the edge of becoming a beast in front of my eyes. “That will
never
happen.”
    “I don’t want to,” I said quickly, trying to soothe him before his anger got the better of him, but the room got hotter and hotter. “I just can’t believe that I’m being punished for being a virgin.”
    “Your purity isn’t a burden, Theia.”
    “Isn’t it? It feels like one to me.”
    “We will find a way. We just have to be patient. And careful.”
    I rubbed my temples. “I don’t want to be careful anymore. I’ve been careful my whole life. I want to be reckless and heedless, and I want to show you how much I love you, and it’s not fair that I can’t.”
    Haden enveloped me in his arms, holding me close. “The best part of being human is loving you, Theia.”
    I let him hold me and tried to block the doubt that crept through the corners of my mind like a thief in the dark, stealthy and sly. Loving me could strip Haden of his humanity. I was far more dangerous to him than he’d been to me.
    I sank further into his embrace, memorizing the thud of his heartbeat against my cheek, the way he smelled, the weight of his strong arms. I loved him so much that I couldn’t imagine my life without him, especially now that I was changed—not human, not demon, something else entirely. We’d risked so much to be together, but his soul was the