“I’m sure, Jill,” he said evenly, still holding my arms. His fingers tightened slightly around me. “I am positive.”
I searched his face, almost like I was looking for some hint of the monster in his eyes. But all I saw was Tristen: complicated, sometimes frightening, occasionally violent, even. But also capable of great good, great warmth, a willingness to sacrifice his life for others. For Becca, in particular, if my suspicions were right. “How do you know?”
“I dreamed last night,” he said.
“You’ve dreamed before.”
“This time I concluded the dream,” Tristen confided. “I finally saw the outcome . . . the actual murder.”
“That doesn’t mean anything!”
“I saw her face, Jill,” he continued, loosening his grip on my arms, not so much restraining me as just holding me. “I saw her face as she died. As the monster killed her.”
“I don’t understand . . . You knew all along who it was.” Becca. How in that awful moment could I be jealous again? But I was.
“No, Jill,” Tristen said, brown eyes miserable, “I was wrong. He didn’t kill a silly cheerleader.”
“No?” My voice sounded strangled in my throat, because somehow . . . some clue in the way he was looking at me gave me the answer to the question I was about to ask before I could even voice it. “Who—who was it, Tristen?”
“You, Jill,” he said. “I—he—murdered you.”
Not Becca, but me . . .
We stood together in the lonely classroom: me and a guy I loved who swore that something inside of him wanted to kill me. Yet I wasn’t afraid of him.
Trust me, Tristen had said.
And somehow I did.
I was scared, but not for me. Just for him—even when Tristen, pinning my arms, revealed very matter-of-factly, “He wants to kill you right now, Jill. And not just in fantasy.”
And how could I describe the way it felt when Tristen pulled me closer—voice throaty with what I thought were sadness and need—how could I ever capture how it felt when he said, “It’s been you all along, Jill. He wants you as much as I do. But I’ll be damned, genuinely damned, before I let him have you.”
It was maybe the world’s sickest declaration of affection, complete with a touch of black humor, but it rang as perfect to my ears.
Tristen cupped my chin in one hand then and bent over me, wrapping his other arm around my waist, and I had my first real kiss with a boy—a man . . . a monster and a martyr, who might very well be dead in the next few minutes.
Of course Jill Jekel wouldn’t have a normal kiss good night at the front door after a movie or a school dance.
Of course a relationship that started at the edge of one grave would culminate on the brink of another.
Of course that first kiss would not just be to say good night but probably goodbye.
Chapter 43
Tristen
OH, HOW THE BEAST INSIDE of me roared and snapped and snarled when I finally kissed Jill Jekel the way I’d wanted to for—how long?
Could I trace my attraction to that night in the diner when she’d walked by the window, her demure lace blouse somehow more intriguing than Becca Wright’s skintight T-shirt? Or had it started in chemistry class, where I watched that glossy ponytail swinging in hypnotic rhythm? Was that when she’d first mesmerized me? Or had it been the day I’d held her at her father’s funeral, felt her cling to me, so in need of strength, protection?
How ironic that as those soft, pink lips finally pressed against mine, uncertainly, and as Jill’s hands fluttered to find their proper place—my shoulders? hips? chest?—and as her mouth yielded to my gentle pressure, opening so I could feel her timid tongue against mine one time before my own mouth was seared and wrecked forever . . . How ironic that a kiss born of a desire to protect was all but overwhelmed by my struggle to control a force within me that wanted nothing less than to destroy Jill herself.
As she hesitantly drew closer into my embrace, resting against me, the beast wriggled in my soul, trying to break free, to take control.
Stop now, Tristen, I told myself. Stop before you black out.
Stop before you do something that can never be undone.
Yet the feel of Jill in my arms, the exhilarating, intoxicating mix of passion and tenderness that she elicited in me—it was like nothing I’d ever felt with any other girl, and I couldn’t quite bring myself to make the feeling end. I wanted the kiss to go on and on, fairly certain that it was my last, completely certain that it was the best, and I drew Jill even closer to me, hungry for her, a condemned man trying to savor his last meal even as he hears the construction of the scaffold just outside the cell.
“Oh, Jill,” I murmured, wanting to tell her that I loved her. Wanting to say so much but not wanting to pull away long enough to say it. “Jill,” I whispered, nuzzling against her soft, soft cheek, hoping she heard everything I wanted to express just in the way I spoke her name.
“Tristen . . .” I heard my emotions echoed in Jill’s voice, too. Sad, desperate bliss like my own. Her heart raced against my chest.
And I heard something else, too, intruding upon my thoughts. “Yes, Tristen . . .”
Its voice.
As I folded Jill to me, caressing her back, stroking her throat with my thumb, the words echoed softly but clearly from somewhere deep inside of me. A place that I was only beginning to recognize.
I’d felt the beast twisting within. But this was the first time I heard it speak.
Stop, Tristen, I told myself—even as I continued kissing Jill. The attraction, the passion, escalating as she ventured to slip her hands around my neck. Just one more minute, Tristen, and then never touch her again . . .
I thrust
