Page 97 of Crush

Thorne’s not evil. I know this at my deepest core. His father is the true evil. Thorne’s been caught up in the storm, its brutal edges shown through the blood on his back. Yet he still finds it in him to touch me like I’m the fragile one about to crack.

This flip-flopping between hating him and caring for him … it’s too much. I just fought an impossible battle down below, throwing myself to chance, all because I can’t shake Thorne from my head, his pain and his pleasure an all-consuming duet of good and evil inside my chest.

Make the right choice.

I bat his hand away. “Don’t take this from me, too.”

Without waiting for one of his scripted answers, I turn to the torch, finding the matchsticks close to the base. Lifting them, I break one off and scrape it against the package, lighting a flame.

Thorne comes up behind me, grabbing my wrist and yanking the lit match from my hand. It sputters, then goes out in the sand.

“No! I’m not failing this, Thorne! You’re not doing this again!” I scream at him as my vision turns blurry, hot, wet. “Fuck you—”

I’m given enough time to see the swirl of emotion behind his pale eyes, the promise of heat before he flies forward and captures my lips with his.

I freeze in his possessive hold, his lips making mine cut into my teeth, bruising and bloody and ferocious.

Something in me fractures.

I claw at him like he’s the cliff that promises to bring me out of the unforgiving waters below. My hands tangle in his hair, bringing him closer, pushing him away, my lips peeling back so my teeth can cause the same damage his are to me.

Our tongues crash through the blood.

This. This is what genuine frustration feels like. A gathering of souls, a thrashing of two angry waves meeting in the middle, white-tipped wrath frothing into the air before landing in the water as one ocean.

It’s not calm under the surface. Its furious currents come together under the water, a lashing of power, and the urge to drown each other.

I want to shed my skin and drown in him. A sound comes out of my throat, pleading and wanting, unlike any noise I’ve emitted, even when Thorne has me at the edge of pleasure.

I recognize it for what it is. The sound he’s always wanted. Submission.

Thorne has me where he wants me. He untangles his hands from my hair, gliding them down, squeezing my breasts through my wetsuit, and managing to get my nipples to sing with electricity through the thick fabric. Pain throbs from my chest. Pleasure seeps from my mind. It happens so violently, I can’t tell one from the other.

Then without warning, Thorne grabs me by the shoulders and shoves me back.

It’s like he releases me into the wild. I’m blind and stumbling. I nearly fly into the torch.

When I get my bearings, I lift my head, studying him for why. I can see the way I clawed at his hair, how it spikes out in all directions, combed through with desperate craving. His focus is still on me, but the color of his eyes is darker, his pupils dilated and eclipsing the eerie blue. And he’s looking at me like … he doesn’t know me.

Like he doesn’t know himself anymore.

Thorne breathes out hard, his posture bowed, but not for me. If he took a whipping, he must be in agony, yet he stares at me like I caused it.

“Savannah,” he grinds out.

I shake my head in confusion, though my heart’s already explaining the reason. He’s hurt, and in his pain, he’s confused you for her. He probably kissed her plenty of times. He’s never laid his mouth on mine.

Not once, until this moment of weakness.

My lips aren’t so swollen and ravaged that I can’t dare him further and torture myself more thoroughly, however. “Savannah, what?”

“Light your fucking torch.” Thorne’s eyes flick to the pole I’m gripping with one hand like it’s the one thing keeping me balanced. “Get in my father’s good graces and be a perfect little Virtue.”

Oh, you fucking asshole. I fumble through the sand beneath my feet and hold up the pack of matches I’d dropped during his … claiming… then flash them at him like I’m giving him the finger. “This is what you want, then, huh? Good. Me, too.”

I light another one, the small fire likely illuminating the pure fury on my face. Or the complete and utter humiliation he managed to land one last time.

“They found Savannah.” Thorne picks up his phone, shoving it in his jacket pocket. “So I guess this ends our fucked-up ride together. That’s what I came to tell you.”