Deny Me: A Paranormal Romance (Legends of the Ashwood Institute Book 2)

by Jayla Kane

  That’s almost the best part. I missed her every day. Every. Single. Day. I don’t need a lot of people; I’m not an introvert or an extrovert, as Hunter pointed out one time when we had to take personality tests in some college prep section of some sociology class in senior year. The test results were a mash-up, broken up evenly between the two factions, and we both handed them in and our teacher just shook his head at us. I like being around very few people, and half of them are dead—or as good as--anyway. Hunter doesn’t like anyone, not even me, most of the time. But I like my freedom, and that means I like control, and having control over things requires the cooperation of other humans. So there you go. I’m classically anti-social, I believe is the term. But not with Raven.

  With Raven… I’m normal. I want normal things. I enjoy normal things.

  I like watching her eyes close when she laughs so hard she can’t help it, I like the little hitch in her breath as she recovers. I like telling her about something I saw, or admired, or hated, or whatever might fall in between; I like hearing her sarcastic observations about my character and the world around us, and the painful sincerity that peeks through at the same time. I like holding her hand when she talks about something that upsets her. I like listening. I like brushing long, dainty strands of pitch black hair back from her beautiful face, I like it when she looks up at me with those twilight eyes, I like it when she knows I’m listening, that I want to hear her, that she matters.

  I wasn’t lonely in general, those years; I was surrounded, in fact, constantly the center of activity and movement, whispers and intrigue and time-passing-games.

  I was lonely very specifically. I was starving for her.

  This dream was a nightmare, when I first started having it—when everything was raw. This time, though… I let myself settle into it, and it feels oddly fresh. The same things happen—the same love note, the same roll of the eyes my teacher gives me when I stand up and begin to recite, in graphic detail, what I want to do to her this afternoon, until he has to shut me down because it’s a little too risqué. The same jokes. The same observations. The same assignments, the same people I move past to get to her when we’ve been apart for even an hour, the same sigh from Hunter when I finally see her face in the crowded hallway. The same food for lunch, the same gasp as she feels me getting hard and climbs down, her cheeks bright red, a wicked grin on her face. The same push from Hunter at the end of the day as he sends me off in her direction, the same look on her face—joy. Easy, care-free, happiness… She is full of joy when she sees me and the bell has rung, and we head over to my car, wrapped up in each other. But this variation of the dream—there are about three or four, always the same until now—stops us midway as we sit down inside, and she leans towards me from the passenger seat. “I’ll see you at six?” And my stomach clenches, wondering how the hell I’m going to get through that much time without her, but she reaches over and strokes my cheek. “I still don’t want to do dinner with everybody. Is that okay?”

  This is the prom dream, I realize, and settle in. “Sure, baby,” I hear myself say, and then we are kissing, and my whole body is on fire, and she abruptly pulls away and smiles the most mischievous smile at me—

  “See you then,” Raven says, and she twists open the door and jumps out, jogging away to catch a ride with Christa.

  And I’m left, waiting, burning alive with desire.

  It’s worse than usual, this time; I actually do feel like I might be on fire. I take a minute to look around myself in the dream—I know, having done this a million times before, that the hours are really going to pass by in seconds, I just have to be patient for seconds, even if that feels like too much—as the parking lot empties out. Hunter got in his truck and was gone immediately; he’s basically the same in my head as he is in real life. And everyone else is too. Some of them wave. Some are driving off. There is an aura of excitement because of the added novelty of prom in a gigantic high school—not that I gave a shit then, or now, really, although… Raven.

  The thought of Raven and prom makes my stomach sink and my heart sing at the same time.

  But this is a dream—this is what I lost, sure, but I can enjoy this. It’s just a dream. A happy, very sweet dream, if the trend holds, with a particularly memorable limo scene later on. I lay back, putting my arms behind my head until my body finally settles down, and then drive home. The montage as I get ready is rushed and uniform, hitting all the notes I remember: getting dressed, a brief argument with Lucas, Mina insisting on a photograph in the empty solarium, leaving with a tight smile on my face, trying hard to be nice, who knows why.

  Picking her up. Having a picnic in the bed of my truck—just us. Spring air all around; we’re in the parking lot by the old church, the quiet is immense, and we feed each other fruit and chocolate and champagne. I try to run my fingers through her hair and she bats me away, saying it took hours to make it look like this. Dark, heavenly waves, braided crystals, an ice-white dress. She looks like a real princess, like Snow White really would’ve appeared when she took the throne. Regal, elegant, so beautiful I can barely stand it. I want to touch her, and I don’t; I don’t want to mar the perfection, and I want to find the girl inside of it at the same time. She winks at me, reading my every thought as if her curse were already in place, and when the limo pulls up—I arranged that in secret, knowing she’d never think of such ostentatious frippery on her own—she squeals. We get inside, pick up Christa and her date, and go to the prom. We dance. We dance and dance and dance—Raven loves to dance. Or she did. I don’t know if that’s true any more. But in the dream, she still has a reason to, she can trust and let go and enjoy herself because I’m there, and she is young and at prom and looks like a goddess. And then they crown us—more fast-forwarding, because my mind does this to me in the nightmare version so I can drink up the tears in the corners of her eyes as she revels in something so sweet, so simple and ordinary and fun, something I ruined completely for her in real life—and we leave soon after and go find the limo in the parking lot. King and queen. She really looks the part.

  And I feel my heartbeat start to pick up speed, because I remember what comes next.

  We’re not virgins in this version of the dream. In one of the prom versions, we are, and there’s crying and blood and also… It’s the worst one, that nightmare, because it mercilessly runs through all the things I destroyed, all the chances I took from her, from myself, all the things that were ruined. In the one where we’re virgins, we hold each other, naked and raw and alive, and promise to get married. It’s not an engagement, exactly. It’s just an acknowledgement that we belong to one another, forever, and that’s just the way it is and the way it should be. I woke up from that one crying more than once when I was still really young.

  But this one is different. My brain had a little bit of mercy on me when it made this one, because the limo scene is fucking hot.

  Except… This time, it again feels a little strange—like the edges are blurry, the script slightly different. We’re sitting in the back of the limo, gazing at one another under the open roof; the stars are above us, and Raven just climbed down after hanging out of the top and singing some pop song I’m one hundred percent sure she’s never even heard in real life. Christa and her beau are with another group of revelers back at the dance, so it’s just us. I watched her and laughed and then she came back down and flopped on the seat across from me; wind whistles through the compartment. We’re whipping down back country roads, which is what I asked the driver to do. Raven just told me she didn’t want to go home yet, which is good, because I got us a hotel room in Philly, but she didn’t want to do that either, she said. “I want to… To just go. To just go with you, drive all night, and see where we end up.”

  “Really?” I’m surprised. She nods eagerly at me, and I shrug. Being rich has a few distinct advantages, and tonight is one. “You got it. And all the Taco Bell and Waffle House you can stand.”

  “Ew,” she says, laughing, and th
en she grins at me. “You really know how to treat a lady, Warfield.”

  Right now, at the end of the evening, she looks even more unearthly; her hair is undone, sweat glazing her body from an evening on the dance floor. Black wisps swirl around her head in the starlight, and she licks her lips as she takes in my face. When she crawls over to me, my whole body is ready to explode. I worship her. I cannot think of anything else in this moment, my mind entirely focused on her, on the weight of her body settling over mine, the light tease of her hands on my chest, the scent of her sweat. “Raven,” I say, and the word is a prayer.

  We don’t speak again. She kisses me, and the wind picks up around us, filling the cabin; our mouths are ravenous. This is different from my old dream, I realize, and as I pull back I feel the place on my leg where I got injured senior year. My hand has a scar on it from a fight last summer, only two months ago. And Rae… Raven doesn’t look care-free and full of joy. This is us. As we truly are, as we were when we went to bed. But she is still kissing me, hard, her beautiful mouth devouring mine, and I sink into it, surrendering to the feel of her, the need rampant in my body. Her skin is cool, and I lick her throat from the hollow at the base to her chin as she pants, my hands working their way under the layers of her dress; she is straddling me, and I’m surprised when I find there are no panties beneath it. Definitely different from my old dream. I lean back to look at her again; her hands are gripping my hair, tight, and we both catch our breath as we stare at one another. I dig my fingernails into the meat of her ass, watching her wince and moan, and then I push the arch of her back down, down further, so she can ride me through my clothes. Raven’s skin is flushed, peach beneath the icy white; her hair is a halo of night. We grind, ruthless and desperate, until I can’t handle it any more and let go, using one hand to free myself and the other to rip the top of her strapless dress down, immediately seizing her nipple with my mouth as I sink inside of her. Raven is damp, slick heat; I am raw force and need. I suck the plush velvet white of her breasts, I pump into her from below, I use my other hand to wrap around and slip a finger in that last, forbidden hole, the one I claimed as mine. Raven is wailing with spasms of brutal pleasure above me, and I lick her lips, her face finally lowering to my own as I slip my tongue in. I am inside all of her entrances at once, and it undoes us both—Raven clenches me, so tight it hurts as she comes, and I grunt into her mouth as I slam into her from below—we go together, over the cliff, a tenderness that has teeth latching us together as we writhe in ecstasy, in one another. She is my mania. She is my cure, my disease. My soul.

  And then I open my eyes.

  The limo is gone; there is moonlight patching the floor through the tall windows, dappling the floor of my bedroom. The fire is low, and the smell of smoke fills the air—but its not from the mantle. It’s because the bed is on fire, a ring of it dancing around us in a slow, revolving circle. Inside, directly above us, snow drifts gently down onto the bed, covering our bodies in calming, soothing flakes that hiss into steam almost instantly.

  I say us because Raven is on top of me, exactly as she was in the dream; my finger is inside of her ass, my cock buried in her sweet pussy, our faces an inch apart as my tongue retreats and we rest our foreheads against each other. We both sound like we just ran a marathon, heaving great, panicked breaths, misting the chilly air beneath the snow. I’ve ripped apart her dress. I’ve set the bed on fire in multiple places, the satin smoking as I dampen the blazing ring with my mind; the snow slows to a few flakes. And here we are, naked, wrenched from my nightmare, my dream, staring at one another, and I am still inside her.

  And I have no urge to leave.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Raven

  “Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit,” I muttered, realizing what happened—taking it all in, all at once: The burning bed. The snow. The fact that I just invaded Jake’s dream and walked around in his head for what felt like an entire day, living a whole other life.

  Jake.

  Just Jake. Just the most beautiful man I have ever seen, nostrils flared as he sucks in air, eyes glazed with lust, his cock imbedded in my body like a steel rod. Muscles gleaming with sweat like gold filigree, hair rumpled and damp, his finger still in my body, announcing his ownership with even the tiniest movement. And me, flushed with desire to do everything we just did, all over again, right now, right in the smoke and ash and sweat and snow.

  But I can’t.

  I won’t.

  “I’m so sorry,” I said, and he immediately slid his finger out of my body and leaned back enough to look me full in the face. “I didn’t mean to—”

  “So…” His brow furrowed; I shifted in his lap, but neither of us seemed willing to address the fact that technically, we were still having sex. “You were there? The whole time?”

  “I think so,” I told him, unsure. “I… I thought I was dreaming. I was walking down the hall in our high school—”

  “Fuck,” he said softly, his eyes wide, and I stared at him.

  “What?” I know I did something horrible, but I also don’t know how I could’ve stopped myself… Were we holding hands when we went to sleep? Or did I walk into his dream, or however that’s supposed to work?

  “I’ve been having that dream since… Since we stopped talking,” he says carefully, and I let that sink in for a minute.

  “The whole thing? The way we—”

  “Yes. The way we were,” he said significantly, as if he doesn’t want to be reminded of everything this alternative life entailed, the jokes and the smiles and the… The happiness. The sheer comfort of simply being together. “There are a couple different versions of it—nightmare versions, I think of them—but that was definitely one of the more benign ones.” His eyes softened. “I should’ve known something was up in the limo.”

  “I had a lot of fun,” I suddenly said, the wrenching loss of it all hitting me—the simplicity of it, a day in the life of who we could’ve been. My lip trembled, and I felt him begin to leave me below as he reached up and ran the broad pad of his calloused thumb over my cheekbone.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Me too. That’s why it’s a nightmare, sometimes.”

  “Because—because of what?” When I think of nightmares, I don’t think of smiling and caressing and laughing so hard I cry. He watched me for a long moment, then reached down and lifted me off of him, pressing his stiff member down as he resettled me in his lap. Jake was so big that I was completely enclosed in his embrace, his long legs beneath mine, his arms around me, his face so close I could kiss him if I wanted to—and I did want to. But I also… I don’t know. Everything felt completely fucked up.

  “Because that’s what I ruined,” he said softly, watching me. “I’m sorry, Raven. I took too much away from you. And in my nightmares I get to see what I destroyed, over and over. There are worse versions,” he said warily, his eyes glazing as he looked somewhere over my shoulder, as if he were watching them play out; I didn’t think he meant worse the way I had first imagined him to—I think he meant worse as more painful, more gut-wrenching, and who knew how that looked in his head. “That one wasn’t bad at all,” he finally said, turning back to me. We watched each other in silence for a moment.

  “You’re not mad that I… I went into your head?”

  “Did you do it on purpose to fuck with me?”

  “No,” I said immediately, offended, but the corner of his mouth quirked up.

  “I wouldn’t blame you if you did,” he said softly, and then he leaned back against the headboard, resting his head on his clasped hands, his chest open, spread arms. There might be nothing on earth more glorious than Jake Warfield—every sweaty, copper inch of him—in repose. He wasn’t sated, exactly; I had a feeling he could do what we just did more than a few times tonight alone, and still come back for more. He looked devastating, dangerous, tempting… And sad. “I don’t think so, though. I think we probably just fell asleep holding hands, or brushed up against each other in the night. Should’ve gues
sed what might happen.”

  “That I would invade your dream?” Or that we’d end up fucking like animals?

  “Yeah,” he said, and the shiver his gaze sent over my heated skin told me he might have heard what I thought. I checked my shield, and sure enough, it was down. “Did you…” He frowned, just for a second, trying to find the words. “Are you okay? I know you weren’t interested in—”

  “I’m fine,” I said quickly. Too quickly. I worried my lip between my teeth and saw him frown again, watching me. “No,” I told him, deciding the truth was a better idea; we had too many damn secrets, he and I, and nothing good had come of it. Never. “I’m not fine.”

  We were supposed to be a team.

  That’s what his dream reminded me of—yes, it hurt. Yes, it was excruciating to imagine the life we didn’t get to have together. Yes, I guess, technically, that could be classified as a nightmare.

  But it was also a wake-up call. Jake was my best friend, once upon a time. And not because of anything else but the fact that we fit together, perfectly. We understood each other in a way that could only be felt, not explained; we were synchronized, exactly right, but only as a pair. Alone, he was a sociopathic monster; alone, I was misanthropic and world-weary.

  We weren’t meant to be those things. We were meant to be together.

  “Tell me about the dream,” I said, and he looked at me, his eyes wary.

  “What about it?”

  “Everything,” I said, staring at him. “Is that something you did with someone else—like, did you have a girlfriend you just erased from the dream, and pasted me in—”