He's looking at me.

My eyes haven't opened yet, but I'm sure of it. The sun is beaming through the windows, seeping through my eyelids. The bottom of the bed is pure heat, spreading into the blankets that are still bunched up near my feet, no doubt a result of scalding river stones. It contrasts the fresh crisp air that is dancing over my skin. I'm wearing nothing, and I'm sure he's looking at me.

The memories of our night sift like rotating record discs in my mind. His fingerprints feel permanent and lasting, tenderizing the valley of my curves. Hours have passed, spent in deep sleep, but they are still there.

My head may be throbbing, my body may be ridden with fatigue, but my soul is soaring, and touched. I'm a kid on Christmas. I'm skydiving through the air. I'm experiencing emotions for the first time in my life—true, mind-numbing ones—and it's glorious. I'm free, so free.

Aidan's fingers are tracing the side of me, lightly dusting over the deep curve of my waist to my hip. I'm terrified to open my eyes, frightened for what I'll see.

Regret. Suspicion. Reluctance.

Aidan is as much a mystery as the day I met him. To open my eyes and face reality, face his realities with the knowledge that they may distort my own is hard. But, cloud nine only lasts so long.

"You're looking at me," I announce, cutting the silence to quick. My voice hasn't recovered in any sense, still a rough squawk. At his lack of answer, which drives my thoughts wild, my eyes slide open with slow, testing flutters, adjusting to the sunlight until I can gaze upon him clearly.

The sunlight is bouncing off of his skin, giving a sheer glow, a sparkle of light blinding enough to bring warmth to my features. His arm is still on my hip. He doesn't retract it now that he knows I've caught him. In fact, his expression is expectant, as if he'd been waiting for me to wake and realize it myself.

My hands are tucked under the pillow comfortably, a casual pose that I don't unwind from despite the relief I experience at the unclouded gaze he's set upon me. His musings, the dark ones, are on the backburner. He's enjoying this too.

I smile tiredly, admiring the youthfulness I catch in his face under this light. His sharp features have softened, his mouth smooth, his jaw unclenched. His usual brooding scowl is nowhere in sight, miles and miles away from this room.

His caresses begin again, traveling lightly down over my thigh.

"Do you know what it's like?"

"What?" I whisper.

"To forget what it's like to sleep next to someone."

I could lie. I could say yes. I could say no. Instead, I tell him the truth. "I forgot what it's like to wake up beside someone I want there."

He looks over my face. "I didn't think I'd ever...have this again. To have someone next to me..."

"Do you like it?"

He nods, slowly. "I wish I could enjoy it more."

A glower of confusion sweeps across my face and I remove my hand to extend it and clasp his neck. Soft tendrils of wavy dark hair poke out from under my grasp. "You deserve enjoyment, Aidan. You deserve this."

"You are so delightfully positive, Josephine," he responds, with a wry smile. "It's a beautiful oddity."

"Is that a compliment?"

"Absolutely."

"But you're saying I'm naïve?"

He scoots closer until he's on my pillow with me. My sensitive skin tingles as his hand spreads across my back. "I'm saying you choose to see the innocence in people, the light side of the darkness and it's a beautiful quality."

"I choose to see your light side, Aidan. Others I could give a damn about."

I take in his beauty, drinking him in. He moves his face into my caresses, seeking it as much as I desire to give it.

"I want to see your light," I whisper, wishing he'd grant me his eyes. It takes him a while to do so, but when he does, a smile, a small one, accompanies the look.

"I think...we may have a puzzle or two?"

                                                ***

Aidan's pupils rotate over the page of the book he's reading to me, left to right in calculated sweeping glances while he takes in the words. His voice is honey soft and melodic, speaking the sentences with clear preciosity. What is left of our lunch covers the surfaces of Aidan's nightstands. The sun hasn't gone away, still brightening the room, adding a hint of warmth to the stone.

The bed is lived in, the sheets still turned out. Aidan's head is comfortable on my stomach, his bare body laid out horizontally over the mattress. He's too long for it, so one of his knees is bent and he's holding the book against his thigh, taking the time to introduce me to another book in his extensive library. At first, I was paying attention. Now, I can't take my eyes off of his legs. Or the slope of his abdomen. Or the dip between his collarbone and his chest.

We both haven't made a move for clothing to cover up. Even when we each took our time in the bathroom to groom, there was no desire to shield ourselves when reemerging. I can tell he's soaking this up as much as I am, the fragility of nakedness. Every so often his hand will slide over the length of my thigh, and I'll return it with a graze to the parting space between his muscular pecks. Fleeting grazes that we do simply because we can, because we both want it.

There is no normally anymore. Normally, I would have never allowed myself to fall this far into this infatuation. I don't have a reference book anymore. I don't have what has been done, what should be done. I'm thinking and acting as I go along, expecting the moment where I suddenly don't want this anymore to arise fatedly.

But, it's not coming. In fact, my desire for more—more time, more laughs, more caresses and kisses—has intensified, and I fear I'm leeching myself onto him. And that makes me wonder when he'll stop wanting this.

It's just when I'm overthinking, wondering if maybe I should give him space, allow him to breathe and begin to pull back, that he reaches out and touches me to ensure I won't.

"Tell me something about you, something you've never told anyone else," I say suddenly, interrupting his reading. He looks from the book, tilting his gaze up to me.

"A confession?"

I nod. "It doesn't need to be serious."

He sets the paperback book down onto his stomach and sighs, thinking. "Um, I'm not sure." Eventually, he clears his throat. "I can show you something no one's ever seen."

"Okay."

He gets off the bed, stretching his stiff limbs. My brows set high on my forehead when he approaches me again, holding his camera. It's massive, and technical, but he knows every inch of it. He sits on the edge and I turn onto my side, intrigued.

He hands me the camera, instructing me to move the dial to the right. I look at the screen, squinting, not sure what I'm looking at. It looks like his library, the one downstairs.

"Um...I'm not sure what I'm..."

My words drift as my eyes widen, and I use the dial to close up on the left bottom corner. My heart shrinks and then expands, and I begin to stutter, meeting Aidan's cautious gaze.

In the corner of the small screen is the ground of the library. His daughter's toys are scattered like they were when I arrived. There's a sheer, odd light beside the items, a shape that the longer I study, the more it becomes the shape of a human...a child.

"Is this—?"

Aidan nods. "Yes. I don't know how to explain it, but they're here. It's not all the time, but it happens. I took this image six months ago."

I blink, gaping, both awed and horrified. "How do you handle this?"

"I don't know, badly," he says, taking the camera back. He runs a hand through his hair, chuckling weakly. "It's happened for years. Now, I hardly flinch when something moves, or I hear a laugh."

"I can't believe it," I breathe, on the contrary, believing every word coming from his mouth.

"You see enough, and everything becomes believable."

I swallow, frowning. "Does it make it easier or harder?"

He smiles softly, placing the camera on the bed. "I don't know."

He slides over to me and lies out over the pillow. I grab the back of his neck, inhaling deeply, absorbing the strangeness with a lot more coherence than I would have a few days ago.

"I broke into the White House once for a story."

His eyes widen, his mouth falling open. It quickly extends into a creeping smile.

"Okay, details."

                                              ***

"Hold still," Aidan commands as the setting sun seeps through the open curtains, and the house items warm to an orange tint. I shake my head, sticking my face into the pillow abashedly.

"Jo, come on."

"I look like crap."

"That's impossible."

I remove my face from the fluffy pillow, scowling. "Pictures don't flatter me."

"Not my pictures," he says, bending to his knees. "Lower the sheet to your ribs."

I chuckle, doing as he says, blushing at the sheet tangled around my limbs sensually. "You better be the only person seeing these."

"They are for my eyes, Josephine," he says, concentrated. I'm enjoying myself, despite my nervousness. And what's more...I enjoy the thought of him looking at these when I leave this place.

"Turn your face a few inches to the left, so you're looking up at the ceiling."

Listening to the master of photography, I do as commanded and I hear him snap the shot. Out of the corner of my eye, I notice him shifting to catch the light pouring in. I'm struggling to hold a straight face, overly self-conscious, which is rare for me.

"Turn your face to me," he says behind the camera. I watch his smile widen when I comply, bubbling with laughter and sweet, sweet enjoyment.

"Stop smiling."

"I can't," I reply, cracking the mask I'd created, losing myself in giggles. He takes the shot.

"Are you done now?"

"Not nearly." He climbs onto the mattress, shuffling over to me on his knees. It's getting colder the more the sun disappears, so he's pulled on grey sweat pants. His glorious chest is still exposed to my gaze, and as he plants himself on either side of my legs, and stretches with his camera, I marvel at the way his chest expands with his laughs, and how his abdomen ripples, his virile muscles snaking down his torso.

It's odd how quickly, how easily we've adapted to no electricity, no entertainment. Because of it, we are devoted to each other, and clueless to the time slipping past. He momentarily directs his attention to my pose, to my locks of hair, to the sheet. My skin flushes everywhere he grazes.

He lifts the camera to his face, and I hear the click. He gives me his eyes then, lowering the camera with a small smile.

"How did they come out? I swear if you've made me—"

He hands me the camera, and I let my warning drift, placated when I take in the picture he's taken. It's rather good. The other he took from a bent stance on the floor is beautiful, which is a strange thing to admit to myself. The light is encompassing the majority of the photo. My face turned to profile is hitting the light just right to illuminate the shapes and send rays of light out around my body.

"They're not bad," I murmur, cheeks warming considerably as the sheet begins to slip further down my chest, at his tugging. Cooled by the sudden intrusion of air upon my skin, I watch while he curls his fingers around one of my ankles. His touch spreads higher, covering the space of my calf. He's lowered, and his lips press where he started, and begins to follow the setting course of his hand.

"They're perfect."

I feel every touch of his mouth right to my clustered nerves at the core of me, shocking me with shudders in anticipation. I let his camera slip from my fingers, and it makes a new home in the mattress. By the time his lips are against my thigh, my breath is already coarse.

"You're perfect," he whispers heatedly, tucking himself into the warmest crevasse of me, set on showing me the depth of his admiration.

                                              ***

The fireplace roars, crackling and popping, providing the only noise between us in hours. Nestled between Aidan's legs, leaned against his chest, I massage my fingers deeply into his palm, working his joints tenderly. My measly body looks miniscule between his legs. His skin is doing its work. I haven't felt the chill of the night at all tonight.

"You have good hands," he says, softly. I hum, nodding.

"I used to give my mother massages when I was younger. She worked crazy shifts on her feet. It was the only way she could get to sleep."

"You told me your father wasn't around?"

"He wasn't."

"Divorce?"

I chuckle, and it's dark, dark humor. "They're still married actually. He performed a jaw-dropping disappearing act on us. He told her for years that he didn't want to be a father, that he'd eventually leave one day. He told her. She didn't believe it until it happened."

"How old were you?"

"I was two."

The irony is not lost on me. The same age my father abandoned our family was the same age Aidan's daughter was torn from him beyond his will. One man willing to do anything to keep his daughter in his life, even live in a house haunted by her...the other so desperate to leave, he even left his watch on the bedside stand.

"I can't imagine it."

"I know you can't," I whisper, smiling softly at his soft kiss to my shoulder.

"I'm sorry. That must have been hard for you both."

"It was harder for my mother. She'd been raised to be a wife, and she was crazy about my father. Always expected he'd come back. I knew he wouldn't...she worked three jobs and left me with my aunt for most of my childhood. I can't say I was deprived of anything. She gave me what he couldn't. An education, comfort, a chance for a future. She and I weren't always so different."

"Until she wanted you to settle down."

I nod. "Have the life she wished she was able to have with my father. She didn't realize that I would do anything to never experience what she did...that dependency she has. She wasted her whole life on a man who didn't want her."

Aidan's cheek presses to my hair. "Love is dangerous."

My eyes dart under his palm, where his veins show through pale skin. The slashing scar extends from one side to the other. The scar of his left wrist is less frayed. I stop breathing, and take a chance, drifting my thumb over the dark line gently.

Love is dangerous.

His scars are the proof.

His chest expands, and his cheek leaves it's nestled spot at my soft inquiry.

"Six months ago," he admits quietly behind me. My eyes widen, and I'm glad he can't see them. I wait for more, not wishing to disrupt him with probing. "It was the anniversary...of the day. I'd been planning it for months. Victoria found me in the tub. She was supposed to be gone the whole day, but she stopped to drop off groceries she'd picked up."

He's talking to me. He's confiding in me. To hear him talk about this hurts more than I expected it would.

"Obviously, she called the police in time. I spent two months in a psych ward until they deemed me of sound mind to reenter society."

"Were you of sound mind?"

"Well, I wasn't going home to attempt it again. But, it's hard to say. I haven't been of sound mind in years."

"Do you still think about it?" I ask, hearing the fear in my own voice.

Please say no. Please say no.

He says nothing, and my heart sinks. My eyes are swarming, imagining that special kind of desolation, that desire to rid yourself of everything—experiences, emotions, life. They pour over my cheeks, fast paced and weighty.

Six months...that may as well have been yesterday. It feels as though he's told me it was yesterday. My chest is thumping with fright.

"Aidan," I breathe, shaking my head. My fingers have gone limp against his skin, weakened by the shock he's hit me with.

Six months. Four that he's been home.

I close my eyes, wishing the images my mind conjures up away, but they're here to stay, forcing me to imagine Aidan's face without life, pale and drained of blood. I squeeze them, and hiccup back the sound of reluctance that escapes my lips.

"I shouldn't have said anything," he says, tucking his face in the nape of my neck. His arms wrap around me, tightly. "Jo, I'm sorry."

I clutch onto his forearms, shaking my head. There are no words I can utter, none that I'd allow myself to say. I want to tell him I'd wished I'd met him six months ago, so he never would have fallen so low. But, thinking that makes me wonder if I'm holding what we're experiencing with too much regard.

This might be more of an impact for me than him.

To suggest that I could make those dark thoughts disappear may be too optimistic.

I sit up fully, lifting my back from his warmth. My knees are at my chin, protecting my vital organs from the uncertainties around me. This is happening so fast. I'm overwhelmed by a torrent of emotions. I'm latching onto his grief, to this houses haunted stories, and to my own morphing feelings.

It's suddenly ice cold, cold enough that I wrap my arms around myself to keep the chill away. Aidan's gaze is on my back momentarily while my distance from him sinks in. I'm surprised when he sits up to, and gently touches my back with his hands, pressing his lips to the tip of my spine.

"I don't know how to do this...to be open with someone. I'm sorry," he says. "I'm trying."

I wipe my cheeks on my arm. "I know. I just didn't know how hard it would be to hear."

His hands slide around my waist as he molds to my back, apologizing with tenderness. I want to sink into his embrace, to let go of the warnings he's just said.

"The last thing I want to do is weigh you down, Josephine. I don't want you to feel an ounce of this."

"I can take it."

"No, no, you can't. I won't let you." He kisses my skin. "You are an angel to me, Jo. You make everything...bearable."

I grab his hand from my body and lift it, desperate. I press my trembling mouth to the scar of death on his wrist, struck with unease. I feel like he's saying goodbye even though we're still together. He rests his forehead against my back as I adore the inflictions, wishing to show him that I'm willing to brave whatever is harbored within him.

I can handle the demons.

We can fight them.

"You don't have to be alone anymore," I whisper, thickly, turning my face to him, peering over my shoulder. His eyes are soft, soft and withdrawn, attempting to shield me from any pain. The words I utter are so hesitant, because I know they are a mistake.

Because right now, we're hidden away. Right now, it's just us, the snow, this cold eerie manor.

In a few days, life will begin again, and this fantasy will end.

Aidan's life isn't compatible with mine, I know it. But, I'm rejecting the very thought of it.

"You don't," I repeat, shooting my hand out to clasp his face. His eyes close tiredly at my touch, his features crinkling with agony.

"Everything I touch turns to ash, Jo," he whispers, opening his eyes, resigned. "I can't give you what you deserve. I can't risk hurting you."

"But you've touched me, Aidan," I snap. "You've already touched me. I'm just supposed to forget I met you? Forget this? Forget the forest?"

"I don't know," he whispers, shaking his head, just as confused as I am. "I didn't expect this. I didn't expect to feel what I feel when I'm with you, when we're together."

"You aren't cursed, Aidan. There's no such thing—"

"But what if there is?"

"There isn't—"

"But what if there is?" His eyes slant in frustration. "I've lost everyone I've ever lov—c-cared for. I'm scared enough to believe it, Jo. You literally died in my arms a few days ago. I have a right be afraid, to want to spare you from this hell I'm in."

I twist and capture his face, sucking in a gulp of breath. My eyes sweep over his features at lightning speed, with longing. He's slipping from my fingers.

"I can lead you out of it," I whisper against his lips. "Let me do it. Let me try."

"You don't even know what's in here, Jo."

"I don't need to. I don't." I want to shake him, make him bow to my will. "You feel it?" This yearning for air that doesn't ever seem to come. The need to be touched. The need to consume each other. "You feel this? Me?"

"God, I do," he breathes against my lips, tortured by his own desire for what I'm offering.

"Then, submit, Aidan. Don't think. Don't worry. Touch me, and forget."

He's gasping, so am I.

Our hands are roaming, both trembling, tense and too overwhelmed to focus on one area.

We're consuming each other's air, all of the space, leaving us no choice but to rely on each other. I'm dizzy from lack of oxygen, at wit's end, trying to understand why I've allowed myself to fall so far.

His smell, his fingertips, his dense eyelashes.

I'm in too deep.

I adore the sight of him. I worship the feel of him. I yearn for the heart.

"Kiss me," he breathes, as if he can't survive without it. I grab ahold of the back of his skull, and crush my mouth to his, moaning with relief as his kiss brings me peace.