Page 23 of Broken Butterfly
Ry: Tell Elizabeth I love her. I didn’t tell her that today.
Chapter 7
Day 5: Finding Elizabeth
Nordurljosavegur
I have never seen anyone more excited to see snow and hot water than Elizabeth. I thought she would get a kick out of seeing the blue lagoon, so I arranged for us to stay at a retreat in Nordurljosavegur instead of Reykjavik. When she saw the blue waters of the hot thermal springs for the first time, she told me, “The blue is almost like the color of your eyes.” She took off her gloves and touched the heated water, surprised pleasure exploding across her face. I’m going to make it my priority to put that wonderous look on her face every damn day she’s with me. Because I know there’s an end date to our little adventure. I’m not the man who will get the girl at the end of the story. I’m actually the villain. I’m the man who is destined to destroy her. But not yet. Today, I get to enjoy her giddy smiles and I’m devouring every one of them like they are the last supper before my execution.
“Kitten, what’s taking you so long?” I call to her from the living area while looking out of the floor-to-ceiling windows. I watch the steam rise from the thermal river that runs right next to our room. The snow-covered rocky terrain adjacent to the blue waters creates a majestic contrast between ice and heat. It reminds me of the dichotomy between Elizabeth and me. Ice and heat. Light and dark. Good and evil. Virtue and impurity.
“I’m not sure I’m ready to do this,” she says from the other room. I told her to put on a bathing suit so we could take a dip in the lagoon before dinner.
“Get your ass out here or I’m coming in to get you.”
“Not fair! There are no doors in this place,” she grumbles, and I chuckle.
Elizabeth tentatively walks out of the bedroom, and my mind goes blank for a second. She’s wearing a two-piece bikini set we found in New York City. My gaze lingers on the swell of her breasts then travels down.Fuck me. She has her hair piled up on top of her head. Her skin is pale and luminous. Her long legs are lean and toned. I follow the path of her butterfly tattoos before my eyes land on the vertical scar that starts at her navel.
“Stop it, Fallon.” She covers her abdomen using her arms and hands. “The way you’re looking at me is exactly why I’m not ready to expose myself like this.”
“How am I looking at you?” I cock my head at her.
“You’re scowling like my scars either disgust you or you pity me.” I didn’t realize I was scowling.
“Disgust was the furthest thing from my mind,” I assure her.
“You pity me, then.”
I walk up to her, moving her hands to dangle by her sides and trail my fingers up the soft skin of her arms. She shivers. The devil in me comes out to play. My fingers glide down the sides of her torso and she pulls in a shaky breath. I tempt fate by splaying my hands across her abdomen, gliding them up, so they stop just below the curve of her breasts. Elizabeth closes her eyes and her lips part slightly, little puffs of air escaping like the fluttering of tiny wings.
“Does this feel like pity to you?” I exhale against the shell of her ear. “Now, let’s go and enjoy ourselves, shall we? Don’t forget to put on your robe and slippers.”
I walk out of the suite, leaving a dazed and glassy-eyed Elizabeth standing in the middle of the room. I adjust the painful hard-on I’m sporting as I hit the elevator button.
Elizabeth is floating on a thin mat beside me, and every so often she’ll wiggle her fingers and toes in the warm water and sigh. “This feels so fucking unbelievably good.”
“Told you.”
“Can I ask you a question?”
“Depends on the question,” I tell her, and she starts to giggle. “Did I say something funny?”
“Don’t you remember?” she asks me. I turn my head on my mat to look at her. “You said basically the same thing to me at Curtis’s party.”
“Did I?” I don’t remember much from those days. I made sure to live every hour wasted, high, or with my dick shoved up some random girl’s pussy.
She stops giggling. “Yeah, you did. Why did you stop?”
I know exactly what she’s talking about. My propensity for using drugs, mostly weed, to numb my pain was strong back then. “Something happened that made me open my eyes for the first time and see how I had wasted most of my life.”
“I’m proud of you.”
Why does hearing her say that inject me with an enormous surge of joy that shoots straight to my blackened heart?
“You shouldn’t be. I’m still damaged. I’m still dangerous.”
“Not to me.”
