Page 37 of Bad Bunny
Silence settles between us again.
Too thick. I fidget with the edge of the sheet, rubbing it between my fingers.
“And how do you know?” I ask, because now I really want to understand. “When it’s happening, I mean.”
Sorren goes very still.
“You feel it,” he says at last, his eyes flicking to mine, then to my mouth, and the air goes thin.
“Feel what?”
His gaze shifts back to the ceiling.
“A pull,” he answers. “An awareness. Their presence is difficult to ignore. Their scent. Their voice. Their safety.”
My stomach turns uneasily. I remember back to earlier. In the dark.
How I couldn’t stop thinking about him.
“That sounds intense,” I manage past the lump in my throat.
“It is,” he says.
Another pause stretches out.
“What about the marking? The bite? Is that a part of it too or totally separate?” I ask the question I really want to know. I can’t stop reliving that moment. How it felt when he put his teeth to my wrist. That should be a bad memory, or at least neutral, but it’s not…
“Here, in this world where there’s hardly any magic, I need the bite to transform. To shift.” He pauses. “The bite gives me the magic. Shifting is my choice.”
“But in your world? How does it work?” I supply.
“There we can shift at will without any assistance. The bite is used there more for, uh, um,” stuttering for the first time since I met him, “mating.” He drags in a breath so loud I hear it. “It’s used during mating. It strengthens the bond. It allows the magic to settle between two people. To take root.”
The room is suddenly too warm.
He’s not done though. “It allows us to track one another. To draw strength from one another.” A pause. “To feel one another.”
My skin prickles.
“Feel how?”
He finally turns his head toward me, his gaze catching mine in the dim light.
“Emotion. Pain. Fear.” Another beat passes before he adds, quieter, “Desire.”
Heat floods my face.
Had he known what I was thinking about earlier?
“And here?” I cut myself off before I spiral. “Can you sense those things here in my world?”
“Yes,” he says. “And it deepens over time with each bite. Both here and in my world.”
I flush, grateful for the low light so he can’t see.
“Which is why we should be careful,” Sorren adds. “The bite is binding. Dangerous to you.”
Something in me cries out at that. Disappointed. Frustrated. Because if I’m being honest with myself, when I pictured us like that, intertwined with each other, breathless, and I thought about his mouth on me, it wasn’t just kissing.
