Nightshade: An Enemies to Lovers, Dark Academic Romance (Sorrowsong University Book 1)
Nightshade: Chapter 21

I wake up with a warm body wrapped around my own.

The air outside is crisp and cool, chilling the tip of my nose, but beneath the duvet it’s heaven. Alex’s watch on the side table tells me it’s not yet six in the morning.

Three more days until Christmas break.

Five mornings in a row I’ve woken up in this bed. Five nights of movies and ramen and soul-wrenching kisses. Five nights of watching all that Alex does for his sisters, from nightly phone calls to emails to their teachers and physicians.

Not only does he have a black heart, but Cain Green is also fucking useless. He kills people, blackmails people, treats his workers like shit, but nothing enrages me like what he does to his children. He teaches them that they’re not worth coming home for.

He’s let Alex believe he’s not good enough to be loved.

His son, however, is all my favorite feelings tangled up in a six-foot-one masterpiece. At some point in the last two months, he’s become the closest sensation I have to a home. He calls me beautiful as if it were my name, touches me as if it keeps him alive, kisses me like he wants to brand himself on me forever.

Ophelia from two months ago would slap me.

In the peaceful dark, I trace my index finger down the space between his brows, gently so I don’t crack him more than he’s already been cracked. He makes it all look easy, but I know it isn’t. I wake up in the night to replace him scrolling through trial drugs for his mother, or catch him reading a story to Josie over the phone, all the while keeping his grades in the nineties and body fat below fifteen percent.

I’d be lying if he didn’t make me feel a bit guilty about my weekends in bed, eating crisps and crying over fictional rats.

My finger dances over one of the ravens on his chest, watching its wing flutter with each inhale. I like it when he sleeps, because it’s the only time he’s not living for anyone else.

We were up late last night. Delicious flashbacks of Alex’s head between my thighs flit back to me, and then ones of him teaching me to return the favor. Of him looking down at me like I hung the moon in the sky, my name a breathless curse from his lips.

Now I know he whimpers—fucking whimpers—I’m truly screwed.

My body hums with a calm sense of exhaustion, but I can’t sleep. How cold will the house be when I get back there? How quiet will it feel on Christmas Day, when no one is there in the morning and no one kisses me goodnight? When no one will tell me to stop eating chocolate or to not shower for so long?

That thing I used to call freedom, it’s festered into isolation.

A macabre sunrise slips through the burgundy curtains, an inky mess of brown and purple and yellow. Alex’s phone lights up on his side table, buzzing with an incoming call from his mother.

Those lashes flutter open, and for a second I get the calm; the tranquil pool of green that I got for all of last night, free of stress and trauma. He smiles drowsily at me. “You’re beautiful this morning.”

I trace a finger over each of his browse. “You said that yesterday morning, too.”

His voice is low, roughened by sleep. “You just keep on getting better.”

I want to indulge, but instead I tuck a messy lock of hair behind his ear and nod my head toward the table behind him. “It’s your mother.”

“Shit.”

He sits up against the headboard, a sliver of light running over his naked abdomen. I quash the urge to run my tongue along it. He hits Accept and presses the phone to his ear. “Maman. Qu’est-ce qui se passe?…Oh. Is she okay?” He stands up and paces to the window, giving me a chance to admire him in full. Muscular shoulders taper down to a slim waist, the broad lines of his thighs flexing. “Did she? Was Dad home?”

I bite my fingernails and watch him talk, watch him lazily chuck a few clothes into a bag as he does. Pocketing his passport, he swipes two pairs of my underwear from his desk and stuffs them into his jacket pocket, mouthing the word souvenir at me.

He’s going home early, probably for the rest of the year. My stomach sinks. I slip into his bathroom and turn on the shower, trying to catch a hold of my emotions before they spiral.

I have some real abandonment issues for a girl who’s never really been abandoned by anyone in her life.

By the time Alex steps behind me in the thick, eucalyptus-scented steam, I’ve pulled myself together. He takes over from my hands where I massage shampoo into my head, meeting my gaze in the mirror above the sink. He snakes his hand between my legs, tracing the delicate skin while his other hand scratches my scalp. “I licked it so it’s mine.”

He’s ridiculous. I bite down my smile, tipping my head back to meet his shoulder. “How is she?”

His hands return to my sides. “Having a bad day. She gets these voices that tell her she looks wrong. That her nose shape is outdated and she’s too fat to walk the runway and her clothes are out of season. I know it sounds superficial, but it’s torture for her. She’ll be fine; I just hate my sisters being around that sort of ideology.”

I reach my hand up and behind me, scratching my fingers through his hair. “I’m so sorry.”

His next sentence sounds like an apology. “I’m going to fly back for Christmas.”

“Today?”

His fingers work deeper into my scalp, his hard chest against my back. “This morning. It just makes sense for me to. I’m going to go to Charlotte’s parent-teacher conference. I don’t have to, but the alternative is that no one goes, and that’s not fair. She wants to be a doctor one day.”

I stare at the water running down the tiles and swallow. I hate that he’s leaving, but mostly I hate that a twenty-three-year-old is having to go to parents’ evenings for his sisters. “Okay.”

“Vincenzo’s man will keep a watch over you while you’re still here.” He sighs, his chin coming down to rest on my shoulder. His frustration about my stalker is palpable. Every time we think we’re onto something, we aren’t. From vague IP addresses to disabled CCTV, they’re covering every track they leave. “They couldn’t replace a match on the prints in any database, UK or US. This guy has no criminal record.”

His strong fingers move down to my neck, kneading and rubbing the tension away. I’m sure it should be me doing this to him. “It’s possible I don’t even know the stalker. It could just be someone who knows my mum, but not me.”

“We’ll replace them.”

I turn around and wash his hair how he likes. “The police lose interest the second I say the word ‘Sorrowsong.’”

“Doesn’t surprise me. When will you go back?”

“I’m not sure. I don’t think I actually have to be off campus until Christmas Eve.”

He frowns, catching my wrists to stop me from rinsing his hair. “Don’t tell me you’re staying here that long.”

“I might stay a couple of weeks more.”

“Please don’t.”

“Alex.”

“I get things are shitty with what’s happened with your mom, but don’t stay here. Not with Alan here. I’d be so much more relaxed if you left.”

My hands run down his chest and over his abs. He sucks in a lungful of steam, pupils dilating. The look in his eye hasn’t darkened, his shoulders haven’t slumped under the new weight on them since the phone call. I have this desperate urge to make this man the happiest man alive.

“I’ll think about it, I promise.” My knees land on the warm tile at his feet, and I blink up at him with my most innocent look. “Have you got time?”

He leans his head back against the wall and casts his eyes to the ceiling like he’s thanking a god he doesn’t believe in for my existence. His hands lift my wet hair into a ponytail, wrapping it around one fist and pulling it, hard. It’s in contrast to the softness in his eyes. I love that; how rough he is with me all while staring at me like he’d bend the tides or steal the moon to see me happy.

I want him to be my first. I want him so much it’s probably unhealthy, but I don’t care. I want the faces he makes and the noises that leave his mouth and the way he takes control.

I want it all, but we’re on two vastly different levels of experience.

He tips my chin up as I brace my hands on his thighs. “You make me finally understand what people mean when they say life isn’t long enough.”

I read a new notification on my phone, overstimulated by trying to pack my bag. One day I’ll learn how to fold a T-shirt correctly, but for now, I’ll stick to swearing at them and squishing them into the corners of the bag.

_____________________________

From: Alex Corbeau-Green

Subject: Ophelia (verb) my favorite morning activity.

Date: Thursday 27th November 00:12 BST

To: Ophelia Winters

Landed safely and on the way into the city.

Started replaying this morning’s shower in my head when I sat in my seat, and when we touched down at JFK I’d only just got to the part where you sat backward on my shoulders.

_____________________________

Oh my god. I hope they don’t monitor our emails. The IT guy is probably having the time of his life.

I lie back on Alex’s bed between his room key hanging on my keychain and piles of my unfolded clothes. I’ve booked a taxi and a train home for a few days’ time. My mind has been so stuck on last night and this morning that I don’t think it would be safe for me to drive even if I could.

_____________________________

From: Ophelia Winters

Subject: Obedience (noun) compliance with an order, request, or law.

Date: Thursday 27th November 00:39 BST

To: Alex Corbeau-Green

We can recreate the shower again after Christmas.

I’m packing up my bag, ready to leave in a couple of days.

I hope your mum is doing better.

_____________________________

He doesn’t reply, and I try to imagine what he’s doing in New York, sitting in the back of a driver’s car, pulling up outside the Corbeau-Green’s famous brownstone near Central Park. Is there a man standing at the door to open it, or does he just put a key in like a regular person? It’s not a world I’ve ever lived in or even experienced from afar.

Do they have family dinners? Who do the girls eat with when Alex is away, Elise is with her doctors, and Cain is in the office?

Alex has made it clear that the media is the wedge that splinters his mother’s health. That for her, all press is bad press.

I can’t bring myself to publish that document online, not now I know the family it would ruin. I need to replace another way to bring Cain down, and I need to decide whether to do it alone or with Alex.