All Chapters of The thought of not you: Chapter 11 - Chapter 17

The heavy, suffocating silence of the bedroom settled over Yolande like a shroud the moment the air fractured and Lucian vanished. She lay perfectly still on her back, her fingers still curled into empty fistfuls of her quilt, her breath catching in her throat. Her lips were swollen, tingling with a persistent, electric heat that refused to fade, and the heavy, damp ache between her thighs pulsed with an agonizing rhythm.She stared up at the dark ceiling, her mind spinning through a chaotic loop. He had just disappeared. Not walked away, not slipped out the window, but vanished into thin air right out from under her touch."The alcohol," she whispered into the dark, her voice trembling as she pressed the heels of her hands against her eyes. "It has to be the wine. That crimson wine... Shaw said it was strong. I’m hallucinating. I’m completely, utterly drunk."It was the only logical explanation her analytical mind could grasp. The massive ancient mansion, the telepathic looks between

"Don't answer it," Maria panicked from the wall, her voice cracking. "Yola, seriously, do not answer that. She knows your voice. She’s going to know you're freaked out.""If I don't answer, she’ll call the cops," Yolande muttered. Her brain was misfiring, trying to handle a breakup, a traumatized best friend, and an impossible man all at once. She looked up at Lucian, her voice dropping to an embarrassed, desperate whisper. "You need to calm down. Whatever you're doing to the air, stop it. If she hears a weird buzz or the call drops, she’s going to drive over here."Lucian stared at her, his jaw clenching. He clearly hated the phone, and he looked incredibly frustrated that a tiny piece of plastic had this much power over her. But seeing her look that stressed, he closed his eyes and took a slow, heavy breath.The suffocating, weird pressure in the alley immediately vanished. The freezing temperature leveled out, and the normal, boring sounds of suburban traffic leaked back into the s

The quiet in the bedroom was no longer the freezing, clinical silence of an interrogation room. It had transformed into something thick, pressurized, and impossibly warm. Lucian’s face remained buried in the crook of her neck, his breath hitting her skin in deep, measured cycles that felt like the steady rhythm of a furnace. Yolande stood between his knees as he sat on the cedar chest, her fingers still woven into the dark, unruly thickness of his hair. She could feel the hard, unyielding ridge of his collarbones beneath her palms—a skeletal structure that felt denser, heavier, and far more permanent than any human anatomy she had ever palpated during her rotations at the hospital.Slowly, with a deliberate, trembling restraint, Lucian pulled his head back. His obsidian eyes were wide, the pupils so dilated that the dark irises were almost entirely swallowed, save for a thin, glowing ring of luminescent gold that rimmed the edges. He didn't let go of her wrists. His long, pale fingers