Unravel Me: The Juliette Chronicles Book 2

it?”
    “ See it?”
    But Warner is already on his feet, unbuttoning his pants and I’m wondering what could possibly be happening, worried I’m being tricked into some new sick game of his when he stops. Catches the horrified look on my face. Says, “Don’t worry, love. I’m not getting naked, I promise. It’s just another tattoo.”
    “Where?” I ask, frozen in place, wanting and not wanting to look away.
    He doesn’t answer.
    His pants are unzipped but hanging low on his waist. His boxer-briefs are visible underneath. He tugs and tugs on the elastic band of his underwear until it sits just below his hipbone.
    I’m blushing through my hairline.
    I’ve never seen such an intimate area of any boy’s body before, and I can’t make myself look away. My moments with Adam were always in the dark and always interrupted; I never saw this much of him not because I didn’t want to, but because I never had a chance to. And now the lights are on and Warner’s standing right in front of me and I’m so caught, so intrigued by the cut of his frame. I can’t help but notice the way his waist narrows into his hips and disappears under a piece of fabric. I want to know what it would be like to understand another person without those barriers.
    To know a person so thoroughly, so privately.
    I want to study the secrets tucked between his elbows and the whispers caught behind his knees. I want to follow the lines of his silhouette with my eyes and the tips of my fingers. I want to trace rivers and valleys along the curved muscles of his body.
    My thoughts shock me.
    There’s a desperate heat in the pit of my stomach I wish I could ignore. There are butterflies in my chest I wish I could explain away. There’s an ache in my core that I’m unwilling to name.
    Beautiful.
    He’s so beautiful .
    I must be insane.
    “It’s interesting,” he says. “It feels very . . . relevant, I think. Even though it was written so long ago.”
    “What?” I rip my eyes away from his lower half, desperately trying to keep my imagination from drawing in the details. I look back at the words tattooed onto his skin and focus this time. “Oh,” I say. “Yes.”
    It’s 2 lines. Font like a typewriter inked across the very bottom of his torso.
    h   e   l   l    i   s    e   m   p   t   y  
a   n   d    a   l   l    t   h   e     d   e   v   i   l   s    a   r   e    h   e   r   e
    Yes. Interesting. Yes. Sure.
    I think I need to lie down.
    “Books,” he’s saying, pulling his boxer-briefs up and rezipping his pants, “are easily destroyed. But words will live as long as people can remember them. Tattoos, for example, are very hard to forget.” He buttons his button. “I think there’s something about the impermanence of life these days that makes it necessary to etch ink into our skin,” he says. “It reminds us that we’ve been marked by the world, that we’re still alive. That we’ll never forget.”
    “Who are you?”
    I don’t know this Warner. I’d never be able to recognize this Warner.
    He smiles to himself. Sits down again. Says, “No one else will ever need to know.”
    “What do you mean?”
    “I know who I am,” he says. “That’s enough for me.”
    I’m silent a moment. I frown at the floor. “It must be great to go through life with so much confidence.”
    “You are confident,” he says to me. “You’re stubborn and resilient. So brave. So strong. So inhumanly beautiful. You could conquer the world.”
    I actually laugh, look up to meet his eyes. “I cry too much. And I’m not interested in conquering the world.”
    “That,” he says, “is something I will never understand.” He shakes his head. “You’re just scared. You’re afraid of what you’re unfamiliar with. You’re too worried about disappointing people. You stifle your own potential,” he says, “because of what you think others expect of you—because you still follow the rules you’ve been given.” He looks at me, hard. “I wish you wouldn’t.”
    “I wish you’d stop expecting me to use my power to kill people.”
    He shrugs. “I never said you had to. But it will happen along the way; it’s an inevitability in war. Killing is statistically impossible to avoid.”
    “You’re joking, right?”
    “Definitely not.”
    “You can always avoid killing people, Warner. You avoid killing them by not going to war.”
    But he grins, so brilliantly, not even paying attention.