❝we're reeling through the midnight streets, and i've never felt more alone.❞

❘❘

"WE'LL TAKE OVER THE WORLD!" I cry into the empty street, throwing my arms up. I trip, I fall, I stumble with the sensations that try to take me to my knees.

My entire body is on fire. Crackling, sizzling, sparking. An electric current fizzes at my fingertips, skating through my blood with enough power to jumpstart my brain and send it rocketing to the fucking sky.

I feel alive.

Lost in the veins of a ruined city, knotted hair and tangled thoughts, surrendering to this forever feeling of restlessness. A delirious intoxication.

"Just us," I tease, whirling around to face him with a dizzy grin. "Me and you. We'll take over the world, and it will always be winter."

Not a single breath of hesitation separates us. When Julian hooks an arm around my waist and reels me in, everything boomerangs. My heart ricochets, rattles, rages until I feel my pulse in each fragmented action, in each wasted word, in each shattered thought.

A laugh tumbles free, broken and bruised; I think my feet slip. I think I fall.

But then I'm in his arms, against his body, inhaling him and nothing else. Lips and teeth, tongues and moans, kissing the waves and waves and waves of an endless ocean. His breath melts with mine; his fingers sink into my skin; his words become memories.

Somehow, we slip into synchronous oblivion together; somehow, we start to drown.

I claw for the surface—for air. My nails dig into his neck, and before I can start to breathe again, he's hauling me onto the sidewalk. To the fringe of shadow and light, to the edge of something and nothing.

Somewhere in the haze, I hear myself moan his name. There's something so deliciously raw about the feeling of his skin against mine.

My back hits a brick wall, and another sound tears up my throat in surprise and fervor. In desperation. Fingertips inch up my dress in white-hot needles of pain and pleasure.

Of feeling.

So much feeling.

Every nerve in my body wakens to his touch, and I let it seize me.

The high.

I'm on fire, and it feels breathtaking.

A trail of sparks follows as his fingers sweep below fabric and over skin, hitching my dress up, sliding my panties to the side. I run my hands through his hair, nip at his neck, try to find out why we're in the shadows.

I want everyone to know.

Julian mumbles something raspy and low in my ear before swiveling back. His glassy eyes meet mine; I think he says my name.

And then he's railing into me.

A million sparks flutter beneath my eyelids as I gasp in pleasure. Every pore is open to the new sensations; every breath is new and foreign; every fiber of my being stirs with something singular.

"Julian, Julian...I..." I can't breathe.

Waves of bliss crash over my head with every fierce jerk of his hips. An endless tsunami, sensation after sensation, drowning me in some twisted, cocaine kiss.

It feels like heaven.

Something in the pit of my stomach comes undone. A tangled knot of fire, unraveling and expanding into a blazing inferno of ecstasy.

It feels like hell.

"I'm...I'm..."

Suddenly, all my senses implode. Both worlds collide, and I come crashing down, trembling around his cock, whimpering through the ripples of untamed euphoria. I taste blood, I smell gravel, I hear heavy breathing, I see him, and I feel everything.

Julian grunts, curses, jerks as my heels dig into his back to keep him close, to keep myself warm.

Nirvana is the first thing that I find. It doesn't break through the fog; it merely coexists. In two intertwined strands of sated laziness, it filters through my veins to chase away the high.

My eyelids droop, and I barely hear Julian. "Neva. Neva."

"I'm Neva," I breathe, a gust of cold air billowing between us.

"You are Neva," he lulls me into a calm with a simple, sensual whisper. "Nieve. Snow."

Snow, snow, snow.

A hand caresses my cheeks faintly, ice-cold fingers that remind me of winter, of distant snowstorms. "You are so fucking beautiful."

Beautiful. Like snow.

Like a cocaine orgasm, like a fleeting high, like a blizzard. Unstoppable. Invincible. Strong.

I feel my lips ghost into a smile, a trace of the high revived with the compliment. "Beautiful."

"So fucking beautiful," he says breathlessly before warm lips replace his fingers, worshipping chilled skin like he's willing to brace the deep freeze.

When I open my eyes, his are closed, lashes fluttering ever so slightly as he places flurries of kisses onto my cheeks and descends to my neck.

All that was on fire is gone.

I'm left with nothing but snowflake kisses, dainty and imperfect and cold.

❘❘

**And we move onto part ii...

This was one of the first scenes I wrote for this story. I fell in love with it. Despite that, it was...very hard to write.