“I just don’t know what I would do without you,” he said.

“I know. I feel the same way …”

Omkar cut her reply short. “No, that’s just the thing … You don’t know. You don’t know that you’re all I think about. You don’t know that if my whole life just fell apart, it would all be worth it because nothing else has mattered so much to me in all my life as you matter to me. Aria, you are my yesterday and my today and my tomorrow. And just the thought of you with another man, I can’t stand it.”

He walked toward the door, hoping to find that it could be opened from the inside, despite being locked from the outside. He had thought that Aria had followed him, but she hadn’t. Instead, she had unzipped her backpack on the floor to find the feather that Luke had given her. When she caught up to him, at first she said nothing. She extended the feather toward him, far enough that the texture of it brushed against his arm.

At first, Omkar didn’t understand the symbolism of her gesture. “‘Bring me this hawk feather and I will know it means yes, you can give me your heart. If not, you can keep it.’ Omkar, I am giving you this feather because I am giving my heart to you.” Omkar looked down at the feather before he took it between his fingers. He let the feather fall, wanting instead to feel her between them.

The passion that drove his body toward her would have made resistance impossible, not that it ever existed within her. He ran his hands from the nape of her neck to the base of her spine, gripping her as if torn between one part of him that wanted to preserve her and another that wanted to consume her. When he pushed her against the bookcase, Aria braced herself by gripping the case binding of the books, and when he pulled her away from it, a few of them fell onto the floor. The heaviness of his breath licked the silhouette of her neck before the tip of his tongue could taste it. Beneath the armor of his flesh, the way that he kissed her made the lines that defined them dissipate. She could have forgotten where he ended and she began.

Omkar’s mind wandered to whether or not anyone could see them. But the feeling of her hand against his cheek brought his mind back to her again. Wantonly she grappled with the unyielding fabric and buttons of his jeans. He tore his shirt up and over his head in response to her. Using his own weight to push her up against the bookcase again, he pulled the collar of her shirt just low enough to kiss the peach of her breasts with reverence.