Fusion by Nicole Williams Read Free Book Online

nightmare was unfolding now was intense. I ached from wanting to touch her, ached like a disease had worked its way into my bones.
    Unable to fight it any longer, my hand moved towards hers, just to brush it ever so lightly, I assured myself.
    Myself was not good at assuring.
    I knew once my skin connected with hers, even for a heartbeat, I’d be a lost cause for skin-to-skin celibacy. I’d want to weave my fingers through hers, curl up beside her until my body ran against every inch of hers, wrapping both my arms around her until I couldn’t determine where I ended and she began.
    Shaking my head in an attempt to calm myself, I bit my fist too, hoping physical pain would deter me from this line of crazy thought. It was futile of course; nothing short of a team of Immortals intent on ending my eternity would be painful enough to stop me from putting idea into action.
    “Patrick‌…‌”
    If I wasn’t gaping at her, I wouldn’t have believed the word had come from her mouth. I waited for more, another word or for her to stir, but nothing came. Nothing other than a slow forming, long staying smile.
    Did she know I was here?
    I doubted it, because if she did, she wouldn’t still be asleep. She’d throw herself on me in either a ball of excitement or a ball of terror for being in her bedroom when my bar studded room was a few dozen miles away.
    So she was dreaming about me.
    My smile managed to jack higher, although I knew from the levels of smug I could feel elevating, it was tilted higher on one side. My Emma was having lewd, pure, amorous, or I-didn’t-care-what-else dreams of me, and I wanted to dance an Irish jig.
    To be a fly on the walls of that dream world‌…‌
    I heard the footsteps coming down the hall, the heavy clopping reminiscent of a Clydesdale trotting down a cobblestone road telling me it was a purple steel-toed boot-wearing culprit. Julia was going to be here soon.
    Which meant I’d have to leave my smiling, dreaming of me, sleeping girl soon.
    “I love you, Emma Scarlett,” I whispered, going against every instinct in my body and brushing the back of my thumb down her arm.
    And then I was gone, as silently and suddenly as I’d appeared.
    At the end of the day, or the end of the night, a felon belonged behind bars.

CHAPTER TWO
    “That hairnet looks mighty fine on you, Hayward,” Mr. Rogers yelled across the kitchen at me as he slopped something of a medium gray consistency into a serving tray.
    You see, when it came to jail food, everything was some shade of gray. Where the geniuses that created the menus got creative was in the consistency. We inmates were blessed with no, medium, heavy, and brick-like consistency for variety.
    If the time served wasn’t deterrent enough to stay out of trouble on the other side, flashbacks of the food would be enough to keep any man from stealing a subcompact again. In my Immortal, no real need to eat opinion, no food was better than god-awful food. I might have cooked the crap, but I wasn’t dumb or desperate enough to eat it.
    It helped I was able to gorge on a rainbow of deliciousness at one of my three sisters-in-laws’ every night.
    “If I wasn’t positive you’re lashing out only because your receding hairline no longer requires a hair net, I’d be dishing out a tongue lashing comeback right about now,” I hollered back, putting my back into stirring the gray slop of a brick-like consistency‌—‌soup, is what it was called on the menu‌—‌in the metal vat deep enough to hold a man.
    Mr. Rogers chuckled the creepy kind of laugh. The kind that schizophrenic mass murderers emitted throughout a horror movie. “You got yourself a woman waiting for you on the other side?” he asked at the conclusion of that spine spasming chuckle.
    I was caught off guard for a moment, which didn’t happen often. Mr. Rogers had been my cellmate for nearly four months, and he was about as talkative as a corpse, and‌—‌on the rare occasion he did open