Maybe I would have been. I still wasn’t sure.
What a long time ago that seemed to be.
I picked up the clippers. They were rusty, but they still worked. I set to work on the bushes.
After a time, footsteps approached
“You look very silly.” I could hear the smile in Tisaanah’s voice.
“This?” I shrugged my shoulders, making the blanket that was wound up to my ears bounce. “This is practical.”
“You look like… a sleeping worm.”
“A sleeping worm?”
“The kind that makes silk. When they, you know…” She flailed her arms around herself, and I turned to stare flatly back at her.
“Was that intended to represent… a cocoon?”
“A cocoon. Exactly.”
“Ascended above, what a poet you are.”
She settled beside me, shooting me a glare. “Well, you tell me that in Thereni, and we’ll see if you’re a better one.”
Fair enough.
I closed a handful of dead petals in my hand and conjured fire, reducing them to ash. Even that small fragment of magic was… difficult. Like it met resistance within my veins.
“Look at this, Tisaanah.” I held up dead blossoms and leaves, shaking my fist. “This is a travesty.”
“I think the garden is more beautiful this way. It is…free. A sign that it can all flourish even if there isn’t a lonely, cranky man watching over it all day.”
Ouch.
“That theoretical lonely, cranky man wouldn’t appreciate you invalidating his life’s work.”
“And what if he isn’t so lonely and cranky anymore?”
“He will be cranky until the ends of time, I’m sorry to report.”
Tisaanah let out a low chuckle. Through many layers of blanket, I felt the weight of her head against my shoulder. “Part of his charm, I suppose,” she murmured. “But as long as he isn’t so lonely.”
My hands stilled. I dropped the clippers, and wound Tisaanah’s fingers in mine instead. An easy trade to make. I suppose it was back then, too.
No, I wasn’t lonely anymore. Though, “lonely” was a weak word for what I had been. My aloneness had simply become a stagnant part of me, like a missing limb. I hadn’t realized I was craving connection until I found it again. And I hadn’t realized how much I feared losing it until it almost happened.
“How are you feeling?” I asked.
“Better. You?”
“Better.”
I glanced at her. Her brow was furrowed in a look that I knew very well.
“What?” I asked.
She blinked at me. “What?” she repeated, and I pressed my finger on the familiar wrinkle of her brow.
“What’s this for?”
She looked down at her hands and frowned.
“No magic,” I murmured, and she shook her head.
“Nothing.”
“Give it time. You died a few days ago.” Just saying those words out loud made me shudder. My lip curled into a sneer, of its own accord. “No matter the cost, I’m glad that monster is gone.”
Tisaanah nodded. Still, she went silent, and I knew her well enough to know that gears were turning, turning, turning inside her head.
I kissed her on the forehead, inhaling her citrus scent.
“We have time,” I said again.
“We have time,” she echoed, and I knew she was trying to make herself believe it.
We had time.
For so much of my life, time had been a curse — something to be endured rather than cherished. Now? Now I reveled in it. We have time. The most wonderful statement. A fucking gift.
We did everything the long way. That night, we made a ridiculously complex dinner, more food than the two of us would ever be able to eat, because we had time. We ate it over the course of several hours, between more than a few glasses of wine and stretches of long, meandering conversation. Afterwards, we stretched out in front of the fireplace and read, exchanging stories with so many interruptions that it took us hours to get through a few pages.
That was fine. We had time.
It was late by the time we made it to the bedroom. Tisaanah had risen and leaned over my chair, giving me one, two, three deepening kisses, the kind that blurred the line between a question and a demand. I scooped her up in my arms and carried her to the bedroom. We fell on the bed together, Tisaanah’s arms around my neck, her kisses deep and hungry. The minute we hit the bed, she had yanked off my shirt, and was starting on my trousers, when I pressed her down to the bed with enough pressure to stop her, giving her a coy smirk.
“Why are you in such a rush?”
I stretched out beside her instead, leaning down to kiss her again. Not the desperate, hurried kisses. Slow, our lips and tongues moving over each other with gentle caresses. When she tried to push back, deepen it further, I broke away and laughed.
“We have time, Tisaanah. Isn’t that terrific? We can take all.” My fingers trailed down her throat, in feather-light touches. “Damn.” Her collarbone. Lower, to the edge of the fabric of her shirt. “Night.” Unbutton. And another long, slow kiss.
She let out a raspy chuckle. “Why?”
“Why?”
“If we want something…” Another kiss. “…Why put it off?”
I pulled away and cocked an eyebrow. “Want ‘something?’ What is this ‘something?’” I continued down the buttons of her shirt, slowly. I kissed her throat, lower to her collarbone. I wanted to feel every muscle beneath her skin, the texture of every scar.
“Besides,” I murmured, “no one can claim you’ve been dissatisfied the last few days. And it’s nice to finally get the chance to take my time.”
The last button. Her shirt fell open. I pulled away enough to look at her. Moonlight streaming in from the window fell over her body, breasts peaked from the cold or arousal or both, silver falling over her dual-tone skin. Her hair was messy, framing her face, and she looked at me with such unabashed hunger, her lips parted, eyes half-closed.
Her legs parted, just a little, a challenge in her eyes.
Fuck.
I had to fight for my own self control. But I touched only the inside of her knee, in a light, barely-there caress running up the inside of her thigh. Stopping just short of where I knew she wanted me to be.
She let out a rough exhale of frustration. I smothered it with my mouth. Her lips were soft and ready. She didn’t want to break the kiss when I moved down again, lowering my head to her breast, raising a moan to her lips — fuck, that sound.
My fingers kept tracing her thighs. Down. Up. Still not high enough. Her hips lifted slightly.
“What, Tisaanah?”
She let out a rough laugh. “You are cruel.”
“Cruel? I have a theory that you like this. Besides…” And finally, I let my touch trail higher, lightly, so lightly, running up the wet heat at the apex of her thighs. Her hips bucked, and she let out a sharp breath.
“…I’ll make it up to you,” I murmured, against her lips, and slid my fingers inside of her.
The moan wasn’t silent this time. Tisaanah’s hands grabbed fistfuls of the sheets. She clenched around me. And now I had to actively hold myself back, keeping my touch slow, too slow for what she wanted, reminding myself to be patient.
We have time.
Maybe I was cruel.
Tisaanah let out a breathless, frustrated laugh, her head thrown back.
What a sound.
“You’re not being a very good communicator tonight,” I murmured, and in response she muttered something in Thereni.
“That’s not in my vocabulary. You’ll have to teach me those words.”
A breathless laugh. “Never. It would corrupt you.”
My hand withdrew, and Tisaanah’s eyes snapped to me. Her palm pressed to the bare skin of my abdomen. I kissed her, again, again, our lips barely parting. And she let out a groan when my hand moved back down her thigh.
“I hate you,” she breathed.
>
“I think you like me very much, actually.”
My fingertips — just fingertips — still caressed her, up and down the length of her body, lingering on the slender vee of her abdomen, the peak of her breasts, the tender skin of her throat. And I just kissed her, and kissed her, and kissed her.
I wanted her. My own body was straining against my self-control, every nerve and muscle calling out for more of her. But the deprivation was a game, at this point.
We had time.
My fingertips brushed her core, just barely, and Tisaanah let out a little whimper.
“What is it, Tisaanah? If you want something, you’ll have to ask for it.”
Her eyes opened, looked directly into mine. They were glazed and shining with want, and, for a moment, something deeper than that.
“I want you,” she murmured.
Those words lit up a primal force in me.
Fuck it.
Her mouth crashed against mine, our slow kisses turning ferocious, feral. She bolted up and pushed me down onto the bed, the full length of her body pressing against me. Her heat aligned with me, and we were so close, one tilt of her hips, away from being joined.
She paused there, eyes looking into mine. A smirk twisted her lips, a spark of satisfaction in her eyes.
“Victory,” she whispered.
And then she pressed down over me, and I slid into her, and nothing existed except for this, for her, for our desire to claim each other. And just as I had teased her with all her silent pleas before, now I listened just as carefully so I could meet them, every shift of her body, every roll of her hips. I could measure the world in nothing but the sounds of her quickening breath or the throb of her pulse. I could revel in the way that here, we were both raw and unfiltered and utterly ourselves.
But then, it had always been difficult to be anything but, with her.
Tisaanah clenched around me and pulled me to her in a long, deep kiss. When it broke, I opened my eyes and looked at her, silhouetted by the moonlight, eyes closed, lost in pleasure.
I paused.
I didn’t know I was speaking until the words were already coming out of my mouth.
“What if this was always us?”
Her eyelids fluttered open, and she gave me a coy smirk. “This? I would not object.”
I shook my head, suddenly serious. “I mean, all of it. The way we’ve been living for the last week. Just you and me. Here. What if it wasn’t just for a couple of weeks? What if it was our lives?”
She went still, giving me a long stare that I couldn’t quite decipher.
Self consciousness fell over me. I didn’t even know what I was trying to say. Even if I did, the words, as always, got tangled somewhere between my thoughts and my lips.
“Do you ever think about that?” I asked. “After you’re done conquering empires and freeing nations and saving the damned world. Have you ever thought about…”
Have you ever thought about what it might be like to be with me forever?
Ascended above, what a stupid question.
But suddenly, I couldn’t not ask. I realized, all at once, that I did think about it. I thought about it constantly. It was insidious, the dreams slipping in so slowly I hadn’t even realized it was happening until right here, in this moment.
For a long time, I hadn’t thought of a future at all. But now, I couldn’t conjure a vision for one that didn’t have her in it.
She was still giving me that look. I lowered my eyes.
What was I even asking her? And what did I expect her to say? It had been a few months. And there were still so many other things that would be at the forefront of her mind.
“Never mind,” I muttered. “I just—”
But she tipped my head back, so that I was looking directly into her eyes again. “I love you,” she whispered. She gave me a long kiss. The rhythm of her hips resumed, and my thoughts unraveled, and it was not so difficult to discard the self-consciousness of what I had asked her, and what she had not said in response, as she fell back onto the sheets and we lost ourselves in each other again, and again, and again.
Chapter Sixty-One
Tisaanah
For the ten-thousandth time, my palms were empty.
Everything inside of me still felt eerily, terrifyingly quiet. I couldn’t conjure my silver butterflies. I couldn’t feel the emotions around me. Couldn’t so much as ripple the water.
I heard footsteps behind me.
“Sneaking out to work in the middle of the night,” Max said. “Something about this is very familiar.”
I couldn’t even make myself answer. My hands clenched.
“Give it time,” he murmured. “It’s still barely been—”
“It’s been almost two weeks.” I peered over my shoulder. “I don’t understand. It is one thing for Reshaye to leave me. But why would it take everything with it?”
“It didn’t. You need to let yourself recover, Tisaanah.”
“I do not have time.”
Despite myself, my eyes were beginning to sting. The anxiety had been a constant companion these last two weeks, but it had been so easy to simply let it fall to the back of my mind and look away. There was, after all, so much good to cover it up.
Max and I spent our days sleeping and fucking and eating, joking in the garden or sparring in the fields. I was just… so deliriously happy. I was drunk on it. Drunk on Max, and the way every time he responded to one of my deeply-unfunny jokes with that huff of a laugh, it suffused my whole body with warmth.
Now, the shame hit me all at once. Our two weeks were nearly up. My magic was nowhere to be found. And there were people out there, suffering — my people — while I rolled around in a garden, selfishly content.
“I should have been trying harder,” I said. “This whole time. I should have been trying to find out why.”
A flicker of hurt crossed Max’s face, and I immediately regretted the callousness of my words.
We hadn’t spoken again of the question he asked me several nights ago. But it was still there, beneath our every interaction.
Do you ever think about it? he had asked me.
What a ridiculous question.
Of course I thought about it. How could I not? I had never been so happy as I was here, with him. I craved this. But every time I let my imagination extend further, to that soft dream of a future, it was so quickly followed by a wave of darker, more complicated feelings. Guilt. Shame. And above all, fear.
“I can’t sit here and be happy,” I choked out, “when there are so many people waiting for me. People who did not get the chances I did.”
The hurt shifted to understanding.
Max settled down beside me in the grass and withdrew a pocket knife. He opened the blade and, before I could speak, drew it across his palm. Then he offered the knife to me.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“Supposedly, we draw from the same magic. And we’ve proven that you can draw from it. So if your magic isn’t working, then try using mine.”
I hesitated. “What if I hurt you?”
He gave me a wry smile. “Realistically, I think it’s more likely that nothing will happen.”
This seemed ridiculous. But then again, he’d managed to bring me back from the dead with this, and I was desperate. So I took the blade, and cut open my own palm, and pressed it to his.
At first, nothing happened.
But I forced my mind to still, reached out for him the same way I would reach out for minds and emotions with my magic. Everything felt dull and off-color, like one of my senses had been hacked away. But…
No.
There.
I felt it — what? I wasn’t even sure. Something. And it felt like him, a magic now so foreign and familiar at once, rolling and melding with mine like a distant, approaching storm.
Max drew in a sudden breath between clenched teeth. His fingers tightened around mine. Our hands were trembling.
It didn’t f
eel the same as it once had, but it was something. And maybe it would be enough. It had to be.
I lifted my other palm. And I whispered to the magic around me as I had a million times before, even though it was more slippery and rebellious than the magic I had wielded.
Still. It responded. Yes. Yes, this would work. I knew it. This had to be the key —
The thing that rolled from my hand was barely even a butterfly. It was, in fact, more like a moth… or a fly. It was weak and shuddering, dissolving into the air before it barely even made it past my eye line. No… I could save it, I could—
I made a final, desperate push.
But then Max drew in a sharp breath and yanked his hand away. My concentration snapped. My weak butterfly dissolved and fell to the earth, disappearing into nothingness before it hit the ground.
I barely saw it. I was just looking at Max, who let out a low hiss as he rubbed his hand. My heart fell.
“I hurt you.”
“It’s fine. It’s nothing.”
“It’s not…” I pulled his hand to me. The shallow slit across his palm was now black and purple. There wasn’t much of it — not enough to spread beyond the very edges of the wound. Still. Too much. This shouldn’t have happened.
A lump rose in my throat.
“I shouldn’t have done this.”
“It’s nothing, Tisaanah. It’s still just a scratch.”
“I don’t care. We are not doing that again.”
He said nothing, his lips pressed together.
I stood and paced, my arms around myself.
“It will come back,” he said, quietly. “Give it time. We’ll find a solution.”
“We do not have time.” They do not have time.
“You can’t rush this. It’s not the sort of thing you can bang your head against until it works. But something will give. You know I’m too cynical to say it if I didn’t believe it was the truth.”
Despite myself, a smile twisted one side of my mouth. Cynical, he calls himself. At first, maybe it was easy to think he was, with his sarcasm and acidic wit. But over time, I realized that Max had never been a cynic. He was a wounded optimist trying desperately to return to his natural state.
Children of Fallen Gods (The War of Lost Hearts Book 2) Page 41
