I slid my fingers down to flick his nose. “Yet you used to leave me buttons like a magpie.”
“Buttons are not as beautiful as flowers,” he tutted, recapturing my hand and pressing it back to his face.
“Some buttons are.”
“The shiny ones?” I could feel his laughter under my palm.
“The ones on Adelaide’s face.” His smile dropped. “Or ones made from pearls.” Withdrawing my hand, I presented both wrists to reveal mismatched buttons: one crinkled and small, the other larger and rounded.
His hold left my jaw to cradle my wrists, fingers tracing the buttons’ ridges as he stared down at them, mouth agape. “You kept them?”
“I kept them all,” I confessed, mourning the overflowing box I’d left by my cot, unable to bring it with me. I’d told Favia she could repurpose them for the guild. Perhaps they would adorn the shirt of a crusiax or the sleeve of a trader—a button in every continent. I would have liked to have met a stranger one day, in the deserts of Saile, or the forests of Devern, and say, “Oh! That’s my brass button! The one with the engraved waterlily. It looksrather fine, don’t you think?”But where we were headed, there would be no need for buttons.
Demetri lifted them and kissed each button, one after the other. Though his lips never touched my flesh, I shivered all the same.
“So, other than bringing me flowers,” I continued, more breathless than before, “though I much prefer buttons, what else would have been different?”
Eyes lingering on my sleeves, his fingers skirted upwards, knitting with mine. We turned, rising to a kneel, knee to knee, chest to chest, our hands trapped between us. “I would have asked you to marry me,” he said, lowering his forehead to rest against mine. “In the meadow, surrounded by daisies…or bloody buttons.”
I laughed, the sound a little too wet.
“I would have wed you,” he continued, “and watched as you grew plump as a hen on pastries and bread. Gods be damned, I would have cherished every inch of you.” He unlaced one hand to curl around my waist, tugging me closer. “I would have lain with you each night in a warm cot that smelled only of us. You’d chastise me, of course, for the laundering. The sheets would be drenched, night after night, sodden through from where I made you come apart again”—his hand slipped lower, grazing my rear—“and again”—fingers found the tuck of my skirts, pressing into a place that sent a rolling jolt of pleasure straight through me—“and again.”
My breath became a shallow, useless thing, chest rising and falling as though I’d just ascended the Grand Templum’s mighty west steps.
“I would have beheld your belly as it swelled with our child. Massaged your feet by the hearth whenever you pleased.”
A single tear breached my defence, rolling down my cheek. Rather than stay frozen in stone, like the First’s, it fell ontoDemetri’s hand, wetting his skin. He glanced down at the tiny puddle, its surface catching the sconcelight.
“I would have spent every day as if it were our last, each turn a gift.” Mouth moving against my temple, he spoke into my hair. “I would have even let your fucking mother live with us, if that’s what it took.” I tried to pull free, aiming to swat at his chest, but his grip was a vice.
“Though you’d have to put an end to that nasty little habit she had…whacking me with a broom every time I put one tiny toe out of line.”
I narrowed my eyes. “You set fire to her bed.”
“Perhaps two toes, then.”
One tear opened the gates to the rest—they were relentless, but so was my smile—the salt of them slipping between my lips and adding salt to the wine.
I closed my eyes, lost to the memory of her.
“Ashara.” My name was a command. I resisted, if only for a heartbeat.
“Ashara. Fucking look at me.” I opened them and they locked with his, the hickory brown smouldering in the dim.
“A tether exists between us,” he said with the same kind of certainty as the pious recite their dues. “It has drawn us back together, like a thread of fate itself.”
I was on my back in an instant.
Pinned between Demetri and the floor, his weight bore down on me. One of his hands cradled the back of my neck, whilst his other arm banded my waist. His body was hard, surprisingly so, the softness of youth dispelled by a crusiax’s training and battle. My breasts, aching and heavy, moulded to his chest as they’d done to the ashlar. It hurt, but not enough. It should hurt, it should be punishing; it shouldn’t just feelgood, not with what awaited us once the sun crested the easterly ridge.
The smooth fibres of my bodice burned like pits’ yarn, their friction rubbing my flesh raw. I clawed at his shirt, pulling it loose from his breeches. He groaned, wasting no time to thrust the hard bulk of him into the softness of me, still padded by cumbersome fabric. I gasped all the same.
Curls falling forward and curtaining my cheeks, he loomed over me. He stayed like that, the stiff swell of him pressed between my thighs, looking down at me with dark, hungry eyes for what felt like an age. The moment suspended, hanging between us with nothing but our ragged breaths to punctuate it.
“Demetri?” I breathed, syllables thick.
Those hungry eyes slammed shut. “Don’t. Don’t say my name like that whilst you’re pinned beneath me. Don’t say it again until I ask, or else I won’t be able to go as slow as I need to for the next part. Do you understand?” His chest rattled as I lay sprawled open, legs aching with the strain. A wooden table with leather straps flashed in my mind’s eye, only to disintegrate to ash once his teeth nipped my lip.
