The page shook in his hands. Frost had crawled across half of it. His breath was ragged, and his pulse was hammering beneath his skin. He stood beneath the ancient tree with a crumpled piece of paper and his discipline in tatters, and he waited for her to speak.
He looked up from the page.
Phoebe was crying.
Not the composed, single-tear kind he'd brushed from her cheek in the wings on opening night. The real kind. Messy. Her mascara was ruined, and dark tracks ran down her cheeks. Her mouth was open behind both hands pressed over it, her chest heaving with ugly, honest sobs. Not a single part of her was being performed.
The community was watching. Thorne could feel them at the edges of his awareness. Ember was openly weeping into Kaelor's chest, her hands fisted in the flour-dusted front of his shirt. Kaelor's warmth was radiating so fiercely that the frost nearest them had melted into small dark pools on the stone. Ivy stood with her arms crossed and her hazel-green eyes bright. Elder Mira stood beneath the Pine's canopy with her hands folded over her walking stick and a look on her ancient face that said she had seen this before, and it never stopped being sacred.
Thorne could not look away from Phoebe long enough to see any of them clearly.
He folded the page carefully along the original creases, the frost crackling faintly as the paper bent. He put it back in his pocket and stepped closer.
The frost on the ground between them was already thinning where her warmth reached it, his cold and her heat meeting in the space between their bodies the way it had met all season.In doorways. On walks. Across sheet music. In his bed with the wool blanket pulled over them. The boundary narrowing each time. A half-step becoming no step. A brushed hand becoming held. Professional distance becoming the absence of distance. Until the gap was nothing and the contrast was everything.
He reached for her hands.
She dropped them from her mouth before he got there and met him halfway. Her warm fingers closed around his cold ones with a grip that said she was done waiting for him to close the distance. The contact hit him like a fall from a great height. It wasn’t the gentle contrast of a brush over sheet music or the familiar heat of her body against his in the dark. This was the relief of a man who had been holding his breath for days and had just been given air.
Frost bloomed where their skin met. He did not suppress it. Silver-white crystals formed across her knuckles and his, delicate and involuntary, lacing their joined hands in visible proof. His cold answered her warmth, her warmth answered his cold, the contrast that had never been opposition but completion.
"Phoebe, I can not tell you when I started loving you, because I do not remember a time when I did not. It was not because the bond chose you. It was because I chose you.”
The bond had clicked in three seconds of her body on his and told him she was someone hecouldlove. What happened after that: the tea, the walks, the frost on the rail, and the terrible poem folded in his pocket, all of that had been his. His choices. His reach. His.He was choosing her now. Out loud and in the open. With his voice cracked, his hands shaking, and frost spreading from his boots across the frozen ground.
“Wherever you go, I will gladly follow. Phoebe, will you be my mate?"
The question hung beneath the Pine. The community held its breath. The bioluminescence pulsed slow and gold through the ancient needles. The snow fell. The three moons watched.
Phoebe answered, “Yes.”
twenty-two
. . .
"Yes,"she said again.
Her voice was shaking.
"Yes, I want to be your mate." Her voice cracked onmateand she didn't fix it.
"Yes," she said again, raw and wrecked. "That's my answer. That's been my answer since you caught me on the stage floor and I lied about being fine and you let me lie because you were too decent to push, and I have been lying to both of us every day since then and I'm done. I'm done."
Thorne’s hands found her face. Both palms cradled her jaw, his fingers spreading along her cheekbones, and his thumbs brushing the tears off her skin. The frost bloomed where he touched her in delicate lacework across her jaw, her cheeks, and the line of her temple where his fingertips pressed. Silver-white crystals formed on her warm, dark skin, visible to every person watching. His mark. Their private language written across her in front of the whole world.
He kissed her.
The community erupted into a swell of cheering and calling out that broke the held breath of the clearing like a wave breaking against a shore.
Phoebe kissed him back with her hands fisted in the front of his uniform. The same way they'd been fisted on the stage floor the night he caught her. Her knuckles white in the dark fabric, her grip anchored in the solid wall of his chest, and his heartbeat under her hands.
Except that night she'd been falling. Caught mid-disaster. The rigging coming down and his body around hers, and the three seconds that changed everything. She wasn't falling now. She was standing. Choosing. Her mouth against his with peppermint and frost on her tongue. It was the taste of home, and she was done pretending it wasn't.
Thorne pulled back just enough to press his forehead against hers. His breath came cold against her flushed mouth, each exhale visible between them, crystallizing in the narrow space between his lips and hers. His hands were still on her face, and frost was still spreading across her skin in slow, lace-thin patterns she could feel forming like a second pulse.
"I will pack tonight," he said. Quiet. Just for her, though the clearing was close enough to hear. "We can leave on the next transport to Earth."
The words landed wrong in her chest.
