Still here, the names and me. Lately I'm starting to think that's worth very nearly everything.
That's when I notice Felix.
He's in the chair by the cold hearth, where he has apparently been the whole time, one ankle hooked over the opposite knee, his deck loose in one hand and a single card walking knuckle to knuckle, the way it does when he's somewhere else and being polite enough to leave his body in the room with me. I didn't hear him come in. I never do.
I open my mouth to ask how long he's been sitting there.
"Don't," he says, before I get to it. Light, easy, not looking up from the card. "It ruins the trick."
"Felix."
"I folded a corner an hour ago." Now he looks up, and the smile comes up higher on one side than the other, holding there, everything on the low side of it somewhere I still can't follow. He turns his hand over. There's a card face-down on his knee with one corner creased over, a neat little fold, a place kept in a deck that doesn't have pages. "Whatever you're sitting there deciding. I already know which way it breaks. I bet on it an hour ago, and I'm not telling you the odds, because you'd only argue them."
"That bad?"
"Didn't say bad." The card goes still against his knuckle. "Said I folded the corner." And for one second, between the smile and the next breath, there's nothing behind his eyes at all—just the long dark hallway of every future he never makes me walk down. "Tell me when you're ready," he says. "I'll be right here. I'm always right here."
I look at the names in my notebook. I look at Helena's sentence, the one that climbs and climbs and quits before it ever reaches the verb.
"Not yet," I tell him.
"I know." He goes back to the card, knuckle to knuckle, easy as anything. "That's the part I bet on."
40
EVERLY
Felix doesn't ask. He never asks. He just turns his hand over so the cards disappear back into the deck, and then he holds that hand out to me, palm open, no pull in it, the way there's never any pull in him. Only the offer.
I set the notebook aside and cross the room and take it.
He draws me down into his lap, knees to either side of his hips, and the second I settle my weight on him I feel it happen, the thing that only ever happens this close to Felix. The low constant flicker of him goes quiet. All that ceaseless looking-ahead, the branches fanning out and out behind his eyes every waking minute, narrows down to a single line. I feel it through the thread between us, that flutter at the edge of my vision smoothing flat and going still.
"There she is," he murmurs, and it's not the charm. The charm has somewhere to be. This is just Felix, looking at me from inside his own face.
I kiss him. Slow, because there's no spell hunting us tonight and no mark on the back of his hand left to burn and no day spent watching me die in a dozen rooms—just the two of us and an hour I get to give him. He kisses me back like he has all thetime in the world, which is the one lie I'll let him tell, his hands coming up to frame my jaw, thumbs along my cheekbones, gentle in a way the front of him never is.
It builds the way warmth builds, not the way fire does. His mouth opens under mine and I lick into it and feel him sigh, a long one, the kind that comes from a place a person keeps locked. We stay there a long time, just kissing, because there's nowhere either of us has to be and no reason to hurry toward anything. He kisses like he's memorizing it: a slow drag of his lower lip against mine, a pause to breathe me in, then deeper, his tongue sliding against mine until I make a small sound into his mouth and feel him smile against me. His hands move over my back in long unhurried strokes, learning the shape of me by touch, fingertips tracing the line of my spine, the wings of my shoulder blades, the dip of my waist, like he's in no hurry to get anywhere because the getting-there is the part he wants.
I drag my hands up under his shirt and he lets me pull it off him, and then I just look, because I'm allowed to. The lean lines of him, the old silver scar on his shoulder where the spell tore through, the new fading mark on the back of the hand he brings up to my waist. I press my mouth to the scar first. He goes very still.
"Everly," he says, low.
"I know." I sit back enough to pull my own shirt over my head, and his eyes drop, and his hands come up to my breasts like he can't not, thumbs stroking over my nipples until they tighten and a hot pull runs straight down between my thighs. "I'm not going anywhere. That's the point."
He makes a sound I feel more than hear. Then he gets an arm under me and stands, lifting me like I weigh nothing, and carries me the few steps to the bed. He lays me back into it and follows me down, and then he takes his time, real time, the kind the two of us almost never get. He kisses along my throat, down tothe dip of my collarbone, and lower, closing his mouth over one nipple and sucking until I gasp and arch up off the mattress, his other hand cupping my breast, thumb circling slow.
"Look at you," he murmurs against my skin, and all the brightness has gone out of his voice, something lower and rougher left in its place. "Been thinking about this all week. Every branch I looked down, this is the one I kept stopping on."
He works his way across all of me like he's got nowhere in the world he'd rather be. The soft underside of my breast. The line of my ribs, one at a time. The flat of my stomach, where his mouth makes my muscles jump and flutter. He kisses the jut of each hip and the crease of each thigh, easing the last of my clothes down my legs as he goes, until I'm bare under him and shivering and he still isn't where I want him. He drags his lips up the inside of one thigh, slow, then the other, breathing warm against me without quite touching, until I'm squirming and reaching for him.
"Patience," he says, and I can hear the smile in it. "I'm getting there. I want to feel you fall apart first." Then he settles between my thighs and looks up the length of my body at me, both hands spread warm over my hips.
"Tell me," he says.
"Your mouth." I'm already shameless about it, because thank God, this is the one room in this whole watched house where I get to be. "Felix. Your mouth, now."
He gives it to me. He settles his mouth over my pussy and licks up the length of me before his tongue finds my clit and circles it, slow, and I gasp and my hips lift off the bed into his mouth. One finger pushes into me, then a second, curling, and I fist my hands in the sheets and let my head drop back.
