He learns me the way he learns everything—the catch of my breath, the lift of my hips, finding wherever I want him most—except there's no calculation in it tonight, just attention, justFelix paying out everything he has on the one bet he never loses. He lifts his mouth just enough to speak, his breath hot against my slick skin. "That's it," he says, low and wrecked. "So wet for me. Don't hold it back—I want to feel you come on my tongue."
Then his mouth is back on me before I can answer, and he works my clit with the flat of his tongue, pulses his fingers deep inside me, and the pleasure climbs warm and steady and full. When it crests I don't scream. I just shake, my whole body drawing tight and then breaking soft, his name coming out of me on one long unraveling breath while he holds me through it, his mouth gentle against me the whole way down.
I come down slow. He kisses the inside of my thigh, the jut of my hip, back up to my mouth, and I taste myself on him and pull him closer.
"Up here," I tell him. "I want to be on top of you when you're inside me."
"Demanding," he says, but the smile he gives me is soft clear through, and he rolls onto his back and takes me with him, easy, like it's the most natural thing in the world. I straddle him again. I reach down and take his cock in my hand—hard, hot, his hips lifting into my grip on a quiet exhale—and I line him up and sink down onto him slow, taking him an inch at a time, the stretch of him filling me by degrees until he's seated all the way inside me, and we both go still for a second, just breathing.
"There you are," I say back to him, because turnabout is fair.
His hands settle on my thighs, not gripping, just holding. "Set the pace," he says. "It's your hour."
So I do. I ride him slow and deep, feeling him drag thick inside me with every roll of my hips, watching his face the whole way—the way his jaw goes loose, the way his eyes stay open and on mine like he refuses to miss a second of it, the way that quiet in him through the thread goes deeper and deeper the longer I move. There's no urgency in it. There's no future in it. There'sjust his body under mine and the heat building back up low in my belly and the bond between us humming one single steady note, the futures all collapsed down to this, to here, to now.
"You feel that?" I ask him, because I want him to say it.
"Yeah." His hands flex on my thighs. His voice has gone rough at the bottom. "Quiet. You make it quiet."
His hands slide up to my waist and help me move on him, guiding the roll of my hips, and his eyes drag down the length of me and back up to my face. "Look at you," he breathes. "Taking me so well. So pretty up there." His thumb strokes my hipbone. "That's mine, right there—you hear me? This. Always." The words land low and hot where our bodies meet, and I clench around him just to watch his breath stutter and his head press back into the pillow, and he groans something that isn't a word at all.
I lean down and kiss him without breaking the rhythm, and he wraps his arms around my back and holds me against his chest, and we move together like that, chest to chest, my mouth on his, slow and close and warm. He slips a hand between us and finds my clit with his thumb and works me there in time with the way I'm taking him, and the second climb is gentler than the first and somehow bigger, rolling up through me until it tips over and I clench around him with a soft cry into his mouth. He follows me a few strokes later, a groan breaking out of him, his arms going tight, his face pressed into my neck—and through the thread I feel the exact moment he lets go. Not his pleasure crashing back into me from the outside. Just the quiet in him going all the way down, the futures gone silent, given to me freely the way he gives everything.
After, neither of us moves for a while. I stay where I am, draped over his chest with him still inside me, his heartbeat slowing under my ear, his fingers tracing nothing up and down my spine. The house is silent. The bond is full and warm andquiet. It is, I think, the most peaceful I have felt in longer than I can remember.
He presses a kiss to the top of my head, and then another to my temple, and I feel some of the tension I didn't know he'd been holding finally go out of him, his whole body sinking deeper into the mattress beneath me. We don't talk. We don't need to. I trace the old scar on his shoulder with one fingertip and he lets me, and somewhere outside the warped amber glass the campus that wants us gone goes on not knowing where we are, and in here there's just his breath and mine, evening out, falling into the same slow rhythm without either of us deciding it. For a little while I let myself believe it could always be this easy. That we could just have this.
I lift my head and find his mouth again, lazy, unhurried, just because I can. He kisses me back, one hand sliding up into my hair.
And I slide my eyes open against his lips.
Over his shoulder, his free hand has reached out to the nightstand, and it's turning a card. Not the whole deck—just turning them off the top one at a time, the way he does without thinking, the way some people tap a foot. It's the strange deck, the one I've watched him shuffle a thousand miles: a tarot deck folded into an ordinary playing deck folded into cards he's inked himself, his own symbols in his own cramped hand on plain black stock.
A card turns. Death—the tarot one, the skeleton and the white rose, the card he's told me before doesn't mean what people think it means.
Another. The Queen. Just the Queen, dark suit, her one flat painted eye.
Another. One of his own. Black card, something drawn on it in white ink that I can't make out from here, can't quite bringinto focus, like my eyes slide off it the way everyone else's eyes slide off the annex.
His lips go tight against mine. Just for a second. Just the smallest pull at the corner of his mouth, there and gone—but I've spent the better part of a year learning the country behind his face, and I know that tell the way I know my own name. He's seen something. Some branch fanned open and showed him its end, and he hated it.
I go still. I almost ask.
But Felix turns his hand over and the cards are simply gone, folded back into the dark of the deck like they were never there, and he brings that hand up to cradle my jaw, and he kisses me again—deeper this time, slower, both of us, like he's pouring himself into it, like the kiss is a door he's closing very gently on a room he doesn't want me to see inside.
He doesn't tell me. Of course he doesn't tell me.
He just pays the toll the only way he ever has, the only way he ever will: by carrying it alone, somewhere down a branch I'm not allowed to walk, so that I get to stay here in the warm with him and not have to look at whatever's waiting at the end of it.
I let him. God help me, tonight, I let him.
41
EVERLY
Dawn comes through the amber glass the way everything comes into Concordia: warped, a little wrong, gold gone the color of something steeped too long. The window in the front room is original to the building, blown by hand a hundred years before any of us were born, and it bends the light so that the morning pools on the floorboards in a long crooked stripe that doesn't match the shape of the window at all. I've stopped expecting the house to behave. That's the first thing this place teaches you, if you live long enough to learn it.
I'm awake before the others. I usually am now. My body learned to wake in the gray hour somewhere on the run last summer and never unlearned it, and I've decided not to fight it. There's a peace in the gray hour you can't get any other time of day. The house is quiet. The bond is quiet, four threads in my chest, all of them slack and warm and breathing, nobody hurting, nobody reaching, nobody off down some future watching me die.
