My eyes roll back. My head falls back. My scream echoes around the room. My body goes haywire. Muscles spasm and clench. Nerve endings fire, misfire and fire again. And through it all, pleasure burns so brightly it detonates my soul.
My vision fades. Sound dims. The room falls away.
Oh shit. I’m going to pass out.
Best sex ever.
Chapter 28
Where There Is Tea There Is Hope
I’mawakeandI’malone. Which is fine. Which is what I expected. Which is exactly what I knew would happen.
It was a goodbye shag. The best sex ever, so good I passed out. But still, I knew what it was going to be when we stumbled into my bedroom.
And I am completely prepared for waking up alone, and it is absolutely fine.
I lie for a moment, staring at the ceiling. My bed is big and cold and very empty, which makes no sense at all because apart from the early morning activities that just occurred, this bed has never had anyone else in it apart from me.
Dating is a disaster, and I haven’t bothered for a long time. The little interlude of a captor-captive situationship was just that. An interlude. Going back to single life suits me just fine.
Absolutely fine.
The flat is quiet around me in a way that feels different from before, a different quality of quiet. Not the hum of the circle and the wards and the constant low-level magical awareness of another presence. Just ordinary quiet. Just a flat. Just the home of a perpetually single goth witch coffee shop manager.
I get up.
The bathroom is cold in the way bathrooms are cold, and I stand in front of the mirror and look at myself, and I am fine. I look terrible, obviously. My eyes are slightly swollen from last night, which was just the stress and the exhaustion and the events of the past twenty-four hours and nothing else. My hair is a disaster. I look like someone who has been through a supernatural attack, an emotionally significant conversation, and a night of insufficient sleep, followed by a morning of vigorous farewell, which is exactly what I am, and it’s fine.
I brush my teeth. I splash cold water on my face. I look at myself again.
This is good, actually. The quiet. The ordinary. This is what normal life feels like and normal life is great and I’m going to enjoy the hell out of it. No more summoning circles humming in the living room. No more frost on the walls when someone is displeased. No more ancient shadow kings with devastating cheekbones having opinions about the worthiness of layered cakes.
Just me. Just my flat. Just normal.
I stare at my reflection for a moment longer than strictly necessary.
Fine.
I find my clothes on the bedroom floor and put them on because I am a functional adult with a routine anda life and I’m fine. I shuffle toward the kitchen in the particular zombified state of someone who has slept, but not enough, and whose body is still conducting an audit of everything that happened yesterday. There is tea in the kitchen. Tea will help. Tea will make everything clearer and more manageable and less like the particular hollow quiet of a flat that was starting to feel like a home.
I get to the kitchen doorway.
I stop.
Dis is standing at the counter. He is wearing, for reasons I cannot immediately account for, what appears to be one of my jumpers, which fits him the way my jumpers do not fit me, i.e., extremely well. He has the kettle. He has a mug. He has, I notice, put a teabag in the mug, and is now pouring boiling water into it with great focus and intent and has apparently not noticed that he chose the fancy tea and has not yet removed the teabag from its paper wrapper.
He is making tea.
He is making tea in my kitchen.
He is here.
“What,” I say, “are you doing?”
Dis looks up. “Making you tea,” he says, with the calm of someone who feels this is self-evident.
I look at the wrapped teabag. I look at him. I look at the wrapped teabag again.
