Page 104 of Cruel Lies

Whatcan'tRonan Akov do?

The next two hours are the strangest, but also the best Saturday night I've had in longer than I can remember.

Ronan gets Hayden set up with a popsicle. True to his word, it stays down, and Hayden's color comes back a little more with every slurp. Then Ronan does the thing I could not have predicted in a thousand years: he sits on the floor with the deep-sea books, the ones he sent, and he lets Hayden read him facts about hydrothermal vents, and heasks follow-up questions.

Real ones. Like he cares.

"So the tube worms," Ronan says, frowning at a diagram. "They have no mouths?"

"No mouth, no stomach, no butt," Hayden confirms with relish.

"Then how do they eat?"

"Bacteria liveinsidethem and make food from the chemicals. It's called symbi—symbi?—"

"Symbiosis," Ronan supplies.

"Yeah! That."

"So the worm gives the bacteria a home," Ronan says slowly, "and the bacteria feed the worm. Neither one could survive alone. But together, at the bottom of the ocean, in the dark, with no sun, they thrive."

"Exactly," Hayden says, pleased someone finally gets it.

Ronan is quiet for a second. "That's a good deal," he decides. "For both of them."

Isabella, meanwhile, is trying very hard to be part of the science and failing, so Ronan pivots without being asked and lets her run a full medical examination on him with her toy doctor kit. He submits to a plastic stethoscope on his chest. He lets her wrap his enormous forearm in a bandage. He tells her, with total sincerity, that she has excellent bedside manner.

By eight-thirty, despite his declarations earlier that he'd be staying up until sunrise, Hayden is asleep on the couch and Isabella is yawning into her doctor kit. I carry Hayden up and get him settled in his room. Ronan carries Isabella, who insists on bringing Doctor Fuzz along for the ride, and also makes him tuck the shoebox in on the nightstand where she can see it. He does it as carefully as she would do it herself.

"Goodnight, brave caterpillar," he whispers.

"Goodnight, mirror guy," Isabella mumbles, already halfway to La La Land.

When both are situated, we retreat into the hall to stand outside their doors in the dark, both of us just breathing.

"You didn't have to do any of that," I whisper.

"I know."

"You were supposed to take me on some fancy date."

"There'll be other nights for that." He looks at me in the gloom. "This was better."

I don't know what comes over me then, except that it's everything, all of it, the ginger ale and the tube worms and the plastic stethoscope and popsicles made with real fruit—so I reach up and I kiss him.

His hand slides into my hair and he kisses me back, slow at first, then not slow at all.

We make it down the stairs. Barely. My back hits the wall by the landing and his mouth is on my neck and the red dress I never zipped is already sliding off my shoulder, and I don't care, I don't care about anything except the heat coming off him and the way he keeps growling my name against my skin.

"Couch," I manage.

He walks me backward to the good end of the couch, the clean end that Hayden didn't infect, and lays me down reverently. His mouth moves down. To my collarbone. Lower. He drags the dress down as he goes and looks up at me for permission, always the permission, and I sayDon't you dare stop,and he doesn't.

He peels me out of my dress, leaving me in nothing but panties, then kisses my stomach. All of it, the stretch marks, the soft parts, the parts I spent a decade learning to hate, but he doesn't skip a single inch of it, like there's nothing there he'd rather not touch. He hooks my knee over his shoulder.

The first touch of his mouth between my legs makes me bite down on my own hand to keep quiet.

"Let me hear you," he murmurs against me. "Quietly."