“No.” I brushed my thumb over her cheek. “Say it as much as you want.”
“I love you.”
I closed my eyes for one second and let it land somewhere it didn’t hurt as much.
When I opened them, she was watching me like she still didn’t trust the room to hold it.
“I love you too,” I said. “And before you make a joke, I need you to let that be serious for three seconds.”
Her mouth pressed together.
I watched the fight to behave move across her face and almost lost it.
“One,” she whispered.
“Aura.”
“Two.”
“You’re impossible.”
“Three.” She smiled, soft and terrible. “Okay, now I can function.”
I rolled her beneath me, careful with the sheet but not careful enough to hide what she did to me. She laughed as her back hit the pillows, and the sound slid straight beneath my skin.
I braced my arms on either side of her head. “You think you’re funny.”
“I know I’m funny.”
“You’re a menace.”
“You’re still here.”
“Yeah,” I said, lowering my mouth to hers. “I am.”
24
Easton
“Yeah,” I said, my voice rough. “I am.”
I kissed her.
This wasn’t like before. Not the angry, punishing kiss in my apartment. Not the desperate, hungry reclamation in her kitchen. This was something else. Slower. Deeper. A conversation without words.
I poured everything into it. The love that felt too big for my body. The fear of losing her again—of failing. The awe that she was here, letting me in, trusting me with the broken parts. The rage, transformed now, not gone, but channeled into this—into worship, into possession, into a promise written with my tongue against hers.
She moaned into my mouth, a soft, yielding sound, and her hands came up to frame my face. Her thumbs stroked my jaw, and the tenderness of it wrecked me.
I broke the kiss, breathing hard, my forehead resting against hers. “I need you to hear me.”
Her eyes fluttered open, dark and searching. “I’m listening.”
“You are mine.” The words came out raw, stripped bare. “Not like property. Not like a trophy. Mine like… my heart beats in your chest. Mine like I don’t know where I end and you begin anymore. Mine like if the world tries to take you again, I will burn it down around us and carry you through the ashes.”
A tear slipped from the corner of her eye, tracing a path into her hairline. “Easton.”
“Say it,” I growled, my hand sliding into her hair, careful of her braids. “Tell me you’re mine.”
