Page 52 of Thunder

Braxton's two weeks old now.

Grace has been letting Presley hold him, letting her come by, and the thaw's put something back in Presley I hadn't seen since spring—a lightness, a steadiness, like a woman remembering she's allowed to want things.

She smiles more.

She stays later.

Twice now she's fallen asleep in my bed on a night Raine was home and had to do the dawn scramble out the mudroom door, and both times she laughed about it instead of going cold.

This is the best stretch of my life and I'm not fool enough not to know it.

But this.

"What kind of ink?" I ask, careful, because a man learns to step carefully around a good thing.

"A rattlesnake." She says it softly, and her hand comes up to my throat, to the coiled snake healing there, the one I put on myself in the worst weeks of my life when I thought she was gone for good.

Her fingers trace it. "Here." She touches her own ribs, left side, over the bone. "To match yours. You wear my name where the world can see it. I want to wear yours."

And that alone nearly takes the legs out from under me.

Because the importance is there, isn't it?

I marked myself with her in the dark, half out of my mind, not expecting to ever get to touch her again, and now she's lying in my bed in the gold light asking to answer it.

To make it two. To wear the snake I call her, the way I wear it for her.

I could give her that. I want to give her that so bad my chest aches with it.

"That's one," I manage. "You said two."

She holds my eyes. And here it comes, I can feel it coming, the other shoe.

"Property of Thunder." She says it steady, no flinching. "Across my lower back."

I sit up. I can't help it.

It moves me too much and in too many directions at once, and I have to sit up and scrub a hand down my beard and take a breath.

A rattlesnake on her ribs is a love letter, but Property of Thunder is something else entirely, and we both know it.

"Presley."

"Don't." She sits up too, my shirt sliding off one shoulder. "Don't you dare give me a speech about how it's too much, or too fast, or how I don't know what I'm⁠—"

"I'm not." I take her hand, because I need to be touching her for this. "I'm not gonna tell you that. You know exactly what a property tat means in this world, you’ve been in this world long enough to tell. You watched Hadley get Rogue's across her back. You know it's not jewelry. It's the most serious claim there is."

I turn her hand over in mine.

"Which is why I gotta ask you somethin' and I need the true answer, not the one that keeps the afternoon nice."

Her jaw sets, but she nods. "Are you doin' this for us?" I hold her eyes. "Or are you doin' it at your father?"

She goes still, and I watch what I’m asking shake her.

I know I've hit something because Presley's a terrible liar with the people she loves and the truth crosses her face before she can stop it.

"Both," she says finally.