Page 49 of Autumn Queens & Shadows

Pulling at his fingers, I breathed, “You’re not just anyone.”

The entirety of his half naked body was against mine, the closest I’d ever allowed anyone to be, the closest I’d allowed another body next to mine. “Then who am I, little bird? What am I?”

He wouldn’t remember what I said, so I said something I needed him to forget, “Malik. M-my Malik.”

His voice was thick and dark, “Is that so?”

“Isn’t it?”

Even through the faint lantern light that had reached the corner where we were, I could see the gleam in his eyes. “Perhaps it is.”

I put a hand over his mouth when he leaned in. “I won’t let it be just another drunken mistake of yours.”

“It can’t be anything else.”

“I know,” I whispered back.

He dropped his forehead on my shoulder and let loose a long exhale, his arms tentatively wrapping around my middle to pull me close—closer than I’d ever been to him. “You smell perfect.”

“You’re drunk.”

A pain groaned drew out of him. “Hold me back.”

“You’re drunk,” I repeated.

“Just hold me back, Rora.”

“I can’t,” I whispered low, holding my arms limply by my side.

“Please,” he begged, his breathing growing laboured. “Please.”

Shutting my eyes tightly and forcing my nausea back to the bitter pit of envy in my stomach, I did just that. I held him back. I’d held him almost all night long. That night he’d been mine. He’d been my Malik.

He’d never let me hold him again after that.

At some point, I believed I’d imagined him ever feeling like mine.

Chapter thirteen

Ivory Chrysanthemums

Thora

That night at the library seemed so far away. A different lifetime entirely.

My fingers moved up his arm, trailing the vines I’d drawn over his scars. “How?”

“After you left me alone at the library in a puddle of my own misery, I went and had them done.”

I pulled my fingers back like I’d been struck by lightning. No. He’d been drunk. I remembered that much. He shouldn’t though. “But—”

“They needed to be covered,” he said, as if to almost spare me from my own daily dose of embarrassment. “The scars.”

“Thought they hurt to cover?” I asked, gladly taking his bait, and pretending that part of the night had not happened.

“It did. They did,” he said, his gaze dropping from my face to my body. He quickly averted his eyes away from me, focusing them on a distant wall as if it was the most interesting thing he’d ever seen.

I looked down on me and then sighed at my very thin and transparent slip dress I wore. “They’re just tits, Malik. You need to get over the fear of them. Especially since you insisted we bunk like old soldier pals.”