Page 33 of At The End There Was You

“Az, they are sweets. No cats involved.”

He frowned to himself. “I see.”

“Do they keep you Mages in confinement?” she asked. “How does one not know what marshmallows are? One of the smallest but most pleasurable joys of life.”

He didn't answer her, and when she looked up at his face, his features had flattened to that unusual placidity she hadn’t seen on him since that first day they had met.

“Even if they had,” he finally said, looking ahead at the city as if he was looking at people for the first time. “I don’t think I was looking at the world, Winter. I thought trivial things were just trivial things, didn’t know they mattered enough to make one happy or sad.”

“Strange as it is, happiness comes in all shapes and forms. I’m sure you’ve just never noticed all the small things that make you happy.”

“Happy,” he repeated, his eyes following a few elderly gathered around a game of checkers on a low table under the dark shade of an ancient willow that stood like a sore thumb in the middle of the town square.

“Yes, happy.”

Azriel was still looking ahead at the crowd when he said, “I don’t think what makes me happy is small by any means. Short, yes. Not small.”

“Short?”

“You.”

Winter stopped walking, her heart beating out of her ears and almost up her throat.

He stopped walking, too.

“I’m not short,” she blurted out, flustered, overwhelmed. “In fact, I’m pretty tall for a woman.”

He raked a look over her body. “You are, but you’re still shorter than me.”

“I make you happy?”

For a second, he looked like he was contemplating the answer, but then he said, “I don’t wish to say it.”

“Why not?”

“The world might hear, they might want you for themselves if they know I am capable of being happy and that there is something out there that has made me capable.”

She sucked in a sharp breath and looked away, feeling her eyes prickle with tears. Winter felt his arms wrap around her middle and his lips touch the shell of her ear. “So, I’ll just whisper it then. You said happiness comes in many forms. Mine is shaped like you. Has a mind shaped like yours, and a voice I never want out of my head.” He pressed a few kisses on her neck, his hand sliding from her waist and lower to her hip. “Among many other things.”

Briefly, she’d forgotten they were still in the middle of a crowd, and jolted when she noticed a few people staring at them.

Azriel let out another low groan when she slipped out of his hold. “Maybe I should just turn you into a rooted plant,” he muttered, following after her. “Then I’ll turn myself into a vine to wrap around you.”

Winter wanted to laugh, what he’d said was funny, but she often felt so deprived of touch that she’d give anything to be a rooted plant and for him to be a vine wrapped around her, even if he was poison ivy. She’d never thought about perfect death, the ideal death one might desire. She’d heard people wish they’d pass in their sleep or in a field staring at the sun. She’d just found hers. All of the sudden, she’d found her happy death. She’d want to die slowly, wrapped in poison. Held.

Winter took a few steps back to match Azriel’s, and linked her arm around his, clinging closely onto him, her cheek pressed to his biceps. But Azriel was not poison ivy, he was jasmine and she was but a fern tree, flowerless. He was keeping her wanting to see springtime, to see him wrap flowers around her.

But there would be no spring.

The world would end with autumn.

“What about your robes?” he asked, yet he only pulled her closer and even planted a kiss on top of her head.

“Don’t care.”

He shed his jacket and threw it over her shoulders. Her frame sunk under it, but her clothes were out of sight. “You care a little.”

“You’ll be cold.”