Page 12 of Into Ember

I smile back anyway. I don’t think I can help myself anymore.

That’s when I notice Gunnar isn’t in the room.

No announcement. No door. Just a Gunnar-shaped absence where the loudest person in any room should be, and nobody else has registered it yet because they’re all pointed at her. I should have noticed it sooner.

I heard what he heard on that walk. We all did. But I also watched it go through him — “he hasn’t looked at me once, I am not okay with caring about that” — and I watched his hands, and I know the difference between Gunnar annoyed and Gunnar drowning, because I’ve been reading that particular book since we were kids, and I wrote half the margins.

I turn toward the stairs.

“Food’s ready,” Erik says behind me, in the tone of a man who did not get here first to let dinner go cold.

“Be right there. Give us a few.”

He looks at me. Then past me, up the stairs, at the absence. He doesn’t ask. “I’ll keep it warm.”

I make my way upstairs and find Gunnar in the far bedroom. The one with the window that faces the ridge, which every one of us has stood at when we needed to not be looked at. He’s got both hands braced on the dresser and he’s staring out at the dark like it owes him an answer, and his shoulders are up around his ears.

“You alright?”

“Fine.”

I lean against the doorframe and wait.

“Gunnar.”

“What?” He turns around, and it’s not anger on his face. I’d know what to do with anger. “What do you want me to say, Brock? What? That some little woman from Earth — who is apparently a dragon, by the way, a female dragon, which is a fairy tale, which is a thing our mothers made up so we’d go to sleep — has me so twisted in knots I can’t think straight? That I spent fifteen minutes straight listening to everything in her head with no filter because none of us could figure out how to tell her to stop?”

“Gunnar—”

“She thinks about me.” His voice drops on it. All the speed goes out of him at once. “Whether she wants to or not. You heard it. She thinks about me, just like I think about her. Just like she is always in my fucking head, and I can’t get her out, and I don’t think I’m ever getting her out, and I don’t—”

He stops. His jaw works.

“I don’t know that I want to,” he says, and it comes out like a man confessing to the crime he’s been arguing he didn’t commit.

“And my dragon.” He laughs, and there’s nothing in it. “He’s done. He’s done pretending. He wants her. He wants to claim her, Brock, he’s wanted it since the apartment, and on Earth I could keep him quiet and here he will not shut up. Centuries I’ve told everyone fate doesn’t get a vote. Nobody told me fate was going to smell like—”

He doesn’t finish it. He’s breathing like the walk is still happening.

I cross the room.

I take his face in both hands, the way I have after battles and burials and the nightmares he pretends he doesn’t have, and I make him look at me until I’m sure he’s actually behind his own eyes. He is. Barely. Pacing the fence line of himself.

I kiss him.

Not soft. Soft makes Gunnar suspicious. I kiss him the way he needs when he’s like this — firm, certain, thumbs along his jaw — and the first press of his mouth is heat and salt and three hours of night air, familiar as a language I’ve spoken since before I knew it was one. He makes a rough sound against my lips, half protest, and I feel it more than hear it, a vibration that lands low in my chest and stays there. I know that sound too. It means keep going.

His stubble scrapes my chin. His hands leave the dresser and fist in my shirt, knuckles pressing hard into my sternum, dragging me in, and the metal of his tongue ring slides cool along my lower lip before it clicks against my teeth — deliberate, it’s always deliberate, four centuries and he still plays that card like I haven’t memorized the deck.

Heat goes through me anyway.

That’s the part I don’t say.

And for a stretch the kiss stops being regulation and becomes just want. His and mine. Older than the unit. Older than almost everything except this house. He kisses like he argues, fast and certain and looking for the edge of it. He crowds into me, all that restless height finally pointed somewhere, chest to chest so I can feel his heart going — too fast, still too fast — and I let him have it, let him press me back a half step and take what he needs, because taking is how he asks. My own pulse is up. He knows it too.

Then I gentle it down. Slow the pace, soften my mouth, ease my grip from holding him still to just holding him — and he follows, he always follows, that’s the part he’d deny with his dying breath — until we’re just breathing against each other’s mouths, his exhale warm and ragged on my lips.

This is the part I’m actually here for. The after. His breath punches out through his nose. His forehead comes down against mine, skin warmer than normal the way it always runs when his dragon’s been up, and the shaking in his hands goes still where they’re pressed flat against my chest. Under my fingers, along his jaw, his pulse comes down.