Page 43 of Ward

Plain dark under-layer, the gold at his ear catching her lamplight, and he filled her little doorway the way he’d filled the kitchen’s — carefully, apologetically, a man lifelong braced against breaking smaller things — and then he was inside, and her door sealed, and the room was very warm and very small and neither of them said anything at all for a moment.

“So,” she said. “The cuff.”

His hand went to it, reflex. “You’ve been talking to Brooklyn.”

“Brooklyn talks to me. I run a kitchen; it’s like being a bartender but with better knives.” She stepped in close, unhurried, watching him track her the whole way, letting him. “She says when it’s down, it’s a loop. What you feel, they feel. What they feel, you feel them feeling. Round and round.”

“That’s — broadly accurate.”

“And you’ve had it welded to the last notch for eighteen years, except lately.” She was close enough now to see the gold seams in his skin, the fine lines of the markings climbing his neck, close enough that his fever-warmth reached her like the open door of an oven.

“Day thirty, seventh bell. That was you, wasn’t it. You were standing my service door doing the world’s best impression of a wall, and halfway through service the room went warmer — like somebody opened an oven somewhere and nobody could find which one. I looked at my burners twice. It was you. You took a notch down, on post, in my hall.”

“I came to find out what I actually felt,” he said, low, “before I burned the paper. Reading you without your knowledge was a breach. I’ll not do it again unasked, that’s a standing —”

“Ask me now.”

He went still. Deep-water still, the room of him.

“Tisha.” Her name — her actual name, the first time he had ever said it, and oh, that was why he’d never used it; he’d been saving it the way she’d been saving the stew. “If I take the cuff down with you, there’s no wall between us in either direction. You’ll feel me feel you. It’s a great deal. It has been, historically, too much for — “

“Aldric.” His name back, level, gentle, laid flat like a blade that had decided about kindness a month ago. “I have been feeding you what I feel for thirty-one days. It’s the only language I’ve ever been fluent in, and you have eaten every single plate.” She reached up slowly, telegraphing everything, and rested her fingers against the notched gold at his ear. “I’m asking. Take the wall down. All the way. I want to know what dinner’s been like from your side.”

“Yes,” he said, wrecked, and pressed his fingers over hers, and together they thumbed the cuff to nothing.

The room changed.

It came up like a pilot light finding gas — his wanting, arriving inside her own chest, enormous and starved and disciplined to the last, and tangled through it the echo of hers hitting him, and the echo of the echo, warmth compounding on warmth like a stock reducing, richer every pass around the loop.

Tisha had wondered, lying awake, whether it would feel invasive.

It felt like the exact opposite of invasive.

It felt like cooking for someone and being the meal and sitting down to eat, all three at once, and she heard herself laugh — one bright disbelieving note — and felt her own laugh land in him like something breaking open, and the gold markings at his neck kindled to a soft luminance, and that answered the question of whether the glow was a myth.

“Oh, that’s not fair,” she breathed. “You’re a light source.”

“Only when —“ His hands framed her face, careful as a man handling the good plate, thumbs at her cheekbones, and through the loop she felt the restraint in them, the decades of it.

Under the restraint the fever-bright want, and under the want, bedrock, the thing that undid her completely: gratitude, vast and simple.

Fed. After so long.

“Only with — apparently only with you.”

She kissed him.

The loop took the kiss and doubled it and dealt it back, her want and his colliding somewhere in the middle of the circuit and compounding.

He made a sound against her mouth like a man setting down a stone he’d carried half his life, and she felt it twice: once in her ears, and once in her own chest, arriving as his relief.

The second one took her knees out.

He caught her. Of course he caught her.

One arm banded her waist, and he lifted her clean off the deck and set her on the counter of her little galley, between the kettle and the spice rack, so that for once in her life she was looking down at him.

“Oh, I like this,” she said. “I’m going to need a step stool installed.”