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Time. They didn’t have much of it.
“If we don’t survive this,” she said quietly, pulling back slightly, “I don’t want to die only wondering what it would have been like.”
He didn’t speak. Instead, he very deliberately stepped back.
“If you stay,” he said, voice low and barely steady, “if we start to do this, Maia, I don’t think I’ll be able to stop.”
Maia did not step back. “I’m not asking you to.”
As soon as she finished her sentence, something in him gave way. He drew her to him, and there was nothing careful left in it. Weeks of held distance collapsing all at once, his mouth finding hers, her cheek, her jaw, the place beneath her ear, as though he had been starving and would not let himself know it until now. She wrapped her arms around his neck and pulled him closer to her, and for once he did not retreat.
“Caelith,” she breathed against his mouth. “I don’t want this to be it. I don’t want it to be the only time.”
“I know.” It came out wrecked. He kissed her like he was trying to outrun it.
His hands found the laces of her dress and worked them loose. The faint tremor in his fingers, the rare, fleeting lack of control, as though even he didn’t trust himself with this, completely undid Maia. She had only ever seen him contained. Watching him come apart, because of her, was almost more than she could bear.
When the last lace gave, he drew the dress from her shoulders.
And stopped.
His hands went still. She looked at his eyes for explanation, and found they had caught on her shoulder, on the scar the glass reaper had left there, still raised and pink and not yet healed. The mark that was a reminder of how close it had come.
She moved to cover it on instinct. He caught her hand before she could.
“Don’t,” he said.
He looked at it for a long moment, pain etched across his face. His thumb brushed the edge of the wound, barely touching, and she felt the gentleness of it more than the contact.
“It’s healed enough,” she whispered. “Please.”
But he didn’t move on, not yet. He had spent centuries making certain he wanted nothing he could lose. And here she was, marked by how nearly he had lost her before he’d even let himself have her.
The scar had done what her words could not. Whatever he had been keeping inside of him since the night they met, he lost it then. Or maybe he simply let her see it, which was its own kind of surrender.
When he kissed her again, it was different. It was hungry. His mouth moved down her throat, careful around the scar, and she let her head fall back and her fingers find his hair. For the first time in so long, she stopped being afraid of what came next.
He moved her backwards, both hands at her hips until the backs of her knees found the cot. She sat and he did not let go.
She drew his shirt over his head. He put one hand flat against her collarbone and pressed, gently, until she was lying down, and then he was above her, a knee either side of her. Of the little light there was, it caught every line of his body, his glass veins flaring faint beneath translucent skin, almost purple where they should have been silver, glimmering. Ethereal. Beautiful.
He’d always held back, and now he held back nothing. He let her look. He let her see all of him, the way he had let no one.
She ran her hand down his stomach, her heart beating faster and a deep, desperate feeling stirring low in her belly. Before she could go further, he caught her wrist. “Let me look at you first.”
She started to say something, but he shook his head.
“If this is all we’re given,” he said, voice dropping and eyes heavy, “then I want to remember every part of it.”
He drew her arms up, pinning her hands above her head so they skimmed the wall behind the cot. He held them there with one hand.
Then he said one word, and it was not in her language.
She knew it anyway. She had found it herself, months ago, in a fragment in the cold Archive. He had told her what it meant with silver on his wrists.
Hold. Or endure. It depends on who is saying it.
She had not fully understood what he meant by that until this moment.
