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I snuggled closer to him. No reason to give up hope yet.
Auryn’s entire presence shifted with mischief. “We’ll tell Keon to get to work. Akoni and I will watch.”
I fought the urge to squirm and clench my thighs together. The squirming won and I shifted a bit.
Auryn nipped my ear lobe. “You like the idea of him taking you for us? Keeping it matter-of-fact? Goal-oriented? Objective-focused?”
“Oh shush!” I whispered while part of me grasped my proverbial pearls while my lizard brain had an entirely different opinion of that particular scene. The tingling between my thighs came with a raw, strained feeling throughout my whole body.
Auryn caressed the soft skin under my jaw with his fingertips, barely touching me with his skin but prickles of magic played off my own.
The strain under my skin intensified, and faint, faint patterns of pink came up over my forearms, drawn to the surface by Auryn’s presence. But his own patterns appeared at his temple, faint, almost glittery and sparkly.
“What’s happening?” I whispered.
He caressed my skin, tracing the line of my jugular along my throat. I inhaled as ithurt, but just as quickly felt exquisite, and the pulling was alsomeltingand swirling together at the same time. He tilted his head a degree, exposing the line of his throat.
I touched his skin. His magic dipped and softened, sweeping and swirling. I pulled my finger back just off his skin, and instinctivelypulled, drawing up tendrils of his magic. His magic followed my finger like magnetic dust. The flow of magic guided me down to the scar over his chest.
He yanked back.
The magictore.
“What are you doing?” I gasped.
“We can’t.” He tried to pull further, voice tight with pain. “No. Not yet.”
The pain threatened to send me tumbling into an all-too-familiar abyss of grief and loss.
No, it couldn’t be happening again!
“What are you doing?” My voice cracked into a thousand glass shards and tried to splinter out my throat, out of my soul. “Stop! Please, please, stop!”
“We can’t, not yet.” Tortured jade eyes seemed like green stars. “Not until we’re healed.”
Was that what was happening? Our tethers were trying to finalize?
And here Auryn was, spoiling the moment with some last minute flailing, afraid if we finalized bonding now, our tethers would get set in stone, diseased and unwell forever.
I laughed, drowning in old, familiar anguish. “We don’t get a choice.”
Auryn’s magicpulled.
The cosmos itself shifted and the searing pain raced under my skin.
“I can’t hurt you again,” he whispered.
“Even the cosmos has rules!” The anguish was the never-ending memory of that first text, that first moment, that first realization, then every moment after that where I had confronted a life without him. Even my heart beating had felt impossible. But my heart had kept beating, and I’d kept going because I hadn’t had the good sense to quit.
Over, and over, and over, and over, and over.
But we are here together now.
Now/Then
Now/—
Twelve
