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“I don’t care.” I pirouette on the spot as my face is drenched with icy raindrops. Clouds shift in the sky above, and I can smell river and earth and bark and hear animals scurrying for shelter. Everything feels fresh and new and alive.
Everything feels like freedom.
And then I spin right into him. He’s joined me in the rainstorm, and he wraps his arms around me as I burst into a fit of uncontrollable laughter.
“You’re insane,” he laughs, half-shocked and half-amused.
I nod, leaning up on my toes. “I know.”
He holds me closer, his nose brushing against mine. Ilarion is soaking wet, too. Raindrops catch in each thread of his hair and cling to him the way I would if I were a raindrop that was blessed enough to fall on him.
Maybe that’s exactly what happened, that first dark and stormy night. I was a raindrop falling, falling, falling…until I all but landed on Ilarion’s car.
I grin at him. “Wanna go insane with me?”
Something flickers in his eyes. Something deep and primal and intense. “Again and again and again,” he rumbles.
Then he crushes his lips to mine.
66
ILARION
We’re a fucking cliché.
I couldn’t care less.
Sex in the rain. Two lovers, so overcome with their feelings for one another that they rip their clothes off and fuck under the open skies.
I thought it was all a bunch of bullshit. I know damn well life is not what the movies make it out to be. They glorify death, too, but I’ve seen men die, and it’s not pretty or heroic. It’s gruesome and visceral and it sticks with you for life.
I’ve wanted a woman, and it didn’t end with us running through fields of daisies while the orchestra swelled in the background. It’s painful and thorny and it fucks you up forever.
So as the skies break open and happiness has never seemed so close and so far away at the same time, I decide:fuck it.Fuck what the movies say should happen next.
This is our story. Hers and mine.
We’ll write it however we see fit.
When our lips part, Taylor’s face is soaked with raindrops and joy. “The first time you and I met, it was raining,” she says with a wistful smile. After all her protests, I’m surprised at her sentimentality. Her smile widens. “Maybe rain is lucky for us.”
Something roars to life inside my chest. The fact that she considers herself lucky to have met me… I never realized how much that would mean to me until the words slip through her lips.
“Ilarion,” she says before I can kiss her again, “I have a rule of my own while we’re at the cabin.”
That gives me pause, but her eyes are so bright and hopeful. If she’s going to embrace this cabin trip, then I’m sure as hell not going to give her a reason to backpedal.
“Tell me.”
“While we’re here, we have to be honest with each other,” she says. “Always.”
Well, fuck me.
I can’t promise her that. There’s so much I haven’t told her. Things that would make her run from me screaming. Things that would make her rue the day she met me at all.
Things that would prove thatnone of this was an accident.
“Okay?” she asks when I don’t say anything.
