Now Daxon

Now DAXON

I n so many ways, Wilhelmina Chase is a tidal wave.

Ferocious and headstrong, always guns blazing. She’s a current that grabs you firmly from the middle of your soul and drags you along with her, surging across cities and years and wildest dreams and moments like this one.

But also, she’s dew on a quiet morning, whispering across the grass, covering everything. Mist on your shirtsleeve. Aching and quiet and soft. Though this woman in front of me now is the rip tide I don’t want to fight, I can see the glistening stillness, the vulnerability, just under the surface.

She leans into me and I’m ready to let her carry me away.

My back flattens against the cool metal of the refrigerator as Wil’s hands move up my chest and against my neck and up further into my hair. I hold her to me like she’s my high ground.

Her lips, her hands, her body pressed against mine, and breathing is the literal last thing on my mind. It’s happening. Okay. Be cool, Daxon. Oh my god. No big deal, just the thing you’ve been missing like a limb is actually happening. Wil’s hands slip up under my shirt and I feel the coolness of her fingers splay against my stomach, running their way across my skin.

“Abs,” she mutters incredulously between feverish kisses. “You have fucking abs ? Who the hell are you?”

Against her lips, I grin. My hands drift in a wayward mess across her torso, her chest, towards her jaw, her ears. They dip through her hair and I can remember being seventeen with Wil in the back seat of my car on a warm summer night and really touching her hair for the first time and thinking how there was nothing softer in the world.

Now it’s cool and damp against my fingertips. I run my thumbs across her cheekbones.

“I gotta be honest,” I breathe out, dragging my lips towards her neck and chuckling softly, “I have no idea what my name is, currently.” Then I stoop and collect her in my arms, pulling her off her feet and up so that her legs wrap and lock around my hips. I cross the kitchen and sit her on the counter. My heartbeat is the loudest thing I’ve ever heard. It thunders in my ears like the storm outside has moved in. “Wil,” I rasp. It comes out like a question, because it is. My eyes trace their way across her face, which is flushing pink all the way up from her neck.

Seven years . It’s been seven Wil-less years. With only glitchy memories for comfort when I close my eyes at night. But god, it’s been worth the wait. Hell, I’d wait seventy years for her. Seven hundred. They’ll bury me one day, but if she called my name, I’d crawl to her from the grave.

Except, I’m the one who walked away. Who drowned us. Who lowered us down into the earth. I don’t know if I can forgive myself for that, and I’m pretty sure she hasn’t. Not really.

There’s a microsecond where I see a flash of YES in her expression. Then it’s gone. Wil’s face falls, her eyes bugging. She sits up and hastily unlocks her legs from around me.

“Oh my god,” Wil says. Her voice is hoarse and she clears her throat. “Holy shit.”

My hands, which are at her hips, freeze. “Are you okay?”

“I just—I... No . I’m not. I shouldn’t have...” She shakes her head and rakes her fingers through her short hair, tucking it back behind her ears. Her palms come together, fingers beneath her chin, and I know that look. She means business. “Look, Dax, I don’t know what I was thinking. I’m—and you’re ”—she appraises me wordlessly, but I catch a glimmer of something in her eye—“and we —but I can’t. Okay? I can’t. If I’m gonna do this movie, I need to focus. I can’t be distracted thinking about how it feels to touch your abs. Which I’m not thinking about, by the way,” she adds before catching her breath and inhaling deeply.

“It’s okay,” I say. “I get it.” But inside me, I’m a lava rock recently drenched in ice-cold water, steaming. I can see where she’s coming from. It’s not a casual thing, returning to something this monumental after seven years away. The stakes could literally not be higher.

“You do? Okay, good,” says Wil. “Because now that I’m thinking about it, I think we need a... pact.”

My brow twitches upwards. “A pact?”

“Between you and me. A pact. While we’re working together, we shouldn’t...” She gazes around the room, searching for the right way to phrase it, I’m guessing. “We shouldn’t hook up. Okay? Friends?” She extends her hand to me like a mayoral candidate running for re-election. Ishake it gently, my lip curving upwards, despite the disappointment squealing through my body like a piglet on the loose.

“Aye aye,” I tell her soberly. “Friends. But if it pleases the court—”

“You’re not on trial. Or a pirate. Daxon, you are so weird.”

I search the air above her head for what feels like the right salutation and come up empty, shrugging. “I pledge allegiance to the pact.” My hand slaps to my chest, above my heart.

“ Stop .” Wil rolls her smiling eyes.

“Your majesty, if I may,” I say, grinning. “I can one hundred percent respect the terms of the pact, but let the record show... you kissed me. ”

She scoffs. “Did not!”

“Absolutely did too,” I counter.

“Excuse me, why are you talking? You never bought me my Coke.”

I can’t help the wide grin that slides its way across my lips. Wil is trying so hard not to match my smile. I see it in her eyes, blazing and beautiful and bright. But she fixes her lips in a tight line and cocks her head at me, waiting for my answer. Meanwhile, my brain is replaying the last five minutes on a dizzying loop. The cool touch of Wil’s hand against my stomach, the way her fingers curled and her fingernails dug in a little.

Chances of recovering from this are negative five thousand.

“Pretty sure I did,” I say slowly, quietly, shrugging.

Wil’s eyes widen a moment, her mouth popping open incredulously, but she chokes on any comebacks and instead swallows hard, shaking her head at me.

All she can say is, “I think the rain’s stopped.” Her eyes are on the kitchen window beyond me.

The kitchen is quiet, except for my desperate heart still pounding away in my ears. My hand flexes at my side as a strange, nagging guilt suddenly passes over me. “I didn’t plan on...”

“No,” Wil says quickly. “I know.”

“Because I’m sorry if things are weird now.”

“No. They’re... not weird. Everything is super normal. Completely normal.”

I take a step back as she lowers herself from the counter, and hold a hand out for her that she takes, steadying herself, and then drops right away. The coolness of her touch crackles like a lightning strike against my fingers.

“You sure?” I ask.

“I’m sure. It’s all good, Avery. Don’t sweat it.”

But the air is thick with a strange new awkwardness we’ve never known together. Minutes ago, we were clutching each other like life support, like those breathless weeks after our first kiss, when summer and each other were all we had.

It’s the worst idea ever to start something. Not that I’ve been feeling nothing for her all these years—I think it’s safe to say my flame for her has been set to simmer, and I don’t think it could ever truly go out. But at the start of a project like this one, with so much to offer both of us career-wise, it’s the best move to leave things in the past.

“I think I’m gonna, uh, get goin’,” I say.

“Oh my god,” Wil snorts. “Please be more Midwestern.”

“What?” I say, mock-offended.

“Ya ready to rock and roll?” says Wil. She really hits those O’s, making them round with a Minnesota lilt. I laugh.

“Shut up, Chase.”

“Bite me, Avery.”

Our eyes meet. Wil’s teeth claim her lip. Blushing so hard I can feel the heat in my face, I clap my hands and rub them together like somebody’s Midwestern dad. “Night, Wil.”

Slowly, I head out of the kitchen towards the front door. Ican feel Wil somewhere close behind, and when I turn, she’s leaning against the doorframe of the tiny foyer, the firelight behind her glowing like a portal to somewhere entirely made of magic.

“Night, neighborino,” she says.

And it’s a Ned Flanders reference, I know that, but Christ, if it isn’t the sexiest thing I’ve ever heard in my life.

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