43. The Bond
forty-three
The Bond
I woke up the next morning with something lodged behind my rib cage.
My breath came with greater effort, the beat of my heart slowed with confusion, and I felt it contract when I sat up—a brutal tension like the twinge of a pulled muscle.
The foreign object was magnetic, and it gravitated towards something behind me.
I turned my head, careful not to disturb the balance of near pain in my chest. Maybe it had broken off something that I’d been sleeping on—
My eyes fell upon Lucais’s face, and I knew.
I simply knew he’d left something inside of me that was permanent and unalterable, and that when he woke up, he would realise that I’d left something tucked inside of his chest, too.
The bond had been solidified. Once. Twice.
I thought we might have done it one thousand times in total—or at least, it felt like we had.
One thousand crash landings into an explosion of pleasure so acute, violent, and all-consuming that I still felt the echoes of it ghosting across my flesh and bones so many hours later.
One thousand times, I had said yes, more, please.
One thousand times, we told the Oracle that it was right. One thousand times, we carved out tiny little pieces of each other to patch up our respective hearts. One thousand times, we had branded ourselves upon the other with literal blood, sweat, and tears in fragmented dreams and soul stitches.
One thousand times.