Chapter 17 Starlit Confessions #2
I wanted to believe him. Wanted to accept that the choices I'd made mattered more than the legacy I'd inherited.
But the curse sitting in my chest was a constant reminder that Silas had shaped me in ways I couldn't fully escape, had woven himself into my fundamental structure in ways that would only end with one of us dead.
We waded out of the lake when the water got too cold to bear, when our fingers had gone numb and our teeth were chattering despite the late summer air.
Ronan grabbed a towel and dried off, his body showing all the damage I'd cataloged earlier but moving with more ease now that a month of grime was gone. I did the same, trying not to watch the way water ran down his spine, trying not to notice the particular grace he moved with even exhausted.
We sat on the shore wrapped in blankets Michael had packed.
“I was terrified,” I said into the quiet. “Of needing you. Of what that need would cost if Silas figured it out. Of becoming dependent on a bond I couldn't control.”
“The tether,” Ronan said slowly, like he was working through implications as he spoke.
“It doesn't just stabilize you. It anchors me too, doesn't it?
When you pulled me back from the compulsion at the fight.
When you touched me in the clearing today.
My wolf settles around you in ways it doesn't around anyone else.”
“Yes.” I'd noticed that. Had felt the way the dire in him responded to my presence, the way his wolf went quiet and calm when we were close. “Tether bonds work both ways. You anchor me magically. I anchor you instinctually. We stabilize each other.”
“Which means Silas will come for it.” Fear bled into his voice.
“He'll try.” I turned to look at him properly, at the way starlight caught in his pale eyes and made them luminous. “But he underestimates what we're capable of when we're together. He's never seen what a dire wolf and his tether can do when they stop fighting each other.”
Ronan's hand found mine. His fingers were still cold from the lake, but his grip was steady.
“I need you to promise me you'll fight,” he said quietly. “When the curse gets bad. When you're bleeding yourself hollow and hiding it. I need you to promise you'll let me help instead of dying quietly.”
“I promise.” The words felt like an oath. Like a commitment I was making to both of us. “If you promise you won't run again. Won't try to protect me by disappearing.”
“I promise.”
Ronan's thumb traced across my knuckles, a small movement that sent awareness through me like current. “Gideon.”
I looked at him.
He reached up and touched my face with his free hand, fingers careful like he was learning the shape of something too fragile to grip properly. His palm cupped my jaw, thumb brushing across my cheekbone, and I leaned into the contact before I could stop myself.
“Can I...” Ronan started.
I kissed him before he could finish the question.
His lips were cold from the lake but they warmed quickly under mine, his mouth opening with a surprised sound that turned into acceptance that turned into participation.
He kissed me back like he'd been thinking about this, like he'd been waiting for permission, and when his hand slid into my hair I made a sound I had never made before.
Something low and unguarded and honest in ways I did not know how to be with words.
The kiss deepened. It turned into relief and apology and need all tangled together in ways I could not separate.
I responded like a man starving, like a month of searching and fear and desperate hope was pouring out through contact, through the way our mouths moved together, through the particular desperation of two people who had been alone too long and finally, finally stopped pretending that was survivable.
We broke apart breathing hard.
“Here,” he said, his voice rough with want. “I want you here. Under the stars.”
“Yes.”
We spread the blankets on the grass beside the water, the lake reflecting starlight in patterns that shifted with each small movement of the surface.
A thin crescent of moon had risen above the treeline, casting silver light across the clearing in long pale ribbons, and the forest held its breath around us the way old things do when something rare happens within their borders.
Ronan's hands were in my hair, on my shoulders, sliding down my back with the careful exploration of someone learning a body he wanted to know.
I mapped him in return, the line of his jaw and the hollow of his throat and the particular places that made him gasp when I touched them.
Behind his left ear. The curve where his shoulder met his neck.
The small of his back just above the swell of his hips, where pressing my palm flat made him arch involuntarily and breathe out a soft, broken sound.
“Is this...” I started.
“Yes.” His interruption was immediate and certain. “Yes, I want this. Want you. Have wanted you since...” He stopped and laughed quietly against my mouth, a sound that carried its own kind of sweetness. “Since you fixed my sink and looked at me like I was a person instead of a problem.”
I kissed him again because words felt inadequate.
Ronan's hands trembled slightly when he touched me, whether from cold or nerves or desire I could not tell.
The night air was cool against our skin, but everywhere we touched burned warm.
Starlight painted silver across Ronan's shoulders and caught in his pale eyes, making the moment feel suspended outside ordinary time.
The forest breathed around us with the quiet patience of old growth that had witnessed this particular kind of intimacy before and would witness it again long after we were gone.
I drew back enough to look at him properly, at the way the moonlight lay across the damage on his body, the bruises and the old scars and the newer ones, all of it the evidence of a story I was determined would have a different ending.
I pressed my mouth to the bruise along his ribs, a careful kiss that was also a promise, and felt him pull a slow, shaking breath.
“Gideon.” My name in his mouth sounded like a prayer he had not known he was reciting.
“I've got you,” I said against his skin, and meant it in every way a thing can be meant.
I worked my way up his torso slowly, learning each scar with my lips, cataloging not damage now but territory, the geography of a man I intended to know completely. He made soft sounds above me, a low “mmnhh” when I found a sensitive place below his collarbone.
His fingers tightened in my hair, like he needed something to grip while I dismantled whatever was left of his composure.
When I brought my mouth to his again he kissed me harder, hungrier, the careful restraint he had been maintaining finally slipping its leash. He pressed me back against the blankets and settled his weight over me, and I felt the full warmth of him against the full length of me.
I reached between us and found the fold of his towel and pulled it loose with deliberate slowness.
Ronan went still above me.
I kept my eyes on his face while I did the same to my own, letting the terrycloth fall away until there was nothing between us but the cool night air and the thin silver light the moon was casting across the grass.
He was watching me with an expression I had not seen on him before, something stripped of the sarcasm and the guardedness and the carefully maintained distance. Pure attention. Pure want.
“I've thought about this,” I said quietly. “Since before I knew what you were to me. Since before I had a name for it.”
“Show me.” His voice had dropped to something rough and low that I felt in my chest. “Show me what you thought about.”
I wrapped my hand around him.
He was heavy and warm against my palm, already thick with wanting. His hips tilted forward involuntarily, pressing into my fist with an urgency he was still trying to control.
“Gideon.” A warning. A plea. Both at once.
I stroked him slowly, learning the weight of him, learning the particular places that drew the sharpest responses, the ridge beneath the head that made his breath catch, the base where my grip made him shudder from the crown of his head down through his spine.
He was substantial in my hand in a way that made my mouth go dry.
I intended to give him all three.
He dropped his head back and I watched his throat work, watched the moonlight slide across the strong line of his neck and the shadows collect in the hollow of his collarbone.
His hands found my shoulders and gripped, not directing, just anchoring, holding onto me while I took him apart stroke by unhurried stroke.
“You're going to kill me,” he managed.
“I'm going to do the opposite.” I pressed my lips to his jaw, his cheek, the corner of his mouth. “Stay still for me.”
I kissed my way down his throat, his chest, the ladder of his ribs, following the path his own moonlit geography laid out.
He made a low, continuous sound that was almost a growl, the wolf in him surfacing at the edges of his control, and when I reached his stomach and kept going his fingers slid from my shoulders into my hair.
I took him into my mouth.
The sound he produced was not quiet. I worked him slowly, thoroughly, learning what made him tighten his grip and what made him gasp and what made the growl underneath the sounds bleed closer to the surface where it was audible and raw.
He was a lot to take and I did not pretend otherwise. I worked at my own pace, setting a rhythm that wound him tighter by degrees, and I felt his thighs trembling on either side of me with the sustained effort of holding back.
“You don't have to be careful with me,” I said against him, and felt his whole body shudder at the vibration.
The hand in my hair tightened.
A warning, and then a gentle but unmistakable pressure, guiding me down, coaxing me to take more of him, and I went willingly, opening for him.