Chapter 25 #2
I went still. The memory was right there, vivid and sharp.
The mountain road. The headlights. My body tearing itself apart and reforming into something ancient and enormous and terrifying, scales and frost and a wingspan that blocked out the stars.
And Cinder, standing in the road with his hands at his sides, not moving. Not screaming. Not running.
"You didn't run," I whispered.
"I didn't run." He pulled back just enough to look at me, his eyes fierce and wet and absolutely certain. "You turned into a dragon the size of a truck, Taz. You were covered in ice. The road cracked under you. The temperature dropped so fast my breath crystallized mid-air. And I didn't run."
My chest shuddered. The cold inside me flickered, unsteady, reaching for him the way it always did.
"Your mother called you 'it,'" Cinder said, and the gentleness in his voice made the word land differently than it ever had before.
Not as an accusation. Not as confirmation of everything I'd feared about myself.
As evidence of her failure, not mine. "She looked at her son and saw something to be frightened of.
" He paused. "I looked at a dragon and saw you. "
Something behind my ribs cracked. Not the ice. Something older. Something that had been holding up every wall I'd ever built between myself and the possibility that someone could see all of me and stay.
"I didn't run then," Cinder said, pressing his forehead to mine.
His breath was warm against my lips. "And I'm not going to run now.
Not from the cold. Not from the dragon. Not from your father's grief or your mother's cruelty or whatever faceless bastard thinks he can threaten us into breaking apart.
" His hands cupped the back of my neck, fingers threading into my damp hair.
"You are not an 'it,' Taz. You are not broken.
You are not your father's ending. You're the man I love, and I am staying right here. "
I tried to speak. Nothing came. My throat had sealed itself shut around something too big for words, something that had been lodged there since a January morning in Manitoba when a boy watched his father walk into a blizzard and learned that love wasn't enough to keep people alive.
I kissed him.
Not desperate this time. Not claiming. Something quieter and more devastating than either.
I kissed him like I was finally setting down the weight my father had carried to his death.
I kissed him like the boy in the bedroom with ice climbing the walls, the boy whose mother couldn't say his name, the boy who'd spent decades convinced that closeness was the thing that killed people, had finally been given permission to believe otherwise.
His mouth was warm. It was always warm. And the cold didn't recoil from it, didn't fight it, didn't try to freeze him the way it froze everything else. It curled around him like recognition. Like the ice had known, long before I had, that this was the person it had been waiting for.
His fingers tightened in my hair. I wrapped my arms around his waist, pulling him closer until there was no space left between us, until his heartbeat was pressed against my chest and I could feel it, steady and strong and stubbornly, beautifully alive.
I was shaking. Not from cold. From the certain tremor of something structural giving way and being replaced, beam by beam, with something that could actually hold weight.
"Say it again," I whispered. My voice was wrecked. I didn't care.
Cinder's thumbs traced my jaw. "I love you."
"Again."
"I love you, Taz." He pressed his lips to my forehead. "I love you." To my temple. "I love you." To the corner of my eye, where the tears had frozen into tiny crystals against my skin.
The last one melted under his mouth, and the warmth of it spread through me like something thawing from the inside out. Not fast. Not all at once. The way spring came to places that had been frozen for so long they'd forgotten any other season existed.
I lifted my hands to his shirt. Slowly. Giving him time to stop me, the way he always gave me time, the way his patience had never once felt like obligation.
My fingers found the hem and pulled upward, and he raised his arms without hesitation, without the careful clinical distance he used with everyone else. Just surrender. Just trust.
His skin was warm beneath my palms. Always warm.
I mapped it with my hands the way I'd never let myself before, not fully, not with the lights on and the silence between us holding nothing but honesty.
The ridge of his collarbone. The soft plane of his stomach.
The scar on his left side that I'd noticed weeks ago and never asked about because I'd been too busy pretending I wasn't memorizing every inch of him.
"This?" I murmured, tracing it with my thumb.
"Appendectomy," he said. "I was thirteen. Terrible surgeon."
I huffed a sound that was almost a laugh and bent to press my mouth against it. He shivered, and the shiver had nothing to do with cold.
I pulled my own shirt off because I needed his hands on me.
Needed the warmth against the cold, needed the circuit completed, the current that only ran when we were touching, skin to skin, with nothing between us but the truth.
He didn't hesitate. His palms flattened against my chest, and I watched his face as the cold hit him, the way it always did at first, that half-second intake of breath.
Then the settling. The recognition. The moment his body stopped registering the temperature as threat and started registering it as mine.
"You're freezing," he murmured, but he was smiling.
"You're not."
"Funny how that works."
I pulled him closer, shifting us both until we were lying down, his weight half on top of me, his legs tangled with mine.
The bed creaked. The frost on the headboard crackled softly, retreating by degrees, and I realized with a distant wonder that the cold was actually receding.
Not because I was controlling it. Because it didn't need to protect me anymore.
He kissed my throat. Open-mouthed, unhurried, the kind of kiss that wasn't going anywhere because it was already exactly where it needed to be.
I tilted my head back and let him, let the warmth of his breath melt the thin layer of frost that had formed along my pulse point, let his tongue trace the vein beneath my jaw while my hands found the waistband of his sweats and tugged.
He lifted his hips. I got them down. He kicked them off the rest of the way and then reached for mine, and the careful, deliberate way he undressed me made something fracture in my chest that I'd been holding together with ice for thirty years.
He wasn't rushing. He wasn't frantic. He was paying attention.
The way he paid attention to everything, with that quiet, relentless focus that saw things other people missed and refused to look away from them.
When we were both bare, he paused. Propped himself on one elbow and looked at me. Just looked.
I wanted to hide. The instinct was ancient, bone-deep, the same reflex that had made me build walls and wear masks and sleep on the far side of every bed I'd ever shared.
Being seen like this, fully, without armor or angle or the excuse of darkness, felt like standing in an open field during a blizzard with nothing between me and the sky.
But Cinder's eyes weren't the sky. They were warm and brown and full of something I'd spent my whole life being told I didn't deserve.
"You're beautiful," he said.
"I'm covered in frost."
"I know." He traced a line of it down my sternum with one finger, watching the crystals dissolve under his touch. "Still beautiful."
The sound that left me was embarrassing.
Raw and broken and small, the kind of noise a man my size shouldn't make, but Cinder caught it with his mouth, kissing me deep and slow while his hand continued its path down my chest, my stomach, the trail of hair below my navel.
When his fingers wrapped around me, the cold surged and then surrendered in the same breath, and I arched into his grip with a desperation I couldn't disguise.
"Let me," he whispered against my lips. The same words I'd heard him use in the medical room a hundred times, steady and sure, the voice of a man who knew exactly what he was doing and would not be rushed. "Let me take care of you."
I nodded because my voice was gone.
He took his time. Of course he did. He was meticulous by nature, thorough by training, and everything he did with his hands carried the precision of someone who understood anatomy at a cellular level and had decided to use that knowledge to systematically dismantle me.
His grip shifted, tightened, found a rhythm that matched my breathing, and every time I got close, he eased off just enough to keep me on the edge, hovering, trembling, the cold pouring off me in waves that should have frozen the sheets but didn't touch him.
"Cinder," I managed. "Please."
He looked up at me. The expression on his face was something I'd never seen from him before. Not clinical. Not careful. Open. Vulnerable in a way that mirrored my own, like he'd finally stopped performing composure and was showing me what lived underneath.
"I need you," I said. The words scraped out of some deep, ancient place. "Not just this. All of it. I need you inside me, Cinder. I need you to stay."