Chapter 8 #5
She washed me. Her hands moved over my chest, my arms, the care of someone touching something precious, and I washed her in return, my palms sliding over the curves of her breasts, the narrowness of her waist, the dip of her spine, and neither of us spoke for a long time. The silence between us was easy now.
When we were clean, or clean enough, we waded to the shallows and sat side by side on a flat rock that had been warmed by the sun, the water lapping at our thighs, and I told her everything about Lyra.
The cottage under the oak. The fairy with her dragonfly wings and pink hair full of flowers.
The way she’d circled me, poked my chest, touched my medals, teased me about whether all pegasus riders were this handsome.
The tea. The conversation about emotional wounds.
The potion. The warning that it wouldn’t be enough without someone who loved her completely.
And then, because Gabriella deserved the truth and I was done lying to her about anything, ever, I told her the price.
“She wanted an orgasm,” I said. My voice was quiet, matter-of-fact. “With my mouth. On her cloud bed. That was the payment. I gave it to her. It was… thorough. She seemed satisfied. The potion works. She promised.”
Gabriella was quiet for a long moment. Then she laughed, the sound bright and genuine and completely free of judgment.
“Of course she did. Of course that was the price. God, Gabriel, you have the most ridiculous life.” She leaned against my shoulder, her wet hair cool against my skin.
“Thank you. For going. For asking. For…” She gestured vaguely at the grass behind us, at the scattered clothes, at everything that had happened in the past hour.
“For all of it. I’ve been waiting for you to see me.
Really see me. For longer than you know. ”
I reached for my jacket, still lying on the bank where I’d dropped it, and retrieved the vial. The glass was warm from lying in the sun. I pulled the cork, the beeswax seal breaking with a soft pop, and handed it to her.
“This is the place,” I said quietly. “You’re safe here. Drink it.”
She took it. Tipped it back, the liquid disappearing, and for a moment nothing happened.
Then I saw it. The change. Subtle at first, a softening around her eyes, a loosening of her shoulders, the way her posture opened, as if something that had been clenched for years was finally, gradually, letting go.
She breathed. A long, slow inhale that seemed to reach parts of her lungs that hadn’t been accessed in a very long time, and when she exhaled the sound she made was halfway between a sigh and a laugh.
“I feel lighter,” she said. She turned to me, and the smile on her face was one I hadn’t seen since before the war, maybe ever, open and warm and free of the careful control she usually wore. “God, Gabriel. I feel lighter than I have in years.”
* * *
We left the water when the cool began to outweigh the warmth, our skin puckered, our hair dripping.
The grass was soft beneath us, still holding the day’s heat, and we lay on our backs side by side, letting the air dry us, our fingers interlaced between us on the crushed wildflowers.
Above, the sky was doing that thing it does in the hour before proper sunset, the blue deepening at the edges, the light turning gold and then amber and then something richer, the color that makes everything it touches look like it’s been dipped in honey.
The floating islands hung in that light, scattered across the horizon, their undersides glowing with the reflected gold, and I found myself thinking about the view from a Pegasus at three hundred feet, how the islands had looked from above during the war, how I’d scanned them for movement, for threat, for the configuration of trees that might hide an archer, and how I had never, not once, stopped to notice that they were beautiful.
“I used to dream about this,” I said. My voice was quiet, carrying no further than Gabriella’s ear.
“During the war. Not this specifically. The… quiet. The feeling of lying somewhere and not waiting for something to happen. Not listening for the sound of wings that weren’t friendly.
Just… existing. Without the constant weight of maybe not existing tomorrow.
” I turned my head on the grass to look at her.
“Peace is worth fighting for. I knew that intellectually. It took coming home to understand what it actually feels like.”
She was watching me, her blue eyes calm, the potion’s effects visible in the looseness of her expression, the way her features had settled into something that looked, for the first time since I’d returned, genuinely at rest.
“Do you have them?” she asked. “Nightmares. The kind that don’t go away.”
“They happen. Not as bad as yours. Different flavor. Mine are about choices. Men I sent somewhere they didn’t come back from.
Moments where I made the wrong call and someone paid for it.
The usual officer’s guilt cocktail, served chilled with a side of hindsight.
” I shrugged, the grass rustling beneath my shoulders.
“They’re manageable. I’ve had worse roommates. ”
“You’re strong,” she said, the way Gabriella always was when she meant something completely.
“So are you. Stronger than me, probably. You carried your weight alone for six years. I had an army.”
She smiled, and the smile reached her eyes the way it hadn’t in years, and she squeezed my hand.
We lay there as the light deepened, as gold turned to rose turned to the purple that precedes proper dark, and neither of us spoke because speaking would have been redundant.
The lake reflected the changing sky, the water holding the color long after the air had begun to lose it, and somewhere above us a skybird called, its voice carrying across the open water in a long, descending note that sounded, to my ears, like something coming home.
When the last light was clinging to the highest branches of the distant oaks, we rose.
Dressed in what remained of our clothes, which was approximately sixty percent of what we’d started with, the rest either torn beyond repair or abandoned on the bank as not worth the effort of retrieval.
I called Valen with a whistle, and he came from the trees where he’d been grazing, his dark eyes taking in our disheveled state with the judgment only a pegasus can properly deliver.
I mounted first, settling into the saddle, and reached down for Gabriella.
She took my hand, and I pulled her up in front of me, her body settling against my chest with the ease of something that had found its place and intended to keep it.
My arm went around her waist, holding her secure against me, and she leaned back, her head finding the hollow of my collarbone, her hair still damp against my shirt.
We lifted. Valen’s wings beat steady, carrying us up and away from the lake island, and the night air was cool against our skin, carrying the green smell of the islands below.
Gabriella’s body was warm against mine, her weight familiar and new at once, and I held her and tried very hard to memorize the feeling because feelings this specific, this precise, had a habit of becoming benchmarks against which all others were measured, and I wanted this one cataloged properly.
* * *
We landed in the farmyard as the first stars were appearing overhead, pinpricks of white against deepening blue.
Valen’s hooves struck the packed earth, and the sound was the same sound it had been every other landing, but nothing else was the same.
The farmhouse windows glowed warm against the gathering dark.
I could see movement inside, Angelina’s silhouette against the kitchen light, Sabrina’s wings a pale suggestion near the hearth, and the domesticity of it, the ordinary evening unfolding exactly as it had a thousand evenings before, should have been comforting.
It wasn’t comforting. It was charged. The line had been crossed.
The thing we had carried between us, unspoken and growing, had been named, acted upon, made real on grass beside a lake with wildflowers crushed beneath us and my release still warm inside her, and there was no returning to whatever we had been to each other before this afternoon.
The farmhouse would never feel the same.
Dinner would never be the same. The way we looked at each other across a table, the way our hands might brush passing a plate, the way Sabrina would watch us with those knowing eyes and Angelina would say nothing and mean everything by it, all of it had changed permanently, into territory for which I had no map and no guide and only the particular, terrifying certainty that whatever came next, I wanted it with her.
Gabriella slid from the saddle before I could help her, landing lightly on the packed earth, and turned to look up at me. Her face was calm and open.
“Thank you,” she said just for me.
I dismounted. I stood beside her in the darkening yard, and didn’t reach for her hand because I didn’t need to.
The space between us had its own gravity now, and my body knew where hers was without looking, the way it had known the weight and balance of a bow after ten thousand draws, and some kinds of knowing, once earned, never leave you.
We walked toward the house together, toward the light and the warmth and whatever came next, and above us the stars multiplied, each one a fixed point in a dark that was, for once, just dark, and not something to be feared.