Chapter 9 #6
I told her about the way Gabriella’s body had felt beneath mine, tight and wet and taking me completely, and the way she’d moaned when she came, and how nothing in six years of war had prepared me for the devastating peace of watching someone you love find joy in your arms.
Through all of it, Sabrina listened. Her eyes never left my face, her body still on the rock beside me, and when I finished the only sound was the lake and our breathing and the distant call of a skybird somewhere above the trees.
She smiled, and she reached over and took my hand.
“That was… thoughtful of you,” she said.
“Helping her that way. The potion. The… everything.” The smile wavered, and beneath it I could see the jealousy, plain and unvarnished, the hurt of someone watching from the outside of a joy they had wanted for themselves.
“She needed someone. I’m glad it was you. I’m glad she has that. Really, I am.”
The “really” did heavy lifting. I squeezed her hand, and she squeezed back, and for a moment we sat there in silence, two people holding hands on a rock beside a lake that had witnessed considerably more honesty than it had signed up for.
“I want that too,” she said quietly. Almost too quietly to hear over the water. “With you. The closeness. The… everything. I’ve wanted it for longer than I should admit, and now that I’m saying it out loud I feel like I’m standing on the edge of something very high with no idea how to jump.”
The confession cost her something. I could see it in her face, the vulnerability she usually hid behind charm and teasing and the armor of being the beautiful one, the one who could get what she wanted with a smile and a well-timed compliment.
Sabrina didn’t do unsure. Sabrina did confident, bold, forward-moving.
This Sabrina, sitting beside me with her hand in mine and her voice barely above a whisper, was someone I had seen maybe three times in our entire lives.
“I don’t know how to start,” she said. “With you. I’m used to…
knowing. Being the one who decides, who initiates, who takes what she wants.
But you’re… you. You’re Gabriel. And you’re the man who came home, and you’re the only person who’s ever made me feel like maybe I don’t have to be the strong one all the time, and I don’t know how to ask for that without feeling like I’m taking something from Gabriella that she just got and deserves to keep. ”
Her body was warm against mine on the rock, her wing brushing my bare shoulder, and the physical attraction arrived with the force of something that had been building since the moment I’d come home and found her grown, confident, beautiful in a way that had nothing to do with the girl I remembered.
Her lips parted slightly as she waited for my response, and every cell in my body that wasn’t currently occupied with guilt was very enthusiastically voting in favor of exploring the geography of Sabrina’s body with the same thoroughness I’d applied to her sister’s.
But guilt had the majority share, and caution held the deciding vote, and what came out of my mouth was not what either of us wanted to hear.
“We should give it time,” I said. “This is… complicated doesn’t begin to cover it.
Gabriella and I, we… crossed a line that can’t be uncrossed, and I need to figure out what that means before we add another variable.
You deserve more than… whatever this is right now.
Whatever I am right now. Someone who can give you everything, not just… pieces.”
I saw the disappointment. It flashed across her face before she could hide it, and then the mask slid back into place, the bright smile, the confident set of her shoulders, and she squeezed my hand one more time before letting go.
“Time,” she said. “Right. Of course. Time is… good. Time is very… temporal.” She stood, brushing grass from her dress, and the movement carried the energy of someone who was very determined to look like they were fine when they were approximately the opposite of fine.
“We should head back. Angelina will worry. Or Gabriella will worry. Someone will worry. Worrying is what this family does between meals.”
I stood with her, pulling my shirt back on, and we walked to Valen in silence. She mounted first, settling into the saddle, and when I mounted behind her she leaned back against my chest with a familiarity that suggested whatever I’d said about time, her body had already made its decision.
We lifted. Valen’s wings caught the evening air, and the island dropped away below us, the water holding the last of the light in fragments too bright to look at directly.
Sabrina’s body was warm against mine, her wings folded behind her, her hair whipping back to brush my face, and as we flew toward home through the gathering dark, I held her and tried very hard not to think about the impossible geometry of loving two women who shared so much of my history and might somehow share my future, and how no amount of military training had prepared me for the battlefield of my own heart.