Chapter 23 #2
"We have all night." He rolls again, finding a rhythm.
His head tips back, his throat exposed, and in the blue-white light from the window he looks like something from the books he loves.
Otherworldly, luminous, too beautiful to be real but real anyway.
"We have all night in my apartment with my door locked and no one is going to hear us. "
"No one?"
"First floor. Thick walls."
"You asked your landlord about soundproofing?"
"I asked about noise policies. Same thing."
I laugh and he clenches around me and the laugh becomes a sound I don't recognize from my own mouth. He grins, wicked, delighted, the Devin who put cayenne in Melissa's latte, and does it again.
"Found a trick," he says.
"You found a — Dev, if you do that again I'm going to —"
He does it again. I grip his hips, not guiding, just holding on. He's setting the pace, the angle, the rhythm, and everything about this is new. Not the sex, but the confidence. The way he moves like he owns this moment, which he does. His apartment. His mattress. His body. His choice.
"Silas." His voice goes rough, his rhythm stuttering. "I need — can you —"
I sit up. Chest to chest, his legs around my waist. The angle changes and he gasps and his arms come around my neck and we're breathing each other's air.
"Touch me," he says. "Please."
I wrap my hand around him. He moans. No pillow to hide in, no wall to muffle against. Just the sound, filling his apartment, the first intimate sound these walls have heard from us.
"I love you," I say, because I can't not.
"I love you." He's close. I can feel it, the tension building, his body tightening around me. "Silas, I'm —"
"I know. Me too. Come for me."
He comes with my name on his lips and his arms locked around my neck and the sound of it, raw, unfiltered, fully him, pulls me over the edge with him.
We hold on through it, forehead to forehead, breathing ragged, the mattress on the floor and the herbs on the sill and the jellyfish still pulsing on the forgotten laptop.
After, we lie on the mattress in his apartment and look at the ceiling. His head on my chest. My hand in his hair. The laptop's gone to the screensaver. Slow-moving colors that drift across the ceiling like aurora borealis.
"First time in my own bed," he says. "My own space."
"How does it feel?"
"Like I'm real." He turns his face into my chest. "Like I exist on paper now. There's a lease with my name on it. There's a kitchen with my herbs. There are walls that just heard me —" He laughs against my skin. "That's embarrassing, actually."
"The walls enjoyed it."
"Stop."
"The walls are very supportive."
"I'm going to evict you from my apartment."
"You can't. I'm your guest."
"Month-to-month guest. Don't get comfortable."
"Too late."
He's quiet for a while. The screensaver colors move. The apartment is warm and dark and smells like new carpet and French press coffee and us.
"Silas?"
"Yeah?"
"Thank you for asking me to stay with you. Even though I said no."
"You said no. It was the right call."
"It was the right call. But the asking mattered. Because you weren't editing. You were telling me what you wanted even though it was messy and contradicted everything you'd said. That's what we promised. The messy truth."
"The messy truth."
"And my messy truth is that I almost said yes." His voice is very quiet. "I was standing there and you said 'stay with me' and every part of me wanted to say yes. Not because I needed saving. Because your terrible bed with the creaky frame feels more like home than anywhere I've ever slept."
"But you said no."
"Because I needed to know I could say no. That I could choose you from a position of having something of my own, not from a position of having nothing." He lifts his head, looks at me. "Does that make sense?"
"Perfect sense."
"And now I have something of my own. And from here, from this, I can choose you. Not because I need to. Because I want to."
"Month to month."
"Month to month." He puts his head back on my chest. "But for the record, oak bookshelves."
"Already ordered."
"And the reading nook."
"Window seat. Storage underneath."
"And a real bed."
"King-sized. Reading lamps. Deep nightstands."
"You've really thought about this."
"I've thought about nothing else for months."
"Liar. You've thought about Kvothe."
"Kvothe and the bookshelves. Roughly equal mental real estate."
"I'm on par with a fictional disaster wizard. I'm honored."
"You should be. He's very compelling."
Devin laughs. Then yawns. Then burrows deeper into my chest with the boneless ease of a person who's warm and safe and satisfied and in his own apartment for the first time in his life.
"Stay tonight?" he asks. Already half-asleep. "The whole night?"
"I'm already staying."
"Just making sure."
"I'm here, Dev."
"Good." A pause. One more breath, slowing. Then, mumbled against my chest: "First night in my apartment. First person in my bed. First everything."
"How is it?"
But he's asleep. Out like a switch, the way he does when he's truly safe. Not the library doze, not the alert half-rest. The complete surrender.
I fall asleep to the steady beat of Devin's heart.
First night. His place. Our beginning.