Chapter 11 #3
My thighs tremble around his head. My marks blaze, gold light filling the lantern room, reflecting off the glass windows so the whole lighthouse must look like a beacon from outside.
I don't care. I can't care about anything except his mouth, his hands, the pressure building inside me like standing on the edge of something enormous.
"Don't stop," I manage. "Please don't—"
He adds his fingers, curling them inside me.
His tongue flattens against the spot that makes my vision white out.
I shatter. The orgasm rolls through me in waves, my body locking, then releasing.
I'm saying his name like it's the only word I know.
His free hand finds mine, holds it tight, grounding me while I come apart.
He stays with me through it, gentling his touch as the aftershocks ripple through. When I finally go boneless, he presses a kiss to my inner thigh and crawls back up my body, settling his weight on top of me. His face is flushed. His pupils are blown wide.
"Hi," he says softly.
"Hi yourself." My voice sounds wrecked. "Get up here."
He does. I reach between us and free him from his remaining clothes, wrapping my hand around him.
He groans into my neck, his hips jerking forward involuntarily, and the vulnerability of that reaction, the loss of control from someone who controls everything, makes me want him so badly it actually hurts.
"Now," I tell him. "Kaelren, now."
He enters me slowly, watching my face the entire time, checking, making sure.
My body stretches to accommodate him, and the feeling is so much; fullness and pressure and the rightness of it, like a key turning in a lock.
He stops when he's fully seated, forehead pressed to mine, both of us breathing hard.
"Move," I whisper.
He moves.
Long, deep strokes that I feel in my entire body.
His hands grip my hips, adjusting the angle until he hits a spot that makes me cry out, and then he stays there, finding a rhythm that's steady and devastating.
Each thrust pushes a sound out of me, gasps and moans and fragmented versions of his name that I couldn't hold back if I tried.
He lowers his mouth to my ear. "You are everything," he breathes, and his voice is ragged, barely holding together. "You are everything I have ever wanted."
I wrap my legs around him and pull him deeper, and we both groan.
The pace quickens. His composure cracks, the careful, measured Kaelren giving way to something primal, something that matches the wildness I feel building in my blood.
His thrusts go harder, faster, each one punctuated by the sound of our bodies meeting, and I'm climbing again, climbing fast, the tension coiling tight in my core.
"Come with me," I gasp. "Together. I want—"
He adjusts his angle, slides a hand between us, finds the bundle of nerves with his thumb, presses, and I’m gone.
I come so hard I see stars bursting behind my eyelids, my body seizing around him.
He follows me over the edge with a groan torn from somewhere deep inside him, hips stuttering, his whole body going rigid against mine.
We collapse together. A tangle of sweaty limbs, heaving breaths, marks slowly dimming from their peak glow. He rolls to his side, pulls me against him. I press my face into his chest, listen to his heartbeat gradually slow.
Neither of us speaks for a long time. We don’t need to. His hand traces idle patterns on my back. I feel Iteration Eight Elle’s contentment like a warm weight in my chest. This version of her is happy. Truly, deeply happy.
For a few stolen minutes, I get to feel that too.
Later, Kaelren is asleep. I feel his breathing, slow and deep, his arm still draped over my waist. But Iteration Eight Elle is restless.
She slips out from under his arm carefully, pulls on his discarded shirt. It smells like him, like wood-smoke and that dark-spice scent that is Kaelren in every iteration, and pads barefoot down the spiral staircase.
The night air hits her skin when she steps outside, cold and sharp with salt. The lighthouse sits on a rocky outcrop, a narrow stone walkway leading to the edge where the cliff drops straight down to the ocean below. The water is dark and churning, waves crashing against the rocks fifty feet below.
Peeble is already there.
They're perched on the stone railing at the edge of the walkway, wings folded, their jewel-encrusted shell catching the moonlight in tiny prisms of color. They're just quietly sitting, looking out at the water.
Peeble being quiet is unsettling. In any iteration.
"Can't sleep?" I ask, settling down beside them.
"Beetles don't sleep. We enter a state of contemplative magnificence that merely resembles sleep to the untrained observer." A pause. "But no. I couldn't. Too much in my head."
"Yeah, tell me about it."
We sit in silence for a moment, the sound of waves filling the space between us. The ocean below is dark and endless; the horizon is a blurred line where water meets sky.
"I just want everyone to be safe," I say finally. "That's all I want. Kaelren, Bryx, Mora, Sarnyx—all of them. I want them to have lives that aren't defined by running from something. I want them to be happy."
Peeble turns one of their compound eyes toward me. "You know what's funny about the ocean, Elle?"
"That it's wet?"
"That it's terrifying." They gesture with one tiny leg toward the water below.
"All that depth. All that unknown. You can't see what's in it.
You don't know what's down there. Every logical instinct tells you to stay up here where it's safe and solid and you can see the ground beneath your feet.
" They shift on the railing. "But the ocean doesn't care about your logic.
The ocean just is. And the only way to get where you need to go is to stop standing on the edge and throw yourself in. "
I stare at them. "Since when are you philosophical?"
"I contain multitudes, Elle. Sparkling, bedazzled multitudes." They preen one wing. "I'm just saying. Sometimes the safe choice and the right choice are not the same thing. Sometimes you've got to jump and trust that the water will catch you."
Jump.
The word lands on me like a physical weight.
Take the leap of faith.
Thalia's voice echoes in my head, sharp and urgent. When the time comes, you must take the leap of faith. Don't hesitate. Don't think. Just jump. There are no more chances.
I look at Peeble. I look at the ocean below. I look up at the sky, at the stars scattered across it like spilled sugar on a dark tablecloth.
Oh.
Oh!
The lighthouse. The cliff. The water below. This is it. This is the leap Thalia was talking about. This is where I jump.
My heart hammers. I stand up, and Iteration Eight Elle's body responds, confused, resisting. She doesn't understand why we're standing. She doesn't understand why I'm looking at the cliff's edge with purpose instead of fear.
I'm sorry, I think. I'm so sorry. But I need your body to do something, and you're going to have to trust me.
I don't know if she can hear me. I don't know how the merge works from her end. But I push forward, toward the edge, and I feel her feet carry me there even as her instincts scream to stop.
The stone walkway ends. Below, the ocean churns. Dark. Cold. Unknown. Every reasonable part of my brain is telling me this is insane. That I'm going to hit the rocks. That the water will swallow me whole. That there's nothing down there but death.
But Thalia said no more chances. And Peeble said the ocean doesn't care about your logic.
And somewhere out there in another iteration, in another fold of time, Kaelren is looking for me. My Kaelren. Lost in the same tangled mess of timelines I've been stumbling through, and he's looking for me, and the people I love are holding down the fort back home and praying I find my way back.
I look up at the night sky one more time. The stars are bright here. Brighter than they've been in any iteration. And for just a second, standing on the edge of a cliff in a borrowed body, fifty feet above dark water, I feel calm.
I look back at the lighthouse. At the warm glow still visible from the lantern in the room where Kaelren sleeps. At Peeble, who has turned both compound eyes toward me with an expression that might be understanding, or might be alarm, or might be both.
"Elle?" they say. "What are you doing?"
"Taking the leap," I say.
And I jump.
The air catches me. The stars blur. The ocean rushes up.
And the world folds.