Chapter Thirty-Four Taissa #3
She drinks in his every word greedily, snatching up the bits of himself that he hesitantly offers.
He had braces in secondary school, with green rubber bands he quickly regretted because it looked like he constantly had spinach in his teeth.
Kion loves dogs and hates cats, but he might like one of the sphynx cats, just because they’re so ugly that he doesn’t know if anybody else would adopt them (her heart twists painfully in her chest at the look on his face when he whispers this, faltering briefly on the word adopt).
The orphanage he grew up in was called the Waywardly Home, and he did something there, something terrible, that casts a shadow over his face as he quickly changes the subject toward how he loves jam tarts, but not the sandwiched sorts, and how he once tried to fly on a broomstick and broke both his arms because carriwitchet skills apparently do not translate well to the domain of flying household items.
His eyes are crinkled in the corners as she offers small fragments of herself in return (fragments that mean nothing, yet everything): She doesn’t listen to half the band shirts she owns, she just likes the designs (shameful, she knows); she’s ever-fearful of scalding her tongue on tea, which is why she does sometimes plunk a wee ice cube into it—and by the look on Kion’s face, you’d think she was confessing to murdering somebody (fair enough—it’s distinctly, traitorously, and disgustingly un-Scottish of her; a shame to her ancestors).
She gardens out of violence and crochets because of it, too, which makes Kion make that low rumbling noise in his throat that is half a laugh, half a disbelieving groan.
His body is so warm next to hers; he smells faintly of that intoxicating cologne, but more strongly of soap and aftershave and the clean, musky scent that’s just him.
Hardly daring to believe it’s allowed, she reaches over and does what she’s always wanted to: She wraps one of his dark waves around her finger, toying absent-mindedly with Kion’s hair.
It’s just like she always imagined (Teenage Taissa is pumping her fist), silky and soft.
It’s the confusion in his eyes that brings her pause, though: a gentle puzzlement as she plays with his hair.
Like he doesn’t quite understand what she’s doing, or why she’s doing it, why she would even want to.
Taissa swallows hard. Haven’t any of his exes shown him what small acts of affection are?
Or were they only with him for the fame, and for the sex, turning and fleeing once he wanted…
more? (Taissa has never been so glad to have broken up him and Chasca: She never liked the way that woman had simpered to the paps.)
“What are you doing?” Kion whispers as Taissa brushes back his hair and leans over, shyly placing a kiss on his forehead.
He sounds so uncertain. Somewhat suspicious.
(Like Cronus had, she realizes with a small smile.
Perhaps these are the ones she loves the most: the ones most in need of it.) She smooths out the crease between his brows with her thumb, and he blinks.
Sometimes, looking at him is like gazing at a hairline crack in a mirror. Barely visible, the lines of his trauma, but at just the right angle, they make themselves known.
Hasn’t anybody touched him like this before? In small, little ways, just to show him that they care? Taissa cups his cheek. “Admiring you,” she admits, and is rewarded as Kion Locke—gigantic carriwitchet player, snarling coach and captain—blushes to his roots.
“Oh,” he rasps, looking both pleased and unsure. After a moment, he hesitantly strokes her hair, twining one of her curls around his finger. When she doesn’t jerk away from him, he seems to relax, tracing patterns on her back as she snakes an arm around his torso.
“Can I ask you something?” she mumbles, fighting off sleep.
He sounds wary, but she won’t pry into whatever he did at the Waywardly Home. Not yet. “I guess…”
“When you told Everest Huang I had Pixie Pox”—she peeks up at him—“was our rivalry really the only reason why?” There’s an embarrassing amount of hope in her voice, because there’s the truth: It was also jealousy that had Taissa breaking up him and Chasca.
When Kion is quiet, she feels like a fool. But then he sighs.
“No.” His Adam’s apple bobs; she’s noticed how hard it is for him to be vulnerable.
The Glamour glyph constantly on his chest proves it.
“I don’t think so. There was always something about you, sweetheart,” Kion adds, a little gruffly.
“You drove me insane. Back then, I couldn’t understand why you disliked me so much, and it just…
It tortured me. And I couldn’t understand why you liked Huang so much—”
“—and not you?”
“Maybe.” He shifts underneath her. “I mean. Yeah. I felt—I don’t know. Jealous. For what it’s worth, I’m—”
“Don’t you dare say you’re sorry,” Taissa tells him, pressing her lips to his, a soft, sweet kiss, just to catch his next words before they fall.
“Because I’m not,” she mumbles against his mouth.
Not if it means they can be here now, together, tangled in each other’s warmth.
“And I think we’ve had rather enough apologizing for one day. ”
Another rumbling laugh. “He wasn’t good for you, anyway.”
“And you are?” she whispers, pulling back, and it’s a joke, but Kion’s voice is suddenly very serious.
“Yeah,” he says, pulling her closer to him and hesitantly pressing a kiss to the top of her head, like the action is new to him. “I am. I will be. I promise.”