Chapter 18
Lacey
“Ugh, can you believe it?” Ellis groans, flipping through the tabloid as we exit the store and turn out onto the sidewalk.
“Yeah, I can. I wasn’t kidding when I said you wouldn’t want to kiss me like that in public.” I roll my eyes. He’s complaining, but he’s the one who bought a copy and hasn’t stopped looking at it since.
On the cheap paper cover there’s a picture of us kissing, tucked to the side of a headline about some monster being sighted in the swamp with dubious blurry photo evidence.
When he gets to the page inside, there’s a number of relatively tame snapshots of us crossing the street holding hands scattered around the more damning kiss.
I remember that kiss, the way his body pressed against my hips as his fingers fit into the curve of space between my ass and my thigh, the sweater dress that he just couldn’t stop touching.
“God, we look good though,” he mutters to himself, teeth worrying his lower lip as he checks out a different page. “Is it weird if I get this framed?”
I snort, following him down the sidewalk. His fingers link through mine, and he pauses only to press a kiss to the top of my head.
We aren’t dating. Yet. At least, we said we weren’t. We talked a lot about trying to ease into this whole thing, take things slowly. And, yet, in the couple weeks since the incident, we’ve barely spent any nights apart. It doesn’t feel like I could possibly ever get enough of him.
Even just walking down the sidewalk together, I can’t help but get lost staring at him.
Ellis looks more back to his old self. He hasn’t trimmed the shaggy fuzz that crept along his jawline, and I kinda hope he won’t.
It looks good on him. His incisor teeth are still more pronounced, but he’s been filing his claws down.
After a couple blocks, Ellis stops and hands me the paper bag—shower curtain rings, dish soap, and two pints of ice cream. It’s already growing damp with condensation. “Here.”
“Wooow.” I drag the word out. “You’re gonna make me carry it all the way home?”
“You hold the bag, and I’ll hold you,” he clarifies, rolling his eyes. He nods to the overpass ledge that leads down a steep hill. “Walking is, like, for the birds.”
“Specifically birds.”
Ellis carefully rolls up the tabloid magazine and stows it in his pocket before he puts an arm around my back and then dips a little to thread an arm under my knees.
In a second, I’m swept off my feet, pressed against his chest. The feeling of it has become so familiar my arms loop around his neck before I even fully settle against him, his arms secure around me.
“Don’t drop me,” I tease, poking the soft part of his cheek. Ellis lets out the most aggrieved sigh ever, but there’s fondness in his eyes.
“It was one time,” he scoffs, putting a foot up on the concrete barrier. In another step, the world tilts and we glide down from the overpass, catching a breeze that pulls us up into the sky.
There’s dim blue fog, a cloud of sleep rolling in over the city evening, only the tips of skyscrapers cutting through the haze. The clear, rosy dusk light glints gold and lilac across the buildings.
Leaning my head against his chest, I feel Ellis’s hand tighten around my shoulder. I could get used to this.
Somewhere between work and the outer edge of Goethal, where the buildings are shorter and older, Ellis tilts a wing, and we descend back below. His wings beat as we slow, stopping before the fire escape on the side of my apartment building.
He lands gracefully, and I slip out of his arms, clutching the paper bag that’s already starting to weaken from condensation. I roll open the window, duck inside, and shed my sweatshirt for the warmth of my apartment.
The glint of streetlight off his golden eyes before the shape of his wings emerge from the shadowed fire escape always makes my heart skip a beat.
Ellis rakes his hair back from his face and flashes me that fanged smile that makes me weak in the knees. I take a step back, letting him crowd me against the wall. His hands come up to the sides of my face, one blunted claw tipping my chin back for a kiss.
My fingers snake down the back of his neck, pulling him to me. He’s warm and solid.
He captures my lower lip between his teeth, and I let myself sink into it, tangling my hands in his hair.
Pressed between the hard lines of the wall at my back and his body, all I can think as his warm soft mouth takes mine is how I could possibly get any closer to him.
My body needs his weight on top of me, aching to be overwhelmed by him, to tangle myself so utterly with him I lose track of everything else.
He breaks the kiss for a low groan to escape, I swear it reverberates through me and settles low in my belly. Ellis leans his forehead against mine, our noses grazing one another, before his head rolls onto my shoulder.
“I missed you.”
I stifle a giggle. “I didn’t even leave your line of sight.”
“Uh, you absolutely did,” he says, and flicks the light switch a few times with growing insistence, the room staying dark regardless. “When are you going to get some lights in this place?”
“When I actually have time to,” I promise, leaning into him. I’ve been so busy at work, because it turns out all the material from my conspiracy board was a great start to making an exposé piece for Channel 6.
I have a different conspiracy board now, it’s much smaller.
It’s two newspaper clippings pinned to the fridge with a couple of magnets leftover from the last tenant.
Both are blurry sightings of the mutant that escaped Steel’s lab, with quotes from terrified locals.
We’re gonna find him and get him home, somehow.
It was Ellis’s idea. I know he doesn’t think it, but God, what a man. He’s so good.
Each slow breath against him relaxes my body a little deeper until a satisfying shiver creeps up my spine. I can’t believe I ever let myself think love could never be this good.
He sighs against my shoulder. “The minute you have something to bang your shins into . . .”
“Oh, well that settles it. No lights, no furniture.”
Ellis gives me one last quick kiss, before he detangles himself from me and disappears into the dark of my apartment. A beat later the built-in stovetop light flicks on, casting a warm, dim glow that disappears around the corner from the kitchen.
I find the mattress on the ground and flop onto it, rolling over to find the couple scented candles that I light and place up on the windowsill. Right now, this and the stack of boxes of my clothes Adrianna helped me pack up and move are the sum total of my life.
At this point living here is more like camping than anything else; there are so many household things I don’t have. I remembered to pick up a shower curtain but of course forgot shower curtain rings.
It’s a pretty standard apartment—the walls, doors, kitchen cabinets, outlets and light switches all got the landlord special, a thick coat of off-white paint applied indiscriminately.
We had to pry the bathroom light switch free from a couple layers of it, so I didn’t have to shower in the dark again.
Still, I can’t hate it. There’s something about a fresh coat of paint, blobby and inexpertly applied as it is.
I’m pulled from my thoughts by the sound of the crinkling paper bag as Ellis rummages around in it from the other room, probably digging for the pack of condoms.
He is so not slick, I think fondly. It does give me time to roll over and grab a towel out of one of the boxes, spread it out over the mattress. Not taking any chances.
I flop back onto it, fluffing my hair and propping myself up on my elbow. In the seconds ticking by, I tug the neckline of my shirt down a little more.
“What are you doing?” I call out after a few too many moments waiting in this pose.
“Just a sec,” he replies over the sound of the sink running. There’s a few clinks and clatters, the sink running as he rinses the last couple dishes from when we cooked dinner together earlier, loading up the dishwasher. It beeps and hums as it begins to run.
Ellis emerges from the kitchen, silhouetted by the dim light.
“We went out for dish soap originally, didn’t we?” he says as he hands me a glass of water that makes me pause. Between the water and running the dishwasher, I melt a little into the bed. I don’t know why it makes me all choked up.
“This is like, the third time you’ve done this,” I say, kind of pointlessly, swallowing past the tightness in my throat. He sinks down onto the mattress next to me, the springs creaking and dipping under his knee.
“It’s just water,” he says, like it’s nothing. He sprawls out on the mattress beside me, rolling over onto his side.
“And the dishes.”
“Yeah, and you made dinner. I haven’t had a home cooked meal like that in forever.”
“You did help.”
“You mean the part where I moved the uncooked chicken from the package to the pan? Or the part where you said, ‘stop standing where I’m trying to walk, just stay over here and stir the sauce’?”
“Yeah, that’s still your fault for not reading my mind,” I hum, threading an arm around him and tucking my forehead against his chest. I don’t know how to explain that all the little things he does are so much more than that.
It’s the gesture, the thoughtfulness, the simple warmth of it.
I want to keep the feeling it gives me in a jar, to preserve it forever.
There aren’t curtains up yet to diffuse the harsh glare of the setting sun, it’s an odd mixture between too bright and too dark. My eyes hurt trying to see, so I close them and just feel how good it is to be held by him.