19. Fable #2
“Because you have to choose it. Not in the moment… not caught up in sex or emotion or the aftermath of a fight. You have to choose it knowing exactly what it means.” His eyes meet mine, gray and steady.
“And I would rather have you without the bite than pressure you into something you’re not ready for.
Not yet. But someday, when you ask me knowing exactly what it means, I’ll give you anything you want. ”
“Anything?”
“Everything.” His voice is rough now. Raw with something I’m only beginning to understand. “I would give you everything, Fable. Every piece of me. Every year I have left. Every moment of the next three hundred years, if you’ll have them.”
My eyes are stinging.
“That’s a lot to offer a woman over crêpes.”
“The crêpes are just a bonus.”
I laugh, and it comes out watery. “I don’t know if I’m ready for forever.”
“I know. I’m not asking you to be.”
“But I want to be.” The admission surprises me. “I want to want it. I want to get there. Is that… is that enough for now?”
“That’s everything.” He reaches out, tucks a strand of hair behind my ear. “That’s more than I dared to hope for.”
And then I’m kissing him.
There’s no desperation in it this time, none of the dam-breaking, rain-on-the-windows urgency of that night in my apartment. This is different. Slower. A choice made with eyes open, with full knowledge of what I’m choosing.
He makes a sound against my mouth, half groan, half prayer, and his hands come up to frame my face with a gentleness that makes my chest ache.
“The crêpes,” he manages between kisses.
“Will keep.”
“They’re getting cold.”
“Orion.” I pull back just enough to meet his eyes. “I don’t care about the crêpes.”
His expression shifts. Cracks open.
“Are you sure?”
“I’m sure.” I reach up, touch his jaw, feel the muscle flex beneath my fingers. “I want this. I want you. Not because of the bond or the fate thing or any of that. Just because you’re you. Because you make me feel safe and drive me crazy and alphabetize my creamers.”
“That was practical…”
“Shut up and kiss me.”
He does.
This time there’s no hesitation. He kisses me like I’m oxygen, like he’s been holding his breath for days and can finally breathe. One hand cradles my jaw while the other fists in my hair, angling me exactly where he wants me, and I feel the soft scrape of his teeth against my lower lip.
“Bedroom,” he says against my mouth.
“Here is fine.”
“I want…” He pauses, and I can feel him struggling with something. “I want to take my time. I want to do this right.”
“You always do everything right. It’s annoying.”
“Fable.”
“Fine. Bedroom.”
He scoops me up, one arm under my knees, the other at my back, carrying me bridal-style back through the house. The plate of perfect crêpes sits abandoned on the counter as we pass, and I laugh against his neck at the absurdity of it all.
“You’re laughing,” he observes.
“You’re carrying me away from breakfast like a romance novel hero.”
“Is that a complaint?”
“It’s an observation.”
The bedroom is bright with snow-light, the windows turned to mirrors by the white world outside. He sets me down on the edge of the bed with exaggerated care, then stands back to look at me.
“What?” I ask, suddenly self-conscious. “Is something wrong?”
“No.” His voice is rough. “I just want to remember this.”
“Remember what?”
“You. Here. In my shirt.” He reaches out, traces the collar where it gapes open at my throat. “Choosing me.”
“I already chose you. Multiple times.”
“I know. But those were…” He pauses, searching for words. “Before. Before you knew everything. Before the confessions and the secrets and all of it.”
“And now?”
“Now you know everything. Every terrible part of me. And you’re still here.”
“The terrible parts are actually my favorite parts,” I tell him. “The obsessive organization. The lock-checking. The way you can’t let anything be imperfect.” I reach up, grab the front of his sweatpants, tug him closer. “I love your terrible parts.”
His breath catches. “You said the word.”
“What word?”
“Love.”
I freeze.
I did say it. I didn’t mean to, it just slipped out, woven into the list of things I find annoying and endearing about him.
“I…”
“Don’t take it back.” His voice is urgent now. “Please. Don’t take it back.”
“I’m not taking it back. I just…” I swallow. “I wasn’t planning to say it like that. I had a whole speech.”
“You had a speech?”
“I practiced it in the car. Before the storm. It was very eloquent.”
“I want to hear the speech.”
“I can’t remember the speech now. You made me say the word early and now my brain is short-circuiting.”
He laughs, actually laughs, warm and surprised, and sinks down onto his knees in front of me so we’re at eye level.
“Fable.” His hands find my hips, thumbs stroking slow circles against my skin through the fabric of his shirt. “I love you.”
My heart stutters.
“You’re just saying that because I said it first…”
“I’m saying it because it’s true. Because I’ve wanted to say it for weeks and I’ve been too afraid to scare you.
” His eyes are bright, gray shot through with gold, the way they get when he’s feeling something too strongly to hide.
“I love your sticky notes. All of them… the ones on your mirror and the ones on your register and the ones you leave yourself in random places and then forget about.”
“That’s ADHD.”
“I know. I love that too.” His thumbs keep moving in those slow circles. “I love your pep talks. The ones you give yourself in the stockroom when you think no one’s listening. ‘You’re fine, everything’s fine, you’re a person who does things.’ I’ve heard them all.”
“That’s embarrassing.”
“That’s brave. That’s you being brave every single day, talking yourself through the hard parts.” He leans forward, presses a kiss to my knee. “I love the way you shelve books wrong on purpose to see if I’ll notice.”
“You noticed?”
“I noticed every single time. The Duke’s Inconvenient Bride in the mystery section. The cozy vampire romance in literary fiction. The entire Sue Grafton alphabet arranged in reverse order.”
“That last one was an accident.”
“Was it?”
“…Maybe not.”
He’s smiling now, and it transforms his face, makes him look younger, lighter, less like a three-hundred-year-old king and more like a man who’s just found something he didn’t know he was looking for.
“I love you,” he says again. “I love every chaotic, impossible, beautiful thing about you. And I’m going to keep loving you for as long as you let me.”
My eyes are stinging. My throat is tight. And the speech I practiced, the eloquent one, the one with actual structure, has completely evaporated.
“I love you too,” I whisper. “I’m terrified, but I love you.”
“That’s enough.” He rises, and his mouth finds mine. “That’s everything.”
The snow-light pours through the windows as he lays me back against the pillows.
Everything is slow. Unhurried. The urgency of that rain-soaked night in my apartment has been replaced by something else entirely. A vow.
He kneels over me and takes the hem of his shirt, the one I stole, the one that smells of him, and lifts it over my head with a care that makes my breath go shallow.
Then he just looks. Down the whole length of me, laid bare in the pale morning light, and he doesn’t hurry, and he doesn’t blink, and being looked at like this should make me want to hide.
It doesn’t. It makes me arch.
“What?” I ask, when the silence stretches.
“You’re beautiful.”
“That’s a cliché.”
“It’s a fact.” He lowers himself over me, bracing on his forearms, his weight a warm cage I never want out of. “The optimal ratio of milk to flour is a fact. This is a fact. I don’t traffic in opinions before nine a.m.”
“You’re comparing me to crêpe chemistry.”
“I’m comparing you to the most precise and beautiful thing I know.”
“That’s either romantic or insane.”
“It’s usually both with me.”
He kisses me then, deep and patient, and I stop thinking about crêpe chemistry. His mouth moves to my jaw. My throat. The dip of my collarbone, where he lingers, unhurried, learning the exact pressure that catches my breath and then applying it again, and again, a scientist confirming his results.
“Orion.”
“Mm.”
“You can go faster.”
“I know.” His lips drift down my sternum. “I’m not going to.”
“Why not?”
“Because I told the woman I love that I would take my time.” He drags his mouth along the curve of my breast, close to my nipple and deliberately not on it, and smiles when I make a wounded sound. “And I’m a man of my word.”
“You’re a menace.”
“A gentleman menace.” His mouth finally closes over my nipple, hot and wet, and my whole spine bows. “You named me yourself.”
He worships me. There’s no other word for it.
He maps me with his mouth in the snow-bright quiet, unhurried, thorough, cataloging every gasp: the undersides of my breasts, the ladder of my ribs, the soft give of my belly, the crease of my hip, the inside of my knee.
By the time he finally works his way to the slick heat between my legs I’m shaking, wet and swollen and so keyed up that the first slow lick pulls a sound out of me I’ve never made in my life.
He takes his time there too.
Long, patient strokes of his tongue, no rush, no destination, until my hands are fisted in the sheets and my heels are digging into his back and I’m chanting his name to the ceiling of a house on a mountain in the middle of a snowfield where no one can hear me.
He brings me right to the edge, holds me there, suspended, sobbing, and then eases me over so gently that the orgasm doesn’t crash.
It unfolds. Long, rolling pulses that go on and on while he works me through every one of them, humming his satisfaction against my clit, his hands warm and steady on my hips.
I’m still trembling when he crawls up my body.
“Eyes open,” he rasps, wrecked, gravel and want in every syllable. “I need you to see exactly what you’re choosing.”
I open them.
His are gold. Fully gold now, no gray left at all, blazing with three hundred years of patience finally spent.