9. Posy #2
I tie off the last strip and don’t let go of his hand.
I mean to. The letting-go instruction leaves my brain and gets lost somewhere in transit, and I sit there holding his bandaged hand in both of mine, and when I look up he’s already looking at me, and the kitchen goes very quiet and very small.
His gaze drops to my mouth. Mine drops to his.
One of us leans first, and I honestly couldn’t testify to which, and the distance starts closing with the slow inevitability of a tide.
I stop it.
My hand flattens against his chest, over the shirt, over the silence where a heartbeat should be, and I hold us both exactly there, an inch from the point of no return.
“Not like this,” I say, and my voice comes out lower than I planned. “Not as a thank-you for bleeding at a fence. When I kiss you, Valerian, it’s going to be because I chose it on a boring afternoon when you haven’t rescued anyone. You’ll have to earn ordinary.”
He holds still under my palm, eyes dark, and then he inclines his head, slow and formal, accepting terms.
“Then I will court the boring afternoon of my life,” he says.
I take my hand back before it can revise the treaty, and my pulse takes a long while to accept the ruling.
Back in the library, with his hands wrapped and the bleeding stopped but not healed, I go through the journals until I find it. Third volume, buried between lunar cycle notes and a recipe for “ward water.” My grandmother’s handwriting is messier here, hurried, and the line is underlined twice.
The prisoner may cross the boundary, but the curse will exact the distance in blood.
“‘The curse will exact the distance in blood,’” I read aloud. “So you can leave.”
“For a price I would gladly pay.”
“Well, I wouldn’t.” I slam the journal shut. “You nearly tore yourself apart crossing a property line, and I was standing right there. What happens if I drive into town? That’s a county away. You’d bleed out before you made it halfway.”
“Then I would bleed out.”
“That’s not…” I press my hands against my eyes. “That’s not a solution, Valerian. That’s suicide.”
“It would be worth it, to be at your side.”
“Stop saying that!” I drop my hands and glare at him. “Stop acting like your life doesn’t matter! Stop treating yourself like you’re disposable just because some dusty old curse decided I’m your… your…”
“My what?”
I don’t have an answer. I don’t know what I am to him. Bride. Fated mate. The words are all too big for a woman who was arguing about late fees a week ago.
“Stay put,” I say finally. “When I go into town, you stay here. No heroic boundary-crossing. No bleeding yourself dry because you felt me drive away. Just stay.”
“And if something happens to you?”
“Then you text me. You know how to text now, don’t you? Extensively.” He has the grace to look faintly embarrassed. “If I’m not back in two hours, you’re allowed to start panicking. Until then, you stay inside the boundary and you don’t do anything stupid.”
He’s quiet for a long moment.
“I do not like this,” he says finally.
“I don’t care. I’m not watching you kill yourself because you can’t stand a few hours apart.”
“It is not about what I can stand.” He leans forward, bandaged hands resting on his knees. “You are my bride, Posy. The person I waited a century in the dark to find. And the thought of you out there, in a world I do not understand, without me…”
“I don’t need protection.”
“I know.” His lips curve, barely. “You are fierce, and you once struck me in the head with a fire poker. I am aware you can care for yourself. It does not stop the wanting. It does not stop the need to be near you, to…”
He stops.
“To what?” I ask softly.
“To matter.” The word comes out rough. “I was nothing for so long that nothing began to feel earned. A prisoner. A thing in a box. Now you are here, and you have handed me a purpose, and I am terrified of losing it. Of losing you.”
I don’t know what to say. I don’t know how to tell him I’m terrified too, not of him anymore but of this thing growing between us, this gravity that makes me want to hand him everything he’s asking for and a few things he hasn’t thought to ask.
“Two hours,” I say instead. “You’ll stay here, and you’ll text me if you need anything, and when I get back we’ll figure this out. Together.”
“Together, then,” he repeats, careful with it, a man testing new currency.
I stand, and he stands with me, and for a moment we just look at each other across the dusty library.
“I will be here,” he says quietly. “Waiting. As I have always waited.”
“Don’t be dramatic about it.”
“I am never dramatic.”
“You sent me seventeen exclamation points.”
“That was the device’s error,” he says, with tremendous dignity, and I’m still smiling when I find my keys on the foyer table.
I grab my bag, walk out the front door and down the drive, and I don’t look back until I reach the gate.
He’s there.
Standing at the boundary, one bandaged hand pressed flat against the air, watching me with those silver eyes that see too much. He doesn’t push. He just stands, a sentinel at the edge of his whole world.
I get in my car. Start the engine. Pull through the gates and onto the road.
In the rearview mirror I watch him shrink, a dark figure against the iron bars, hand still raised against the thing that keeps him.
The ache under my sternum has a shape now, and I drive the first mile arguing with it.
It’s the bond, probably. Vampire magic, prophecy chemistry, some spell older than the alphabet deciding my feelings for me.
That would be the sensible explanation, and I cling to it for about half the drive, right up until I remember that the bond didn’t make him clean my grandmother’s house, and it didn’t make him hold still while I wrapped his hands, and it didn’t put seventeen exclamation points in my phone.
He’s still there when I round the bend. He’s still there, I’d bet everything I own, right now.
Waiting.
As he has always waited.
My phone buzzes at the first red light.
The house is unacceptably quiet. Return to me safely.
Before I can put the phone down, it buzzes again.
That was not a command. Unless it is working.
I’m still arguing with my own smile when the light turns green.