13. The Dreamwalk
Chapter thirteen
The Dreamwalk
Marcus left yet again with his lips pressed in a tight line and white around the mouth.
He slammed the door so hard the bolt complained on the way home. I lay on the bed and listened to him disappear down the hallway while my body slowly caught up to everything that had just happened.
Three sets of fingerprints rising. Jasper’s at my throat. Eli’s at the inside of my thigh. Callum’s at the back of my neck. Callum’s nip on my jaw. I was still soaking wet from the memory.
The bond was singing.
I choose them, I thought. They get to. He doesn’t.
I pushed the thought through the bond hoping it carried through in full. I choose you.
The shadows had pulled in close around me like a second skin. The candle in the sconce had burned almost to the cup. I was not, in any sense Marcus would have understood, alone.
***
For a long while I did nothing but breathe and let my body settle.
The marks went from hot to tender to a low warm ache.
The candle in the sconce burned down past its own grease, guttered, steadied, and burned down again.
I let the darkness have the room. I had learned in this house that the dark was the one thing in it that did not belong to Marcus.
Past the bolted door, the house went on without me.
Boots on the boards. Low voices that dropped when they passed my door and picked back up once they had gone by.
More of them than there had been the day before.
Marcus had brought people in, and people did not get brought in for a woman who was simply being kept somewhere quiet.
They got brought in for a woman who was about to be moved, or used, or decided about.
I lay still and listened to them settle things I could not hear, and I made myself a promise that whatever they were planning, I would be somewhere they had not thought to look.
I did not follow the threads out. Not at first.
Reaching down them in this room would have been like pulling three good men into the dark beside me, and I had spent a lot of my life learning what it cost to drag the people you loved into your worst places.
So I held them the way you hold a hand in the dark without squeezing it.
I waited the dark out. I paced the room.
I slept. I screamed. I paced again, slept again, and wept.
I waited for what felt like an eternity until the loneliness outgrew my fear of what wanting them might cost.
Then I broke. I could not wait anymore.
***
In the grove, I hadn’t just been feeling Eli touch me.
I’d been paying attention to him.
The way he warned me before every touch. The way his focus moved down the silver thread before his hands ever followed it. Careful. Intentional.
I understood it now.
Our bond could carry more than feelings, sensations, and expressions.
It could carry direction.
I pressed my hand flat against my chest and reached for the dark thread.
It answered immediately.
Of course you did, I thought.
You always do.
The room around me blurred at the edges as I followed the thread outward, feeling for the place where it led.
The shadows moved with me this time.
I let them.
Then I stepped through.
***
Callum was in the grove.
Not the real one. A softer version. The cypress trees taller than real cypress. The moss greener. The great magnolia at the center, an enormous, slow-breathing thing with blooms the size of dinner plates.
He was sitting on a fallen log at the edge of the moss circle. Flannel shirt, sleeves pushed up. Head down.
He looked up when I came through.
He stood up.
“How,” he said.
“Eli taught me without knowing he was teaching me.”
“Of course he did.”
I walked across the moss to him.
“I hate being trapped in that room. I should probably be figuring out how to get out of there, but I'm tired. And it reeks, god, it stinks so badly with whatever nastiness they spilled all over the bed. Plus the blood and yuck on the floor. It’s just fucking gross.”
He stopped breathing for one long breath. Then he let it out.
“Come here, baby.”
I went.
He folded me into his arms and laid his face against the top of my head. His shirt smelled like cedar, wood-smoke, and the sweet, wonderful smell of him. I marveled at the details brought into this dream realm.
We stood like that for a long time.
“You came to me,” he said.
“You’re there, first and always.” An image of him with the axe above his head as I unpacked my car popped into my mind, triggering a ton of memories. “I guess you always have been.”
“You found me.” He pulled back half a step. His hands came up to my face. His thumbs along my cheekbones. “On your own.”
On your own. The words should have landed like a gift. For a breath, they landed like a hook.
That was the thing I had not allowed myself to face.
The bond had not asked me. It had struck before I knew any of their names, the way Marcus’s roses bloomed out of nothing and decided where I would go and who would always be able to find me.
I had spent three years being chosen by a creature that called the choosing love.
I did not know how to tell a bond from a leash anymore.
I must have gone still, because Callum went still with me.
“How do I know this is mine?” I said. “And not just another thing that owns me and calls it mine?”
He did not rush it. He never rushed anything.
“Because I’d let you go,” he said. “Right now. Turn around and walk away if that was what you wanted. It would gut me. I’d do it anyway,” His thumb moved on my cheekbone.
“That’s the difference, baby. He built a door that only locks.
Mine stays open. Our bond isn’t a prison.
It’s a question. You get to choose your answer every day. ”
I answered it.
***
He undressed me like it was the first time. Like he had been thinking about nothing else the whole time I had been away from him.
He started at my mouth. Kissed me deep and unhurried. His hand found the hem of my shirt and lifted it without breaking the kiss. He laid his palm flat between my breasts where the bond was running and held it there. His eyes weren’t gold yet. They were thinking about it.
He kissed my throat where Jasper’s mouth had been. Slower. Deeper. No teeth. Just the sealed press of his lips over the bruise. When he found it, he made a sound in his chest that came up under my hand on his collarbone.
“Mine,” he said against my throat. “Mine for the fact that you want him too. Just mine. Ours.”
“Yours.”
He kept going. He kissed the inside of my elbow where I have an old white scar. He kissed the inside of my wrist. He undid the button of my jeans with one hand and slid them down my hips. He kissed the bone of my hip and the soft place below it.
He kissed the inside of my thigh where Eli’s grip had left a print.
“Eli marked you, too.”
“He did.”
“Stay still, baby.”
He kissed the print in slow, unhurried circles. Until it was a warm, humming thing instead of a tender one. Until my body was trembling in a way, I’d been trying not to.
He kissed every place a hand, or a mouth had been on me in the grove. Only then did he come back to my mouth.
By the time he did, I had stopped pretending I was going to walk out of this dream space the same woman who walked in.
I pulled his shirt over his head.
I was not going to be patient about it.
I got my hands flat on his chest. His skin was warm. His heart was doing something unsteady. The bond between us was singing.
“Lie down with me,” I said.
“Tell me what you want.”
“All of you. Now.”
“Fuck yes, baby.”
***
He came down over me on the moss.
The cool of it was under my back. The warmth of him was over me. Broad shoulders. The dark trail of hair down his abdomen. The heaviness of his weight pressed against me.
He pushed into me slowly. Let me feel every single inch. I was so wet for him there was no resistance. Just the slow, steady press of him filling me out.
I made a sound. I dug my nails into his back. He stopped at the hilt and held there.
“All right?”
“More than all right. Please.”
He moved.
When later I would reach for strength, it was Callum I remembered first. His warmth and comfort pulsing through the dark, onyx thread of our bond.
His open willingness to give and then give some more.
His hand cradling the back of my neck. The slow drag of his mouth against mine.
The careful thought in every touch. The long, slow stroke of a man who was not going to waste a single second of this.
I came the first time on a building swell that sent electricity from my pussy to my toes. He slowed enough to let me ride it. His thumb was at my chin, tilting my face up so he could watch.
“Again,” he said against my mouth. “Again.”
***
He stopped the second time. Not because either of us wanted him to.
He pulled himself half up on his elbows, still inside me, and pressed his forehead hard to the place between my breasts where the bond was. His shoulders were shaking very slightly. He was breathing through his nose.
“Callum?”
“Wait, baby. Wait.”
I waited.
When he spoke, his voice cracked.
“Every part of me wants to fix my teeth in this exact spot,” he said, mouth against the soft skin where my throat met my jaw, “and not let go until you stop breathing fear. I am not going to. I am telling you because I will not lie to you about what I am.”
I put my hand in his hair.
“Callum.”
“Baby.”
“Do you think I don’t want it?”
He made a sound in his throat that was not human. He turned his face back into the place between my breasts and breathed.
“I know you do. I can taste it through this. That is why I am telling you. Wanting it doesn’t change the fact that we cannot.”
“Tell me what we can do.”
He lifted his face. His eyes solid gold.
“Oh, I’m going to leave you something.”
“Show me.”
“Are you sure?”
“Very sure, Callum. Show me.”
He lowered his mouth to the dip of my collarbone. Not the side where Jasper had been. The front. The small private place a high-collared shirt would cover.
He kissed it once.