21. Thornwood #2
He did. He bent and kissed it once. Not the wolf’s kiss and not the lover’s, but the kiss of a man who has been asked to do one specific thing and is doing it exactly. Then he drew back and went on.
He washed the rest of me without speaking, his eyes on the cloth, and the salve spread through the water until the rib eased and the wrists eased and the bruise stopped being pain.
The bruise had stopped being pain a while back.
It was the place I had carried Callum’s mouth and Marcus’s sigil burn and Eli’s anchor and now Jasper’s careful thumb, all of it layered into one tender spot over my heart, and pain was the wrong word for a thing that held all of that.
I did not want him to finish, move away, and just keep watch from across the room.
I had spent days being manhandled by hands I didn’t want near me, and even beautiful moments stolen in a dream realm were still just dreams. He was here.
He was real, this was real, sleeves soaked to the elbow, his wolf banked down behind his eyes for my sake, and I wanted, more than I wanted to be clean or warm or safe, to be touched by someone who was in the room.
“Jasper.”
“Yeah.”
“Touch me.”
He went still. The gold came up in his eyes and this time he let it stay, and he searched my face. “You’re hurt,” he said. It was not a no. It was a man telling me the truth before he let me have what I was asking for.
“I know I’m hurt,” I said. “And I know I’m asking, what I want. I won’t let you hurt me.”
“Promise?”
“Yeah, I promise.”
That undid something in him. He leaned over the lip of the tub, slow, giving me the whole way to change my mind, and he kissed me.
Not the careful kiss he had given the bruise.
This was the lover’s kiss, the one he had held in check earlier.
He kissed me like he had been starving and had decided to be gentle about it anyway, and the gentleness was the part that broke me open.
I got a fistful of his wet shirt and he came down to me, careful of the rib, one hand sliding into the water to find me and the other braced on the floor so none of his weight came down where it would hurt.
His fingers caressed me softly, slowly. He kept his mouth at mine and read every sound I made and gave me back exactly what each one asked for, no more, like a man handling something precious.
The heat built low and unhurried, and when it took me, it took me quietly, my forehead against his jaw, his name coming out of me on a breath instead of a cry, and him holding himself still so as to not put any weight on me.
He did not bite me. The want of it ran through him the same way it had in the grove, hard enough to bend the air, and he pushed it down.
I felt the cost of it to my very soul. He left no mark.
That was the thing I understood, after, with my cheek against his wet collar and the gold easing back out of his eyes: Callum had given me a lover’s mark and Eli had given me a sigil, and Jasper, who wanted to put his teeth in me as much as either of them, gave me the one thing it cost him most to give, which was nothing at all.
He took nothing, and he left nothing, and he stayed.
After a while he sat back on his heels and did not speak for a long moment. Then he opened his mouth and closed it and opened it again.
“Serena.”
“Don’t.”
“I have to.”
“Not tonight.”
“Serena.”
“Jasper. Please. Not tonight.”
He closed his mouth. He looked down at his own hands resting open on his knees, the cloth still caught in one of them, and after a moment he nodded once. “Okay.” He got to his feet and turned to go.
“Stay,”
He stopped.
“Stay until I’m out of the tub.”
“Yeah.” He sank down to sit on the floor with his back against the side of the tub, close enough that I felt the warmth of him come through the porcelain, and I lay back in the water and shut my eyes and let him keep watch.
I stepped out of the bathroom in a robe that smelled like Callum.
Jasper was still on the bathroom floor where I had left him, and he did not move when I stepped over his legs.
I crossed to the hall door, and he stayed exactly where he was, and I knew he would stay there as long as I was in the vicinity.
Tara sat on the bed with two mugs of tea and a plate of toast. She did not look up when I came in.
I lowered myself down beside her. She set the toast on the bedside table without passing me a mug, and I waited, because I could feel something in her about to give, and feel that she needed me to let it.
Her hand started to shake. She set the mug down before it could spill.
“Reen.”
“Tara.”
“I am not going to be okay for a minute.”
“Okay.”
She pressed her hand flat over her mouth, and her shoulders climbed toward her ears, and then she wept, hard, the way I had not seen her weep once in fifteen years of knowing her. The sound of it was bad. I sat very still beside her and did not try to stop it.
Then I held her. The robe gaped open at the front, my ribs ached, my arms were still shaking from the climb up the stairs, and I was without question the wrong body in that room to be the one doing the holding, again, but I held her anyway.
She cried for a while. I didn’t track the time. When she finally pulled back, she did not apologize either.
“I drove down from Nashville and I got forty minutes past the parish line before I had to pull onto the shoulder of I-10 and put my head on the steering wheel for a few, because I could not shake the feeling I had. It was too much like the day my mom died. It felt so… unfinished. I have been carrying that wrong picture of you in my head for six days. Tonight, when you came out of that garconniere, it wasn’t the picture.
I can’t tell you how bad I needed it to not be that picture, Reen. ”
I had nothing in me to give back to that. I sat with her and let it stand.
After a while, she picked up the mug of tea and folded my hands around it. “Eat the toast.”
“Tara.”
“Eat the toast.”
I ate the toast. She watched me do it. When I had gotten through the first slice, she let out a long breath and picked up her own mug, and for a good while neither of us said anything else.
Then she looked over at me. “The stamina thing.”
“Yeah.”
“I told you.”
“You told me.”
I laughed once, and it pulled at the rib.
She did not laugh with me, but she grinned and cocked her eyebrow in a very naughty and knowing way.
She lay down on the bed beside me and laid her arm across my ribs, careful of the cracked one, and on the pillow next to mine the shadow gathered itself in close and settled into a slow, patient breath.
I slept.
***
I came down to the kitchen at first light.
I barely remembered the night. Tara’s arm across my ribs at some point.
Waking up once to a window I’d forgotten to curtain and not having the energy to do anything about it.
I hadn’t slept enough, but I’d slept harder than I had any right to expect after years of sleeping with one eye open.
The sounds from the kitchen pulled me the rest of the way out of bed before my body was ready.
Rowena’s voice low at the stove. The iron pan spitting.
A chair scraping across the floorboards.
Somebody had laid clothes on the chair beside the bed.
A pair of jeans that fit a little loose at the waist. A long shirt of Tara’s that I’d recognize anywhere.
Soft socks. I sat at the edge of the bed for a long time before I made myself put any of it on.
The shirt smelled like Tara, which is to say it smelled like every dorm room, apartment, and rental house I’d ever shared with her, and the smell almost undid me before I’d gotten dressed.
Going down the stairs was easier than going up had been the night before. One hand on the banister. My right knee held. I did not look at the third step where my knee had buckled. I kept my eyes on the bottom step like it was a finish line.
The house was awake.
I’d known before I’d opened the bedroom door.
The smell of biscuits, bacon grease, and the chicory blend of coffee Rowena always had on at the back of the stove.
A man’s voice, low and amused, at the back of the kitchen.
A chair scraped. Tara’s grandmother laughed once, a short, dry laugh that didn’t quite finish.
I stopped at the kitchen door.
Every chair was filled.
That wasn’t what I’d been expecting. I don’t know what I’d been expecting.
Rowena and Celie, maybe. The two of them at the table with a mug of something between them.
Not the whole house. Not all three brothers, Dex against the back wall, Tara’s grandmother at the head of the table, and Miss Delphine in the chair by the window with a leather-bound book closed in her lap, like she’d been waiting for me to walk in before she opened anything.
Callum stood and pulled out the chair beside him.
I sat.
Rowena turned from the stove and set a mug in front of me.
Not coffee. She’d brewed me the green stuff with honey.
Tara’s anti-nausea tea. So she’d been paying attention.
The mug came down on the cypress with the smallest sound.
She didn’t touch my shoulder. She didn’t say my name. She turned right back to the stove.
I wrapped my fingers around the mug. They didn’t warm. They hadn’t warmed properly in I wasn’t sure how long, and I was starting to suspect they weren’t going to for a while yet. Steam curled off the top, and I watched it curl instead of looking at any of the faces around the table.
Tara reached across the table and put her fingers over the back of my hand. She wasn’t looking at the witches or the brothers. Just at the spot on the table where my hand was. She didn’t squeeze. She just kept her fingers there, warm against the back of my hand where the cold was the worst.
The back screen door opened, and I could see Bodie on the porch.