Chapter 24
After about an hour, Stephan’s voice cut through the darkness. “Hayleigh, are you sure you want me here?”
“Of course.” She tried to laugh off the question, but the words came out stilted. “Why would you ask?”
She could feel him shift onto his side to look at her. “Well, you’re definitely not asleep, and I’m pretty sure you didn’t get much sleep last night, right?”
She exhaled. “I have a hard time sleeping in a bed if another person’s in it.”
He let out a low grunt. “Then why’d you invite me back?”
She rolled over to look back at him. “Because I knew you wouldn’t get any sleep over there, and besides…” Her entire body shivered at a cold draft that swept across her face. “It’s so cold.”
His eyes regarded her steadily. “You’re completely safe with me. You know that, right?”
“I do.” The second truth, which had been bubbling its way up like a pot ready to boil over, spilled out. “It’s mostly not about…safety.”
“Oh? What, then?”
She studied the print of the flannel sheets—white and green, stamped with little packages wrapped in gold bows. “You find me attractive, right?”
His reply was a short, rough laugh. “Pretty sure I haven’t kept that secret. But, like I said, you’re safe. I would never do anything you didn’t want.”
Her eyes shot up to him. “But what if I do want it?”
His lips parted. “Do you, Sunshine?”
All she had to do was say the word, and the small remaining distance between them would vanish.
The well-trodden arguments bullied their way into her mind—you’re not that kind of woman, intimacy is a gift to save for your husband—but it was quiet compared to the burning pool of desire their kiss had stoked from embers to a blaze.
To hell with all the people who had told her that in her hands, passion was misleading. That desire was a trap laid only for women, somehow made virtuous in the hands of, and in service to, men.
She wanted something good. She wanted to feel good. She wanted him. Maybe that made her a card-carrying “chainsaw cunt,” but she didn’t care anymore.
Besides, out here, buried within increasingly deepening snow in a train without tracks, it was like they’d stepped out of their world and into another, one where the normal rules didn’t apply.
A liminal space where the balance sheets could be wiped clean, and like in Vegas, what happened here would be left behind when this little vacation from reality was over.
She would never owe anyone the story of what happened in this bed tonight. It could be like it never happened, and then this pressure that built up whenever he was around, making the air so thick she could hardly breathe, would finally be relieved.
Hayleigh shimmied her way across the bed until she was right up next to him and ran a hand up his chest.
“God, why are you so big?” she muttered, raking her nails along the ridges of his shoulder muscles.
He laughed, reaching a hand out to trace his fingers down her arm. “You kind of sound offended. Not sure how to take that.”
“You’re just…a lot more than I’m used to.”
He flipped her over onto her back, easing himself on top of her. The pressure of his weight reached the edge of too much, which she found was just enough.
“I’ll make sure it isn’t a problem.”
He lowered his face to hers, running his tongue along her lips to urge them open, and began a slow, patient exploration of her mouth.
One of his hands kept his body propped up, so he didn’t crush her, but the other traveled, slipping up through her sweater to cup one of her breasts.
Her entire body surged at his expert touch.
“Sorry they’re…small.” She gasped as he rolled her nipple between his fingertips. Her mother had offered implants as an engagement gift, but when the engagement ended, the offer had been rescinded.
“They’re perfect.” He pawed up the fabric of her top for further access, giving an appreciative grunt as he ran a tongue between her breasts and then in circles around the hard nubs of her nipples, chasing that with lust-drunk kisses down her stomach.
She groped her way down to where the hard ridge of him was pressing into her thighs, rubbing him through the fabric of his sweats. He groaned against her, but as she tried to dip her hand through the waistband, he stopped her with a chuckle that tickled her ear.
“Slow down. We’ve got time, Sunshine.”
He pulled her hand up and over her head, pinning it there as he moved to take her earlobe in his mouth and suck it hard as his free hand traveled down her taut stomach and over the rise of her hips.
His touch was frustratingly light as it traveled finally below the band of her pajama pants, and she squirmed beneath the cascade of sensations. He was hitting nerves she hadn’t even known were there.
She tried to wiggle him lower, but he laughed deeply. “Mmm, mmm, not yet.”
As if to punish her, he retreated completely from her lower half, peeling her sweater off slowly with a gentle brush of fabric over skin and then turning her so that she faced away from him.
Beginning just below her ear, he worked his way down—sometimes kissing, sometimes brushing lightly with his fingertips—down her neck and shoulder and the length of her spine until finally he grasped the band of her pants and pulled them down.
His mouth landed on the small of her back, and she tightened in a rush of pleasure. She tried to roll away reflexively at the intensity of the sensation, but his hands held her hips fast until he was finally content to roll her back over and slide her pants the rest of the way free.
He paused there, breathing her in and out. “Fuck, you smell good. I bet you taste good too.”
She made a tiny, hungry noise, so very eager for him to find out, and he grinned devilishly. His fingers slid over everything that had been swelling at his touch, rubbing and toying before he plunged them inside her folds. She buckled from the force of the sensation.
“I thought…you said…slow.” The word came out between gasps as he thrust his fingers into her again and again.
“Do as I say, not as I do,” he murmured. Then his mouth took over, tongue flicking her clit as his chin pressed into her opening.
She wasn’t prepared for how good it felt to have the rough hair of his beard sweeping over into her most sensitive parts, and her hands flew to either side of his head as she let out a gasping moan. Realizing how much it delighted her, he pushed his chin deeper as she thrust against him.
“You like this, Sunshine?” he murmured, and she responded by wrapping her arms around his head to push him in even deeper. “Fuck. Let me know what you like.”
“All of it,” she gasped, “everything you’re doing.”
He committed completely to her pleasure.
No one had ever done that before. Not only did he do it, but when she stole a peek at his face, he seemed to enjoy it.
There was no sense of its being a chore, something to do just to get her wet.
From the look on his face, you’d think this was the main event.
Her orgasm arrived not in one crashing wave of pleasure but many, one right after another. No matter how she writhed, he held her tight against him, until it was crystal clear the orgasm was spent.
She collapsed onto the bed, awash in a pleasant buzz.
“Feeling good?” he asked. His voice betrayed how pleased he was with himself as he gently stroked his fingers up and down her body. Words escaped her; she could answer only in vaguely satisfied noises, and he laughed, rolling over onto his back with a proud look on his face.
When she glanced in his direction, his eyes were closed, and his breathing had taken on that familiar regularity of oncoming slumber. “Are you…going to sleep?”
“Maybe.”
“But we haven’t…You haven’t…”
He looped an arm around her, pulling her in close so that she traveled with the rise and fall of his chest. “You just crossed to the other world and met Baba Yaga. It’s time for you to get some sleep.”
It was true. She was tired—bone-weary, even.
“So we don’t have to do that tonight. Besides, I’ve got a feeling you’ve never had a night that was only about you, and that’s something I want to fix.”
She couldn’t deny that. There’d been many nights with Grayson that ended before she had, but never the reverse.
“But I thought it could…hurt men…if they got erect and didn’t…finish.”
His eyes opened as he scoffed. “The myth of ‘blue balls.’ If it were really a medical emergency that guys didn’t get off every time they got hard, ambulances would run constantly.”
Of course. The obviousness of the lie made her feel incredibly foolish—a transparent tactic to pressure women into sex they didn’t want to have. Still, insecurity pulsed beneath her skin, and she said, “And it’s not that you just don’t actually want to with me…?”
He turned her around so he could look her in the eye. “You don’t know how many times over the last few days I’ve had to use every trick in the book to stop thinking about all the places and ways I’d like to have you. But tonight’s just for you.”
Something inside her softened, and when it did, the emotion it had been holding back spilled out in hot tears.
Even as the orgasm left a glowing feeling, she struggled against a crashing feeling of shame. A vile torrent of emotion surged its way through her, trying to pull her under, as a scornful voice said how wrong it was that she had failed to please him, that she was wicked for centering her desire.
It was all lies—lies designed to keep her low. She could see it for what it was now, but that didn’t completely dull the hurt of it.
She stuffed her face into his chest, and he murmured, “You okay?”
“Yes…No.” She inhaled deeply. “But I’m working on it.”
He pressed his lips to her forehead. They lay there for a few minutes, just breathing against one another, until finally he said, “You asked me why I don’t make plans. The answer I gave…it was bullshit.”
She laughed softly, wiping away some tears with a sniff. “I know.”
“What do you mean, you know?”
Hayleigh lifted herself up onto one arm, gazing at him.
“I’m professionally trained to spot lying, but even if I weren’t, you make it obvious.
” She reached out and put a fingertip on the crease of his smile.
“If you don’t want people to know when you lie, you shouldn’t smile all the way. At least not habitually.”
He grunted. “Huh. Good to know.”
She sensed his story was coming and waited for it but did not push. His eyes lifted to the ceiling. “I went to the University of Washington on a football scholarship. It didn’t work out.”
That explained the athletics bag and probably the injury. “Football? You don’t really seem like a football player.”
“Yeah, that’s ’cause I’m not. Which never stopped feeling weird.
There were so many guys around me who didn’t make it, and that was their dream—playing college ball, going pro—and there I was just some big guy who let myself get pushed into it because how the hell else do you go to college when you’re from a small town and only get so-so grades?
I mean, other than joining the military. ”
She tried to imagine Stephan Midwinter cutting his hair and following orders. “Which is the only ‘less you’ thing than playing football.”
He winked. “Bingo.”
“What’d you play?”
“Left offensive tackle.”
“Ah, you protected the quarterback—of course you did. Your protective magic…it didn’t completely scare people off, did it?”
“Nah, wouldn’t have been sporting. Football’s a game. No real harm intended.” His voice trailed off, and she sensed there was more to the story, but she let him get to it in his own time.
Finally, he continued, “Then I got hurt. Fucked up my shoulder and neck, but even worse, I got the kind of concussion where they don’t let you play anymore.
Had to leave the team. Lost my scholarship.
” His eyes flicked away. “And my brain was never quite the same, even after I was theoretically over it. I couldn’t keep up, so I dropped out of school before I got forced out. ”
“I see…What was your major?”
He’d taken to tracing patterns on her skin, slow drags of fingertips up her arms and down her chest. “Environmental science. I was dead set on being an ecosystem manager for the forestry service. All of it went away with just one accident. Ever since then, well, it’s seemed like it was better not to have a plan. ”
The statement settled between them. She understood what he was saying, even though she didn’t agree with it.
“Ecosystem manager,” she said, winding a finger through the pale tufts of hair on his chest. “You’re kind of doing that now with your spells, aren’t you? And you need to have a pretty good understanding of the problems the animals have in order for your spells to work, right?”
He chuckled and looked down in a bit of a vulnerable way. “I guess you could say that.”
“I saw those books in your car. You never stopped learning.”
“Takes me a long time to get through them.”
“But you do eventually.” He nodded. “And you’ve got hands-on experience.”
He eyed her. “What’s all this leading to, Sunshine?”
“I bet if you tried again, you’d find you know most of what you need to know, and it would just be a matter of passing the tests and getting the paper.
” Her voice picked up in excitement with everything she said.
“Maybe you could look at somewhere less expensive than the U, or into ‘returning adult’ specific loans. You’d have a career and get paid for what you’re already doing for free now. ”
He studied her. “And that’s what makes it worthwhile, right? If I make money off it?”
She let out a low, frustrated noise. “You Midwinters and your endearing war on capitalism.”
He laughed at that, his whole body shaking against her. “I’m just poking you. You’re right—it’s worth thinking about. More so than social media influencer.”
With a huff, she said, “You already are one. You’d just be getting the money you deserve for it.”
He laughed into her ear. “Just gotta get the last word in on that subject, huh?” Then he nudged his face against her neck. “Let’s get some sleep. We have our own little battle to wage in the war on capitalism tomorrow. Assuming we can get out of here.”
Hayleigh let out an exasperated sigh. “What have I gotten myself into?”
“Midwinter magic,” he murmured into her ear.