Chapter 6 #2
"You're allowed to want things," I told him quietly, my mouth close to his ear. "You don't have to be thorough about all of it."
"I want to be thorough about this part especially," he murmured, and I felt the words as much as heard them, low against my throat, and then his mouth was there instead, tasting the same pulse point his fingers had found first, and every careful thought I'd been holding onto dissolved into something wordless.
The candlelight threw gold across the bed as he laid me back into it, the wind hammering the shutters in a rhythm that felt, absurdly, like it was keeping time with something neither of us said out loud.
His mouth found the curve of my throat, unhurried, then lower, tracing the line of my collarbone, the slope of my shoulder, learning me with a patience that felt almost unbearable, every drawn-out second building something tight and molten low in my stomach.
I felt him smile against my skin when I made a sound I hadn't meant to make, low and involuntary, and he did it again on purpose, clearly delighted with himself about it, his hands never quite still, mapping heat and skin and the exact places that made my hips lift toward him without my permission.
"You're smug," I managed, barely.
"I'm thorough," he said, mouth still moving lower, unhurried, deliberate, each kiss landing like punctuation on a sentence he had no intention of rushing through. "There's a difference."
"You keep saying that about everything."
"Because it keeps being true." His hand found the curve of my hip, fingers pressing into skin gone electric under his touch, and when his mouth finally traced past my ribs and lower still, slow and reverent and maddeningly unhurried, I stopped being capable of teasing him about anything at all.
I said his name once, low and shaking, and felt him answer with nothing but the press of his mouth and the steady, devastating patience of a man determined to memorize every single thing that undid me, until the storm outside and the man above me were the only two things left in the entire world, and I was arching into the candlelight with his name still caught somewhere in my throat.
When he finally settled over me, propped on one forearm, watching my face with an intensity that made the moment feel less like a physical act and more like a conversation neither of us had words for yet, I could feel the heat of him, unhurried, waiting, and I reached up and pulled him down properly, done with waiting, done with three weeks of careful distance and index cards and pretending the space between us was smaller than it actually was.
"Isla." My name in his mouth sounded like a question and an answer both.
"I know," I said. "Me too."
He moved slow at first, deliberate, checking my face for every reaction, his forehead pressed briefly to mine, both of us breathing the same unsteady air, and I told him, breathless, that he could stop being so careful, that I wasn't made of anything fragile, that I'd been waiting three weeks for exactly this and didn't intend to wait through any more of it now.
Something in his expression shifted — permission taken, finally, fully — and after that there was nothing careful about it at all, just heat and rhythm and skin against skin, the wind screaming outside like it approved, both of us chasing something that had been building since a wine glass that never spilled and a story we'd invented together on a bar top three months ago, every slow, deliberate movement of him against me pulling another sound out of me I couldn't have stopped if I'd wanted to.
I felt him lose the last of his careful restraint somewhere in the candlelit dark, his mouth finding mine again, rougher now, his name breaking on my lips right alongside my own, and when we finally, together, came apart, it was with the whole storm still howling outside like it had been waiting the entire summer for exactly this.
Afterward, we lay tangled in the candlelit dark, the wind finally beginning to ease outside, his hand tracing slow, absent patterns against my bare shoulder, and I felt more entirely myself than I had in longer than I could remember.
"So," he said eventually, dry despite everything, "for the record, that was not for the performance."
"No," I agreed, laughing against his chest. "That was extremely, thoroughly real."
"Good. I'd hate to think I put that much effort into something that wasn't."
"There's the smugness again."
"I told you. Thorough." He pressed a kiss to the top of my head, unhurried, and I felt him go quiet in the particular way that meant he was actually thinking something through instead of teasing. "Isla."
"Mm."
"The exit clause."
I went still against him. "What about it."
"I don't want it anymore."
I lifted my head to look at him properly, and found none of the careful calculation I usually caught in his expression — just something open and slightly unsteady, a man who'd apparently run every number he owned and arrived somewhere he hadn't planned to land.
"Neither do I," I said.
"That's — good. That's very good, actually, given the timing."
"Given the timing," I agreed, and kissed him again, slow, unhurried, the storm finally quieting outside, the whole villa settling around us like it had been waiting for exactly this to happen since the day I signed a contract I'd never once expected to want to keep.
We lay there a long while after, listening to the wind die down to nothing, the candles guttering low, and I found myself doing the thing I'd been doing for weeks without quite admitting it — memorizing him.
The particular weight of his arm across my waist. The way he breathed slower, steadier, when he thought I was already asleep, like some careful part of him finally allowed itself to rest only once he believed no one was checking.
"I can feel you thinking," he said, not opening his eyes.
"I thought you were asleep."
"I was resting. There's a difference."
"You keep saying that about everything."
"Because it keeps being true," he said, echoing himself from earlier, and I laughed, and felt him smile against my hair.
"I was thinking about the will," I admitted, after a moment. "About how strange it is that the thing designed to force my hand into something fake ended up being the reason I found something real."
"Your grandmother strikes me as the kind of woman who'd take full credit for that, whether she planned it or not."
"She absolutely would. She'd never admit she didn't see this exact outcome coming from the very first line of that clause."
"Smart woman."
"Terrifying woman. Loved fiercely, though. In her own very specific, occasionally ruthless way." I turned to look at him properly, propped on one elbow, the last of the candlelight catching gold in his eyes. "Roman."
"Yeah."
"What happens now? Not the wedding logistics. Not the exit clause we apparently just retired without a formal ceremony. Just — us. What happens now."
He was quiet for a moment, and I watched him do the thing he always did, running some careful calculation, except this time when he answered, there was nothing hedged about it at all.
"Now," he said, "I stop pretending I need a spreadsheet to know what I want. And what I want is you, Isla. Not the performance. Not the contract. Just you, for as long as you'll have me, which I recognize is a significantly less organized plan than anything I've ever proposed to you before."
"It's better than the last one."
"Higher stakes, though."
"Much higher," I agreed, "but I think, for once, I like the odds anyway."
Outside, the wind had finally dropped to nothing, the sirocco spent, the coast settling into the particular hush that always followed a storm this size — the whole world quiet and washed clean, waiting to see what would grow back in its wake.
I had a fairly good guess.
I blew out the last candle and settled back against him in the dark, listening to his heartbeat slow into something even and unhurried, and thought that whatever came next — the wedding, the will, the club, the town's endless opinions about all of it — none of it frightened me anymore nearly as much as it had three months ago in a lawyer's office, hearing the word "married" spoken like a diagnosis.
Some things, it turned out, only sounded like sentences until you found the right person to serve them with.
Somewhere beyond the shutters, the last of the wind sighed itself out over the water, and the villa settled into a quiet I hadn't heard in it since before my grandmother passed — not empty quiet, not the kind I'd been bracing against for months, but something closer to contentment, like the old stones themselves had been waiting to exhale.
"Isla," he murmured, half-asleep already, his voice low and rough against my hair.
"Mm."
"Marry me for real this time. I know we're already technically doing that in three weeks. I just wanted to ask it properly. Without a contract attached."
I smiled into the dark, my hand finding his where it rested against my waist. "Yes," I said, simply, no ledger, no clauses, nothing left to negotiate. "Obviously, yes."
He didn't say anything else. He just pulled me closer, already half-asleep again, and I lay there a long while listening to his breathing slow and even out, thinking that some contracts, it turned out, were worth signing twice — once out of necessity, and once, finally, out of nothing but wanting to.
Outside, the last of the storm cleared entirely, leaving the sky scrubbed and starlit above the villa, and I fell asleep in the warm circle of his arms without a single worry left about which parts of any of this were real.
For the first time since the lawyer's office, married didn't feel like a sentence at all. It felt like the truest thing I'd ever agreed to, and I fell asleep smiling into the dark, certain of it.