Chapter 12
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Sleepy little mornings with my wife.
Kyran
Sleep is…such a cruel mistress, and I do fear that I’m taken now, which is probably why sleep has stopped bullying me lately.
Or, maybe, it’s because after Morana and I learned that we are perfectly compatible—right down to how many kids we want—she took me into her room again, told me not to look at the shrine to me, and let me pick a stuffed animal from her collection.
To protect me.
From the baddies.
My sleep tonight has smelled like her, and my dreams tonight…
Well, let’s just say she didn’t tell me to stop in them.
I’m fairly certain a nightmare was blooming in the fog beyond her face as she loved me into an unrecognizable bundle of delight, but even with that edge of anxiety and promise of monsters on the horizon, every time I took a breath, my lungs tasted of her.
Awake now, feeling quite near rested, I peer through darkness brought on by my black-out curtains at the pink dumpling bear in my arms. Closing my eyes, I press my face to its soft body and inhale.
Morana.
I decide right here and now that when it stops smelling like her I will tell her that it’s lost its magic and I need a new one.
Who would have thought that the things I expected to keep me up even worse would be the very ones that carry me into sleep?
Freeing a tiny protest against myself, I drag my body from my bed and my Morana stuffie, pat Ender’s head when the cat rolls over to blink at me, and get ready for breakfast. For once.
The for once explains why my family, upon seeing me, does double takes.
Clara especially stops short as she piles the fluffiest pancakes I’ve ever seen onto Lukas’s plate. “Kyran,” she says, smiling brightly. “Good morning.”
“Mmph,” I offer, because whoever invented being awake at this hour is actually dead to me.
Settling into my usual seat, I resist the urge to face plant into a plate that appears in front of me.
Ever sweet, Clara in her heart of hearts acts as though she’s going to put pancakes on my soon-to-be pillow.
Until, of course, my older brother’s raging insecurity issues ignite.
Before she can deliver a softer landing place, he tugs her into his lap and traps her there, murmuring, “I don’t think so. The squirt can get his own food.”
This squirt regrets the fleeting moment when he thought that very thing. If he hadn’t, he would be enjoying a special Clara sandwich in several hours, at a more appropriate time for humans to be walking around and talking.
Ever the peacekeeper and never up to mischief, Kaleb says, “Thank you, Lukas, for sharing your wife’s skills with us. We, by no means, take your benevolence for granted.”
Lukas, having just been played, settles in the security that he “allows” Clara to do things and chillaxes. Like an insipid moron.
On the other side of the table, Crisis piles her plate high with pancakes, manages to flip a blueberry into her forehead when she reaches for the fruit bowl, and begins mourning Crimson’s absence as Viktor wipes off the juice.
So. This is breakfast, huh? It’s just like dinner…but earlier, I guess.
I find myself zoning out, staring at Morana’s usual seat at the table beside me. Morana’s notably empty seat at the table beside me. I murmur, “Where is she?”
Maelin hears my lonely heart’s cry and says, “Mora doesn’t come to breakfast much anymore. She’s rearranged her hours so she doesn’t start until later.”
My already not-thrilled-about-being-awake mood sours further. “Well then, what’s the point of having breakfast?”
Lukas’s feathers re-ruffle. “What’s the point of having a meal tenderly prepared by E-clair-a?”
I, obviously, ignore him.
I thought Morana would be here. I thought she started work earlier.
I thought she came over, had breakfast with everyone, and sadly completed her first chores of the day while looking forlornly out every window she passed, wondering at what time I might show up, save her from her sorrows, and bug her endlessly.
Apparently this is not what transpires.
I scoot my chair out.
“Kyran,” Viktor states, hard, very eldest of him, “you can still have breakfast with us. You came all the way out here.”
“I came all the way out here with hope in my heart that I might see what early sunlight looks like upon the skin of the woman I love. I did not come all the way out here for family time.”
Maelin gasps, positioning her fingers at her lips.
Zakery beside her whispers, loudly, “Did he just…declare love for his little sister?”
Maelin scowls and smacks him in the chest.
Holding my stupidest brother’s gaze, I slip my fork from beside my plate, shift my grip on the handle so I’m holding it like a dagger, and stab a pancake. Then another. And another.
I dump fruit across the stack next, snatch the entire bowl of whipcream, and turn on my heel to plastic wrap my quarry at the island counter.
Viktor grumbles, “Kyran, what are you doing?”
“What do you think?”
Chuckling either merrily or evilly—you can never tell with Crisis—my older sister purrs, “Let it be known, the Bachelor boys fall hard…”
While I wrap up the stolen food, Clara mixes more whipped cream for everyone, then as I’m leaving, she whispers, “Good luck.”
I offer her a polite nod, but what I need isn’t luck at all.
It is sunlight. On Morana’s precious skin. Illuminating my kiss marks on her throat. Which suggest that she’s mine.
Huh.
Guess Lukas isn’t the only idiot among us who’s violently possessive for no logical reason. Whatever. We can both be morons. It’s probably genetic.
?
Angrily, Morana throws her door open and snaps, “Will you stop that?”
I stop the seizure my finger is having against her doorbell, take her in, and frown.
Morana, yes. Sunlight, yes. Kiss marks, no.
“Why are you in a turtleneck?” I ask.
She tugs at the fabric covering her neck and mutters, “It’s February.”
“Yes…and?”
“It’s cold.” She adorably tucks into the knit. “I must keep my neck warm, to protect against illness.” Sniffing, she takes me in, glancing at the stuff in my arms. “What are you doing here? Again. Can I have no time to myself anymore?”
“Why would you want time to yourself?”
“Hm, I wonder,” she drawls, as though she’s not stepping aside to let me in. “I like to take my mornings slow, plan my day, prepare for the drive to work…and the inevitable horrors set to befall me there.”
It’s me. I’m horrors.
I say, “I’m sorry I interrupted your FrostPlays meditation time with my unrelated presence.”
“I do not meditate in front of my collection of your posters.”
“Well, I hope you aren’t praying to them.”
She drags a hand down her face, stretching the skin beneath her eye as she groans, turns, and heads toward her remarkable town system, where she appears to be selecting her tasks for the day and eating one of the sandwiches I brought over last night.
I steal the sandwich.
“Hey,” she blurts.
I shove the bowl of whipped cream into her arms. “Trade.”
“What…is this?”
I also, benevolently, provide her with the plate of pancakes and fruit. “Clara breakfast.”
“Oh.” She settles immediately, because that is the power of Clara.
It takes Morana the entirety of unwrapping her food to realize that I am awake.
Right now. In the morning time. She expresses this realization in the kindest, sweetest, and most softest way possible—by looking at me as though I am an alien creature fit only for autopsy and saying, with both disgust and apprehension, “Why are you presently conscious?”
Holding her eyes, I bite into her sandwich over the shape of her mouth mark, chew, swallow, and say, “I missed you so much my chest hurt. I came out for breakfast, just to see you, but you weren’t there, and it was so painful I almost died.” I take another bite.
“Can you be more dramatic?” she asks, ripping a piece of pancake and dipping it in the whip cream.
“Yes.”
“Yeah, I heard myself after I asked. Don’t.” She nibbles her food and shifts her attention back to the town, surveying.
She pulls a card from a small flap holding it to a refrigerator in a house that is entirely a kitchen. The card says, Clean out fridge. Five whole points. She plucks a Dust front parlor free from a different building, and I stare at the single point it provides.
“Still trying to buy my prone likeness?” I ask.
“No.” She gets another task. “I burned that card.”
“You realized you prefer the real thing?”
“Yep.”
I flush.
“Shame you’re not cuddly.”
I bristle. “Who says I’m not cuddly?”
She meets my eyes, dry resignation in them. Then she tugs the collar of her turtleneck down.
I tense.
A harsh, angry bruise stares at me.
Before I have managed to process it, she lifts her shirt, showing off the scattered fingerprints across her soft stomach. They’re all so much angrier than they were last night. A shudder rocks me to my core, and I lose several moments of life, frozen in a place without thought or reason.
She’s beautiful.
She’s hurt.
I hurt her.
I—
“I am so sorry,” I say.
“Don’t be,” she mutters, covering my marks—my marks—all over her.
“I like it. It’s…like proof. You’re not a rough person, Kyran.
I woke up this morning and saw all this in the mirror and felt how badly you wanted me.
” Cheeks softly pink, she murmurs, “It wasn’t a terrible experience.
” She heaves a sigh. “Unfortunately, you want me too much. And therefore cannot control yourself. So, no cuddles for me. Unless…”
“Unless?” I whisper.
She hums. “Well, I suppose…” She selects another card, from a different building, scans it, inviting the divot beneath her lip back to torment me. “I could tie you up.”
I freeze with the thieved egg salad sandwich halfway to my mouth.
Seafoam glass glides my way, sultry. “Would you like that, e-boy?”
This is playing dirty. So dirty.
I. Am. Obsessed.
So this is what Morana looks like when she’s done imposing familial relations between us. This is her flirting.
Lowering my eyes, I murmur, “Yes, mistress. I would.”
She shudders, then she cusses and fixes her attention squarely back on her tasks. “I forgot. You don’t call bluffs.”
“I wonder how you managed to forget that.”
“A real wild mystery. It’s almost like I have things on my mind and a guy who keeps trespassing.”
Trespassing? I’m not trespassing. She, very clearly, invited me in.
I can show her trespassing, if she’d like.
I do happen to know her landlord’s chaotic assistant, who would be nothing but supportive of my breaking and entering in the name of love.
That is to say, Crisis would give me a key in a heartbeat.
I take another bite of my sandwich. “Are you going to tie my hands above my head, or behind my back?”
“Ew.”
“There’s an allure to both, the sheer helplessness…the power play.”
“Stop talking.”
“I’m partial to above my head, because then you could cinch them to the headboard and—”
“Kyran,” she snaps, fully scarlet. “I believe I said…stop.”
Crap. She did.
I hang my head. “Forgive me my neglect. I shall accept whatever punishment you deem appropriate.”
Her eyes roll, but she says, “Let me redecorate your room,” as though she’s had such a “punishment” locked and loaded, just waiting for an opportunity to get it out there.
“My…room?”
“Yes.”
“You genuinely want to redecorate…my bedroom?”
Finding enough scraps of space on the table, she settles her bowl and plate of picked-at food amid the town, turns her whole body toward me, and leans in.
“Yes, baby,” she tortures, “let me leave my fingerprints all over your personal space. It’s only fair, right?
I want to repay every last one of your favors on me… ”
A shiver rocks my fragile body.
As fast as she closed in, she pulls away, adding, “At your own expense, of course.”
Smiling into the final bite of my sandwich, I say, “When do we start?”