Chapter Twenty-Nine #2
“Ferocious, vulnerable, nurturing, brilliant, and unlike anyone I’ve ever met in this long and fruitless life,” he finishes.
“You once said that I made the world a better place just by being in it. It couldn’t be true.
Not with the way I am. Not with the things I’ve done.
But I want it to be, so badly, just to prove you right. ”
To this, I have no smart retort. Just an ache that is spreading across my chest.
“I’ve lied to you, and I’m not proud of that,” he says. “But that night? When I told you I loved you? I meant it. Every word. Life at your side would feel meaningful enough to end.”
Even expecting them, the words hit like an arrow to my heart.
I don’t know how to react, and so I close my eyes and nod in acceptance, run my hands over the planes of his face, down his neck and his shoulders, too delirious to do anything more than feel.
Julian loves me. Our reality right now might seem unfathomable, but there is something grounding and stabilizing and normal about this knowledge.
It’s a tale as old as time, a feat both improbable and mundane: the man I love loves me back.
“Is it safe to kiss you?” I ask.
Julian lets out a breathless laugh, and then he’s lifting me onto his lap like I’m a rag doll.
“Depends on what you mean by safe,” he rasps. His gaze drops, very much not subtly, to the nipples poking through my thin nightgown, and I roll my eyes. Still a man, after all.
“I mean, am I going to die an undisclosed period of time earlier than I’m supposed to if I do,” I say wryly.
Julian’s expression mellows, and I smile, lifting his chin so he looks at me.
“I’m kidding,” I say. “I’d probably take the risk, to be honest. Everyone in my family lives to, like, a hundred anyway. I’m sure I have some years to spare.”
Julian doesn’t laugh like he’s supposed to.
“You don’t have to ‘take the risk’ for a kiss,” he says.
“I can exercise some restraint there. But I’ll be honest. I don’t know if I ever slipped up with Claire.
She didn’t have grays and wouldn’t have shown it as obviously as you did, and we didn’t have enough time together for me to notice any long-term effects.
This is rare, uncharted territory for me. ”
“Hmm,” I say, tracing the edges of his full bottom lip. “How so?”
“The version of me who exists in liminal spaces? He’s still me, just…
less inhibited. More likely to lean into my base instincts.
” Julian’s eyelids flutter, and he grabs my wrist to still my touch, then steels me with a look that demands me to pay attention.
“I wasn’t lying when I said I didn’t mean to take from you.
I didn’t even realize that I had. A transfer with the connection we have, with the anticipation we’ve built”—he holds my hand to his chest—“it’s euphoric.
There’s no other way to describe it. And when I’m in that space, it’s hard to resist taking what I shouldn’t. ”
I absorb the information with uncharacteristic calm. This, I think, is just like learning any new partner, figuring out their dos, their don’ts, the things that make them tick.
“Hard,” I ponder, “but not impossible.”
“It’ll take trial and error,” Julian says. “You’ll have to resist him too. If he—I—asks you to give yourself to me, you have to say no.”
“I say no?” I ask, leaning forward to kiss Julian on his brow, his left cheek, his right. “Even if I really, really want to say yes?”
Julian pulls me more firmly into his lap.
“Especially if you want to say yes,” he says.
And then he kisses me, and all my remaining thoughts fall away.
I imagined our second first kiss as tentative, and it is at its start, a cautious brush of his lips against mine, as if he’s not so sure about his control after all.
But we’ve been holding back too long, have sacrificed too much, to deny ourselves this.
I grab his face and drag him closer, crashing into him like a wave against a shore, and he makes a small sound of surprise before wrapping his arms around me and answering my fervor with his own.
We kiss for a long time, and I marvel at how he feels both the same and so different now that I truly know him.
He’s no longer the oddly put together twenty-seven-year-old whom I felt just a little guilty dating, but a being who has lived lifetimes and chosen me among them.
The effect he has on me—this overwhelming, drunken pleasure—isn’t terrifying anymore now that I know it for what it is, a result of his ability to read me throughout layers of my subconscious.
I feel like the luckiest girl in the world.
I tell him so, and he lowers his head to the crook of my neck to muffle his laughter.
“You’re currently in mortal danger because of me,” he reminds me, incredulous.
“Yes, but I’m also guaranteed at least one earth-shattering orgasm a day,” I counter. “It’s not the world’s best deal, but you won’t catch me complaining.”
Julian nuzzles into me, pulling my skin between his teeth.
“Just one?” he teases. “I’m quite sure I did better than that last time.”
I roll my eyes and wind my arms around his neck, savoring being held, and he squeezes me so tight that I have to fight for air.
We stay like this a while, until, without preamble, the mood shifts.
I adjust myself on his lap, he rocks his hips up, and suddenly I’m hyperaware of the hardness underneath me, the way our breaths begin to heighten.
I reach between us, close my hand around him, and he stills.
“Are you sure?” he whispers. “We don’t have to try this right now.”
“I want to,” I say.
“I don’t want to hurt you again,” he whispers.
“You won’t.” Now that I understand the mechanics, I feel oddly confident. I pull my nightgown over my shoulders and watch his Adam’s apple bob in his throat. “I trust you.”
Julian exhales slowly, his eyes roving over my body like a starving man presented with a feast. He smooths his hands down my sides, starting high at my rib cage before settling at my hips.
His expression is inscrutable: desire, sure, but something akin to sorrow too, like I’ve just handed him a gift he doesn’t think he deserves.
“Thank you,” he murmurs, before kissing me again.
We start slow, an unhurried rediscovery of each other’s bodies.
Julian’s concentration is evident in the serious set of his jaw, and when I joke that he looks like he’s taking an exam he pays me back by sliding down my body to take me into his mouth.
My head drops back, eyes squeeze shut; I don’t think I will ever get used to the rapture this man makes me feel.
I run my hand adoringly along the back of his head, and in the darkness of my closed lids, I feel him emerge.
“You sought me out,” his voice says, echoing all around me. “Even after everything.”
We’re still on the bed, layered upon ourselves like afterimages, except I am back in this Julian’s lap, looking him in his shining eyes.
I’ve been thinking of Julian as two entities, the one that walks with me in flesh, the other that haunts my dreams, but this one stares at me with the other’s wondrous adoration.
It’s true that this is the Julian who stole away a piece of me, but he is also the one who cried for my forgiveness on his hands and knees, who tore me out of a nightmare just minutes before.
“I did,” I whisper.
He clutches my face, searches it with an openness that turns him young.
“You love me too, right?” he asks. “It isn’t just me?”
I haven’t realized until he asks that I haven’t said it back, and that this Julian is not too proud to seek reassurance.
“I love you too,” I tell him truthfully. “But I’m scared.”
“Of me,” he says, knowing.
“Yes,” I confess.
He gathers me into his arms and I gasp; his counterpart has pushed into mine, and I can feel the sensation like a distant, blissful fullness.
The Julian before me tenses, squeezes his eyes shut, and I know that he’s feeling what I’m feeling, fighting the base instincts that tell him to augment his gratification the way he knows best, the way he always has.
“Your life is yours, and mine too,” he says. “Just. Stay here with me like this?”
We hold each other close, breathing in tandem, hands curled together as the versions of us made of flesh tangle, and this Julian of my dreams does not once demand his sacrifice.
We wake up the next morning in a mess of sheets and limbs.
White light streams in through between the crack of Julian’s curtains, and I roll in his arms, knowing that I’ll meet his gaze when I turn.
He’s watching me carefully, like I’m a skittish cat he’s worried he’ll scare away.
I sense, implicitly, that what he’s searching for in my face is regret.
I rub a thumb into the furrow of his brow, feel his whole body relax under one touch. The morning light outlines him in white like a fallen angel. He takes my hand, kisses my palm, my fingers, the ridge of my knuckles.
“You need to tell me what your plan is,” I say softly. “How you intend to get me back home. Because I’m not staying here forever.”
I don’t know what kind of life Mary led before she met Alphonse, but as idyllic as the quiet, secluded life that was laid out in their photo albums appeared, it is not one I aspire to.
I want to savor every last minute that I have left with my aging dog.
I want my stressful, fulfilling, bloody job, cock-blocking pager and all.
I want to take my goddaughter for ice cream to talk about her crushes and check off more countries on the travel list with Winona.
And I want Brandon to survive long enough to see his daughter go to prom.