14. Everly #2
When he comes back up my body and kisses me I taste myself on his mouth, and under it something else, faint, old, the metal trace of stone older than the school.
The building next door, in my blood now, in me.
His eyes flick to mine for half a second, a question he doesn't ask.
He licks his lower lip and lets it go. When he's ready, I'll tell him. I watch him choose not to ask twice.
"Tell me what you want," he says, his forehead against mine.
"You. Inside me." I hook my legs around him, heels at the small of his back, and pull. "Now. I've been extremely patient and I'd like that noted for the record."
"Noted." Barely a breath of a laugh. Then, lower, scared again: "Tell me if it's too much. The bond's going to—when I'm inside you it's going to go both ways. You'll feel everything I feel. I won't be able to hide any of it."
"Good. Stop hiding."
He lines himself up and pushes into me in one slow stroke, and the air leaves me all at once.
He's thick, and I feel every inch of it, feel myself stretch around his cock, feel my own pulse pounding where we're joined.
He drops his forehead to mine and holds there, buried deep, both of us breathing hard.
"Everly." My name comes out wrecked. "You feel that?"
"Yes." It's pouring into my chest already, his pleasure and the terror under it, how much this means to him, how afraid he is of how much. "I feel all of it. Move. Please."
He moves. Slow at first. Then not. The bond cracks all the way open—both directions at once, the first time—his pleasure flooding my chest the same instant mine floods his, so every drag of him through me lands twice, in my body and from outside it with no source but him.
"Talk to me," I get out. "You promised."
"You're going to ruin me." He hooks an arm under my knee, opens me wider, goes deeper, and I make a sound I've never made.
"You already have. I'm not going to be able to stay away from you after this, you understand that?
I'll burn this hand to the bone getting back to you.
" His mouth at my ear, filthy and tender in the same breath.
"Tell me you want that. Tell me it's not just me. "
"It's not just me." I find his hand on the pillow, the burned one, and lace our fingers and hold on through the heat of it. "Ren. It was never just you."
The house is a wrong angle away. The glass eyes are somewhere in the dark of it.
His mark burns low and steady against my palm, blistering new skin with every minute we take.
None of it stops us. For once the night just holds—no fox on the stair, no scramble, no one coming—and I quit waiting for it to break and take this instead, all of it, his weight and his breath and his cock driving into me and the bond singing both ways at once.
"I'm close," he warns, ragged. "Come with me. I want to feel it together. I want—God, Everly, I want—"
"Then take it." I drag his mouth down to mine. "I've got you too."
I come the second time with my nails in his shoulder and his name in my mouth.
He follows on the next stroke, buries himself to the hilt and goes still, a groan torn out of him against my throat, and I feel it crest in both of us at the same moment, his and mine, until I can't tell whose is whose, and we ride it down together slow, holding on.
After, he doesn't leave.
That's the thing I keep returning to, lying tangled with him in a bed too small for two, his heart slowing under my ear.
He doesn't leave. The mark is still burning his hand—I can feel the low heat of it where his arm is across me, new skin blistering under the old—and he stays anyway, breathing into my hair, his thumb moving slow over my shoulder.
"That's going to be complicated," I say into the dark.
"Yes."
"The others felt that. The whole—" I wave a hand. "Bond. Going off like a flare. They know."
"I know they know." He says it evenly, but I feel the truth of it run through him, the guilt of it, the part of him that has spent his whole life trying not to take up room he wasn't given. "I'll deal with that."
"We'll deal with that."
He's quiet a moment. Then his arm tightens, just slightly, the burned hand and all.
"I'm done keeping my distance," he says.
He's the one who wears restraint like armor—who kept himself near doors and pulled back every single time his magic offered him more—and he's saying it plainly, the way you confess a thing once so you never have to pretend again.
"I don't think I could get it back if I tried. I don't think I want to."
I press my mouth to his collarbone. "Good," I say. "It was a terrible look on you."
That breath-laugh again. I feel it move through his chest, into mine, the bond carrying it both ways.
I think about the library. The restricted stacks, his hand over mine on the same page, the way his whole face changed when I turned my palm up under his instead of pulling away.
I'd thought, then, that it was the magic, that the blood bond reached for me and dragged him along with it, that none of this was a thing either of us chose so much as a thing that happened to us, like weather, like the mark.
I was wrong about that. He just told me so.
"You said you've known since the library," I say.
"I have."
"The magic didn't make you—"
"The magic," he says, "only made it impossible to pretend I didn't." His hand stills on my shoulder. "I've known. I've known since the library. The bond just took away the place I was hiding it."
Outside, far across the dark campus, three threads pull at the edge of me, awake and aware and unable to come.
The year's end sits in the room with us, a long way off and coming anyway, and the building next door presses faint against the back of my throat, and somewhere under this house a thing in a covered cage is breathing.
Term's nearly out. Soon the halls will empty, the students will scatter home for the break, and the watching will thin to almost nothing, and that stretch of quiet is the one door we've been handed. When it opens, we go down.
I stay anyway. I tuck myself in closer against him and feel his heart slow, and I stay.