40. Everly
EVERLY
Felix doesn't ask. He never asks. He just turns his hand over so the cards disappear back into the deck, and then he holds that hand out to me, palm open, no pull in it, the way there's never any pull in him. Only the offer.
I set the notebook aside and cross the room and take it.
He draws me down into his lap, knees to either side of his hips, and the second I settle my weight on him I feel it happen, the thing that only ever happens this close to Felix.
The low constant flicker of him goes quiet.
All that ceaseless looking-ahead, the branches fanning out and out behind his eyes every waking minute, narrows down to a single line.
I feel it through the thread between us, that flutter at the edge of my vision smoothing flat and going still.
"There she is," he murmurs, and it's not the charm. The charm has somewhere to be. This is just Felix, looking at me from inside his own face.
I kiss him. Slow, because there's no spell hunting us tonight and no mark on the back of his hand left to burn and no day spent watching me die in a dozen rooms—just the two of us and an hour I get to give him.
He kisses me back like he has all the time in the world, which is the one lie I'll let him tell, his hands coming up to frame my jaw, thumbs along my cheekbones, gentle in a way the front of him never is.
It builds the way warmth builds, not the way fire does.
His mouth opens under mine and I lick into it and feel him sigh, a long one, the kind that comes from a place a person keeps locked.
We stay there a long time, just kissing, because there's nowhere either of us has to be and no reason to hurry toward anything.
He kisses like he's memorizing it: a slow drag of his lower lip against mine, a pause to breathe me in, then deeper, his tongue sliding against mine until I make a small sound into his mouth and feel him smile against me.
His hands move over my back in long unhurried strokes, learning the shape of me by touch, fingertips tracing the line of my spine, the wings of my shoulder blades, the dip of my waist, like he's in no hurry to get anywhere because the getting-there is the part he wants.
I drag my hands up under his shirt and he lets me pull it off him, and then I just look, because I'm allowed to.
The lean lines of him, the old silver scar on his shoulder where the spell tore through, the new fading mark on the back of the hand he brings up to my waist. I press my mouth to the scar first. He goes very still.
"Everly," he says, low.
"I know." I sit back enough to pull my own shirt over my head, and his eyes drop, and his hands come up to my breasts like he can't not, thumbs stroking over my nipples until they tighten and a hot pull runs straight down between my thighs. "I'm not going anywhere. That's the point."
He makes a sound I feel more than hear. Then he gets an arm under me and stands, lifting me like I weigh nothing, and carries me the few steps to the bed.
He lays me back into it and follows me down, and then he takes his time, real time, the kind the two of us almost never get.
He kisses along my throat, down to the dip of my collarbone, and lower, closing his mouth over one nipple and sucking until I gasp and arch up off the mattress, his other hand cupping my breast, thumb circling slow.
"Look at you," he murmurs against my skin, and all the brightness has gone out of his voice, something lower and rougher left in its place. "Been thinking about this all week. Every branch I looked down, this is the one I kept stopping on."
He works his way across all of me like he's got nowhere in the world he'd rather be.
The soft underside of my breast. The line of my ribs, one at a time.
The flat of my stomach, where his mouth makes my muscles jump and flutter.
He kisses the jut of each hip and the crease of each thigh, easing the last of my clothes down my legs as he goes, until I'm bare under him and shivering and he still isn't where I want him.
He drags his lips up the inside of one thigh, slow, then the other, breathing warm against me without quite touching, until I'm squirming and reaching for him.
"Patience," he says, and I can hear the smile in it. "I'm getting there. I want to feel you fall apart first." Then he settles between my thighs and looks up the length of my body at me, both hands spread warm over my hips.
"Tell me," he says.
"Your mouth." I'm already shameless about it, because thank God, this is the one room in this whole watched house where I get to be. "Felix. Your mouth, now."
He gives it to me. He settles his mouth over my pussy and licks up the length of me before his tongue finds my clit and circles it, slow, and I gasp and my hips lift off the bed into his mouth.
One finger pushes into me, then a second, curling, and I fist my hands in the sheets and let my head drop back.
He learns me the way he learns everything—the catch of my breath, the lift of my hips, finding wherever I want him most—except there's no calculation in it tonight, just attention, just Felix paying out everything he has on the one bet he never loses.
He lifts his mouth just enough to speak, his breath hot against my slick skin.
"That's it," he says, low and wrecked. "So wet for me.
Don't hold it back—I want to feel you come on my tongue. "
Then his mouth is back on me before I can answer, and he works my clit with the flat of his tongue, pulses his fingers deep inside me, and the pleasure climbs warm and steady and full.
When it crests I don't scream. I just shake, my whole body drawing tight and then breaking soft, his name coming out of me on one long unraveling breath while he holds me through it, his mouth gentle against me the whole way down.
I come down slow. He kisses the inside of my thigh, the jut of my hip, back up to my mouth, and I taste myself on him and pull him closer.
"Up here," I tell him. "I want to be on top of you when you're inside me."
"Demanding," he says, but the smile he gives me is soft clear through, and he rolls onto his back and takes me with him, easy, like it's the most natural thing in the world.
I straddle him again. I reach down and take his cock in my hand—hard, hot, his hips lifting into my grip on a quiet exhale—and I line him up and sink down onto him slow, taking him an inch at a time, the stretch of him filling me by degrees until he's seated all the way inside me, and we both go still for a second, just breathing.
"There you are," I say back to him, because turnabout is fair.
His hands settle on my thighs, not gripping, just holding. "Set the pace," he says. "It's your hour."
So I do. I ride him slow and deep, feeling him drag thick inside me with every roll of my hips, watching his face the whole way—the way his jaw goes loose, the way his eyes stay open and on mine like he refuses to miss a second of it, the way that quiet in him through the thread goes deeper and deeper the longer I move.
There's no urgency in it. There's no future in it.
There's just his body under mine and the heat building back up low in my belly and the bond between us humming one single steady note, the futures all collapsed down to this, to here, to now.
"You feel that?" I ask him, because I want him to say it.
"Yeah." His hands flex on my thighs. His voice has gone rough at the bottom. "Quiet. You make it quiet."
His hands slide up to my waist and help me move on him, guiding the roll of my hips, and his eyes drag down the length of me and back up to my face.
"Look at you," he breathes. "Taking me so well.
So pretty up there." His thumb strokes my hipbone.
"That's mine, right there—you hear me? This.
Always." The words land low and hot where our bodies meet, and I clench around him just to watch his breath stutter and his head press back into the pillow, and he groans something that isn't a word at all.
I lean down and kiss him without breaking the rhythm, and he wraps his arms around my back and holds me against his chest, and we move together like that, chest to chest, my mouth on his, slow and close and warm.
He slips a hand between us and finds my clit with his thumb and works me there in time with the way I'm taking him, and the second climb is gentler than the first and somehow bigger, rolling up through me until it tips over and I clench around him with a soft cry into his mouth.
He follows me a few strokes later, a groan breaking out of him, his arms going tight, his face pressed into my neck—and through the thread I feel the exact moment he lets go.
Not his pleasure crashing back into me from the outside.
Just the quiet in him going all the way down, the futures gone silent, given to me freely the way he gives everything.
After, neither of us moves for a while. I stay where I am, draped over his chest with him still inside me, his heartbeat slowing under my ear, his fingers tracing nothing up and down my spine.
The house is silent. The bond is full and warm and quiet.
It is, I think, the most peaceful I have felt in longer than I can remember.
He presses a kiss to the top of my head, and then another to my temple, and I feel some of the tension I didn't know he'd been holding finally go out of him, his whole body sinking deeper into the mattress beneath me.
We don't talk. We don't need to. I trace the old scar on his shoulder with one fingertip and he lets me, and somewhere outside the warped amber glass the campus that wants us gone goes on not knowing where we are, and in here there's just his breath and mine, evening out, falling into the same slow rhythm without either of us deciding it.
For a little while I let myself believe it could always be this easy. That we could just have this.
I lift my head and find his mouth again, lazy, unhurried, just because I can. He kisses me back, one hand sliding up into my hair.
And I slide my eyes open against his lips.
Over his shoulder, his free hand has reached out to the nightstand, and it's turning a card.
Not the whole deck—just turning them off the top one at a time, the way he does without thinking, the way some people tap a foot.
It's the strange deck, the one I've watched him shuffle a thousand miles: a tarot deck folded into an ordinary playing deck folded into cards he's inked himself, his own symbols in his own cramped hand on plain black stock.
A card turns. Death—the tarot one, the skeleton and the white rose, the card he's told me before doesn't mean what people think it means.
Another. The Queen. Just the Queen, dark suit, her one flat painted eye.
Another. One of his own. Black card, something drawn on it in white ink that I can't make out from here, can't quite bring into focus, like my eyes slide off it the way everyone else's eyes slide off the annex.
His lips go tight against mine. Just for a second.
Just the smallest pull at the corner of his mouth, there and gone—but I've spent the better part of a year learning the country behind his face, and I know that tell the way I know my own name.
He's seen something. Some branch fanned open and showed him its end, and he hated it.
I go still. I almost ask.
But Felix turns his hand over and the cards are simply gone, folded back into the dark of the deck like they were never there, and he brings that hand up to cradle my jaw, and he kisses me again—deeper this time, slower, both of us, like he's pouring himself into it, like the kiss is a door he's closing very gently on a room he doesn't want me to see inside.
He doesn't tell me. Of course he doesn't tell me.
He just pays the toll the only way he ever has, the only way he ever will: by carrying it alone, somewhere down a branch I'm not allowed to walk, so that I get to stay here in the warm with him and not have to look at whatever's waiting at the end of it.
I let him. God help me, tonight, I let him.