Chapter 10 #3
When she pulled him into her, long, strong legs drawing him close, his breath left him in a gasp.
She went quiet for a moment, her hands braced on his chest, letting them both adjust, and for a moment, neither of them moved.
The sensation was overwhelming…not just the physical reality of her warmth and her closeness, but the emotional weight of being truly known in the most vulnerable way a person could be known.
Then she began to move, and he moved with her, and whatever remained of his capacity for rational thought dissolved into something simpler and more honest. His hands found her hips, and she leaned down to kiss him.
The rhythm they established was unhurried, almost exploratory, as though they had all the time in the world.
Even though they almost certainly did not.
She whispered his name against his mouth, not the title the witch clans used for him or the surname the Van Horns had stripped of its meaning, but Malachi, spoken with a warmth that transformed it into something he’d never heard it be before.
His arms came around her, pulling her closer, and the rhythm between them quickened, building toward something inevitable.
When he felt her tighten around him, felt the shudder run through her body and heard her soft, broken cry against his throat, he let go.
The release that followed went far beyond the mere physical.
It was the collapse of a structure that had been holding him up for the past seventeen years, and for a few unguarded seconds, he wasn’t the Collector, not the banished Van Horn, not the guardian of one hundred and two dangerous objects.
He was only a man being held in the arms of the woman who loved him.
Afterward, they lay in the narrow bed with the quilt pulled up to shield them from the cold and the dark room around them.
The silence between them had changed in quality for the third time since he had known her.
The first silence had been hostile, the wary quiet of two people who didn’t trust each other at all.
The second had been companionable, the easy quiet of people who’d found a rhythm despite everything.
This third silence was something new, warm and close and heavy with a vulnerability that he wouldn’t allow to feel alien.
Roslyn’s head was on his shoulder. Her hair smelled like the shampoo she’d bought at the drugstore, sweet and vaguely herbal.
He knew he would never be able to smell that shampoo again without remembering the way she’d pressed her face into his neck and made a sound that wasn’t quite a laugh and wasn’t quite a sigh, was rather some combination of both he would carry within him for the rest of his life.
His hand was in her hair. He was running his fingers through the honey-colored strands that had caught the lamplight every evening for the past three weeks, the hair he’d watched her braid and unbraid and tuck behind her ear.
The intimacy of touching it now in the dark with her naked body warm against his was almost more than he could bear.
Not because it hurt, but because it didn’t. Because it was the easiest thing he had done in seventeen years, and “easy” wasn’t a word that had previously existed in his vocabulary.
“My full name,” she said into the quiet, “is Roslyn Lysette Campbell.”
He waited. The sentence had the cadence of an opening, the first line of a story she’d decided to tell, and he understood that the telling was a gift, the kind of gift you offered someone after you’d decided to trust them.
“Lysette is my grandmother’s name,” Roslyn went on.
“My mom’s mother. She married my grandfather Marcus when they were both pretty young, and they had two children — my mom, Jenny, and my aunt Roslyn.
” She paused there, and he could see the way she swallowed, the clean lines of her throat silhouetted against the faint glow of the streetlights filtering in from outside.
Then she shifted against him, settling closer, and her hand came to rest on his chest. He covered it with his own.
“My aunt — the first Roslyn — was my mother’s little sister.
Her gift was music, and she had the kind of voice that made everyone stop and listen.
She probably could have been famous, but that’s not what we witches do, so she played in the tasting rooms and bars and clubs in the Verde Valley.
She had bright blonde hair like my mother, and everyone loved her.
” Another pause, and then she said, “And she was murdered by a warlock named Matías Escobar.”
Her voice was steady, but he could feel her heartbeat against his side, and it had quickened slightly. He said nothing, because he was learning — had been learning, for three weeks — that the most valuable thing he could offer this woman wasn’t his words, but his attention.
“It happened before I was born,” Roslyn went on.
“I never met her. But growing up, I always knew something about what had happened, even before anyone explained it to me. It was in the way my grandmother’s eyes would go distant sometimes, for no reason anyone else could see.
It was in the way my grandfather couldn’t hear the name Escobar without his jaw going tight.
” She drew a slow breath, and when she spoke again, her voice had grown softer, almost musing.
“And it was in my name. My mom named me after a dead woman, and I’ve always understood why.
It was a promise — to the family, to herself, maybe to my aunt’s memory — that the McAllisters wouldn’t let one of their own be forgotten. ”
She was quiet for a moment, and in the silence, the house settled around them…the creak of old wood, the distant murmur of the ocean, the low hum of the collection in its containment.
“I used to think the name was why I became a healer,” she said.
“Like it was some kind of destiny, bearing the name of someone who’d died because nobody could get to her in time.
But I don’t think that’s it, not really.
I think the name just gave me permission to do what I would have done anyway, because I’m a person who can’t walk past someone in pain without stopping.
That’s not my aunt’s legacy. That’s just who I am. ”
She tilted her head up to look at him, and in the dark, he could see the faint gleam of her eyes.
“I’m telling you this because I want you to understand something,” she said. “When I say I’m not leaving, it’s not because of the name, and it’s not because I think I owe my aunt some kind of debt. It’s because you’re in pain, and I’m here, and leaving is something I can’t do. Not won’t. Can’t.”
He was quiet for a long time after she finished speaking.
The room was dark, and her hand was warm on his chest. He could feel the rhythm of her breathing against his side, steady and unhurried.
She’d said what she needed to say and was now waiting, without anxiety or demand, for whatever he would offer in return.
What he offered wasn’t a speech, wasn’t a carefully constructed rebuttal or a formal acknowledgment or any of the verbal structures he’d spent his adult life perfecting.
What he offered was his hand tightening around hers and his mouth pressed briefly against the top of her head, and a silence that contained no distance in it at all.
They fell asleep like that, in the narrow bed with the quilt pulled up and the October dark pressing against the window, and for the first time since he’d escaped the void, Malachi did not dream.