Chapter 17
Chapter Seventeen
That night, Marina reached for Alessandro.
She didn’t plan it, didn’t think it through. She crossed the living room where he sat on the couch, laptop forgotten, staring at nothing, and pressed herself against him like proximity could fix what words had broken.
He kissed her like a drowning man, desperate and grateful and a little terrified of being thrown a rope.
She climbed into his lap, deepening the kiss like she could solve something with proximity. The laptop slid off the couch. Neither of them reached for it.
He kissed her back immediately. Desperate and grateful and wrong, wrong in a way she could feel but couldn’t name yet. His hands went to her hair, her waist, pulling her closer like the distance between them was a problem physics could fix.
She didn’t want to talk. Talking meant the hollow space. Talking meant acknowledging that she’d dampened the bond three days ago and hadn’t opened it back up and he’d noticed and hadn’t said anything and neither of them was going first.
His shirt came off. She pulled her own over her head without ceremony, without the slow undressing that used to make this feel like a conversation. This wasn’t a conversation. This was an attempt.
His hands found her skin and they were shaking. Not with desire. With relief. She felt the difference and wished she hadn’t.
“I’m sorry,” he breathed against her neck. “God, Marina, I’m so sorry…”
“Don’t.” She kissed him to stop the words. The apology made it worse. The apology was about him, about his guilt, about making himself feel better, and she didn’t have the energy to explain why that was the problem and not the solution. “Just don’t talk.”
He obeyed. Carried her to the bedroom they’d been occupying like polite strangers for three days.
The bed was made with rigid, anxious neatness, his doing, another form of trying, of showing her he could be good, be careful, be whatever she needed.
She didn’t want careful. She didn’t know what she wanted.
She wanted to feel close to him again. That was the whole of it. The wanting was simple. The execution was not.
He laid her down and covered her body with his, lean muscle and dragon-heat, and she reached for the place inside her where the bond lived.
She reached and found the wall she’d built.
Three days of dampening had made it solid. She pressed against it and felt nothing. His emotions, his physical responses, all of it muffled. Like pressing her ear to a door and hearing only her own breathing.
She could open it. She knew that. One conscious choice and the bond would flood back and she’d feel everything he felt and he’d feel everything she felt, and…
She couldn’t. Because what she felt right now was hollow. And if he felt that, it would destroy him. And she wasn’t trying to destroy him. She was trying to find her way back.
His hands tightened on her hips. His mouth found hers with renewed urgency, harder, like intensity could substitute for intimacy. She recognized the strategy because it was the same one she was using.
They undressed each other quickly. No exploration. No pausing to learn or rediscover. Just fabric removed, obstacles cleared, two people trying to get to something that might not be there anymore.
The sheets were cold. She noticed that. Usually his body heat warmed everything within minutes (dragon thermoregulation, the constant furnace of him).
Tonight he was still hot to the touch, but the sheets stayed cold against her back.
She couldn’t tell if it was real or if she was just more aware of the places he wasn’t.
When he pushed inside her, they both gasped. The physical sensation was still there, precise, undeniable. He still fit her perfectly. Her body still responded, still wanted him, still arched into the feeling of him filling her.
But without the bond amplifying everything, it was just sex. Good sex. Technical, attentive sex with a man who had memorized what she liked and was applying that knowledge with careful diligence.
She hated that word. Diligence.
“Marina.” Her name in his voice, strained and searching. “I can’t feel you. I can’t…”
“I know.” She pulled him down into a kiss to stop him from saying more. His confusion pressed faintly against the wall she’d built, not gone, just muted. He didn’t understand. She’d reached for him. She’d started this. And now she was here with him, skin to skin, and still somehow miles away.
“Just move,” she said. “Please.”
He did. Set a rhythm that was harder than the way they usually did this, more desperate. She recognized what he was doing: trying to be so physically present that it would break through the emotional distance. Each thrust deliberate, pointed, like he could reach her if he just pushed hard enough.
She matched him. Nails in his shoulders, hips rising to meet his. Chasing the thing that used to come so easily: the moment where her body and her heart aligned and she felt safe and seen and held.
It didn’t come.
Her body responded. Of course it did. He knew exactly how to touch her, exactly which angle made her gasp, exactly where to put his hand and his mouth and his weight. He was good at this. He was good at most things he put his mind to.
That was the problem, she realized, distantly, while his thumb circled her clit and her back arched on reflex. He was good at performing competence.
“I love you,” Alessandro gasped against her neck, his rhythm faltering. “Marina, I love you…”
The words landed on the surface of her and slid off.
Not because they weren’t true. She could feel, even through the dampened bond, that he meant them completely. He loved her. That had never been in doubt.
But love wasn’t the thing that was broken. Trust was. And she couldn’t explain the difference to him right now, not with his body inside hers and his breath against her throat. The timing was wrong. The medium was wrong. This was not a conversation that should happen in bed.
She didn’t respond. Just pulled him closer, buried her face in his neck, and chased the physical sensation because it was the only thing she could reach.
When she came, it was sharp and abrupt, her body cresting without her heart’s involvement, muscles clenching, a gasp torn out of her that sounded right but felt hollow.
Alessandro followed moments later, her name wrenched from his throat. She felt his body shudder against hers, felt his arms tighten, felt the heat flare along his skin. No scales this time. The dragon stayed buried.
They collapsed together. Breathing hard. The sheets were still cold.
He pulled her against him immediately, wrapping around her the way he did when things were good, possessive, protective, his chin on top of her head, his arms a fortress. Like this was the ending. Like the sex had been a bridge and now they were on the other side.
But she was still standing in the same place.
The hollow space in her chest (the one where trust used to live, where safety used to be, where she’d kept the certainty that he would hear her when it mattered) the sex hadn’t touched.
If anything, the emptiness was more obvious now.
Thrown into relief by everything that had just happened around it, the way a hole in a wall is most visible when the rest of the wall is intact.
She’d reached for him and found his body and his love and his guilt and his desperate desire to fix things. She’d found everything except the thing she needed.
Just two people in the dark, missing each other completely.
The tears came before she could stop them. Silent at first, just heat behind her eyes and a tightness in her throat. Then her shoulders shook, and the sound leaked out, a small, broken thing she couldn’t swallow back down.
Alessandro went rigid. “Marina? What…”
She couldn’t explain. There were no words for this that wouldn’t sound like blame, and she didn’t want to blame him. She wanted to stop feeling like she was screaming into a room where he only heard the echo.
“I’m fine,” she said, which was so obviously untrue that they both flinched at it.
He didn’t push. He just held her, silent and bewildered, his confusion a dull pressure against the wall she’d built. She could feel him trying to understand, running through possibilities, analyzing. Always analyzing.
She cried until she was empty, and then she stopped, and the silence afterward was worse.
Alessandro held her, bewildered. He’d thought this meant forgiveness; that her body reaching for his was a bridge between them.
But it wasn’t.
She’d been trying to feel close to him again. Trying to recapture the intimacy they’d had before Malachar, before the dismissal, before she’d learned exactly how little her voice mattered when it conflicted with his assumptions.
The physical connection was still there, explosive and undeniable. But trust was missing.
“What’s wrong?” he asked, stroking her hair. “Marina, talk to me.”
She couldn’t explain. Couldn’t find words for the hollow feeling, the realization that love wasn’t always enough.
“I’m tired,” she said instead. “Go to sleep.”
He didn’t push. He just held her, silent and confused, until exhaustion pulled them both under.
When Marina woke in the grey pre-dawn light, she rebuilt her walls.
Four days until the full moon.
The bakery reopened, because bills didn’t care about heartbreak. Marina moved through her morning routine like a machine: flour measured, dough kneaded, ovens preheated. The motions that had always steadied her now felt hollow.
Alessandro tried to help. He started the coffee exactly the way she liked it, cream and one sugar, set beside her elbow without comment. He carried the heavy bags of flour, handled the morning rush with careful politeness, never intruding on her space.
He was trying. She could feel it even through the bond she’d learned to dampen.
But trying wasn’t the same as trusting. And the gap between them widened with every polite exchange.
“You’re BOTH being idiots.”