Chapter Thirty-Three. Temperance
Temperance woke first, just after dawn. For nearly an hour, she lay with her head tucked against the slope of Duncan’s chest, clothed only in strawberry-blond sunrise.
The sooty scent of blown-out candles from hours ago still hung in the air, and the clock in the bathroom seemed to tick slower than reality. With the tip of her finger, she traced the bands of muscle along the upper part of Duncan’s ribs and made meandering swirls in the soft hairs on his belly and chest as he slept. She couldn’t see his face, nestled below his chin as she was, but she felt when he began to awaken. How his chest rose and broadened in a big inhale beneath her cheek, and the way his thighs stiffened when he stretched his legs. The brief tightening of his palm on her naked hip as he tugged her more snugly against his side, and a quiet, contented rumble deep in his throat.
A quarter of an hour passed before either of them spoke.
“I’ve been afraid to talk, or even move, in case this isn’t real.” His words were hot against her scalp. “But I really gotta pee.”
She chuckled and rolled to the side. “Me, too.”
Duncan ran down to the hall washroom, and Temperance hurried to the bathroom adjacent to the bedroom, naked as a willow branch in winter. She was brushing her teeth at the sink when he came back to her, sliding his hands across her belly, curving his body around hers from behind. Their eyes met in the mirror over her shoulder.
“Can I use that?” he said.
“My toothbrush? Nasty.”
“Temperance. We’ve been exchanging bodily fluids for half our lives. How is it nasty to share a toothbrush?”
“It just is.” She rinsed her own brush and put it in the sink-top container, then nudged him backward with her butt to make room to pull out the middle drawer of the cabinet. There were brand-new toothbrushes and a hoard of travel-sized toothpastes in there, along with half a dozen other needful toiletries. “My parents have been traveling most of their lives. There’re enough spare toiletries stashed in this house to stock a Walgreens.”
Duncan plucked out a toothbrush and used her cinnamon toothpaste. After, he lifted her onto the bathroom counter and kissed her. Thoroughly.
“I need to run this morning.” Her head fell back as Duncan worked his way down her neck with his mouth.
“No.” He grumbled against her collarbone. “I’ll be personally responsible for ensuring that you get an adequate workout today, Teacup.” He bent low to press a kiss between her breasts. “Your heart health is one of my top priorities.”
Her belly growled. Loud. They both froze.
“Was that— Did your stomach just growl?” He laughed.
Temperance dropped her forehead to his shoulder. “I’m so hungry.”
“Food first. Then we’re not leaving that bed until tomorrow morning.”
All Temperance had brought for her brief stay at the house was nonperishable dry goods, fruit, tea bags, and wine. Her parents had strict rules about food when she or Maren came to the house: don’t use the fridge (it was running, but in energy-saving mode, and they didn’t want to risk anything being left there to spoil), make sure all trash is taken with them and disposed of (off-property), and don’t eat anywhere in the house other than the kitchen (don’t want to risk a crumb of something dropping and attracting vermin). So, Temperance and Duncan wrapped themselves in oversized bath towels and sat at the bar in the kitchen, chatting and sipping Empress Grey tea from Laine Talbot-Madigan’s tulip-shaped Imperial Porcelain teacups. They ate bananas and date bars, fresh peaches from a Vesper Notch orchard, honey-roasted cashews as big as the end of Temperance’s thumb, and macadamia shortbread biscotti from Fortuna’s.
Then, they went back to bed.
“PLEASEtell me you have more condoms—” Duncan breathed.
“Black bag.” Temperance pointed. “Over there. Outside pocket.”
In seconds, he was off the bed. There was a distinct tan line at the back of his waist from all the hours at the lake. His butt was paler than the rest of him, and it bounced a bit as he vaulted toward her overnight bag. With his dark hair standing wild around his head, and the morning sun sliding over the convexities and concavities of him, he seemed almost mythical, like the magnitude of him was too much for this room. But there was a vulnerability to him, too. A sweetness. He unzipped the bag with youthful enthusiasm and let out a triumphant little growl as he withdrew the shiny foil square. A wave of tenderness crashed through her, sending her heart into her throat. Her bloodstream seemed to thrum toward him with purpose, like the moon urging high tide.
I love him. I am in endless, relentless love with this man.
From the bottom of the bed, Duncan crawled up the mattress on fists and knees, trailing kisses along the inner curve of her ankle, her calves, the softest part of her thighs. Teeth skidded gently over the upward thrust of her hip bone. “I love you, I love you, I love you,” she breathed every time a kiss landed.
A wide-open mouth and a generous tongue closed against the lower curve of her small breast. Her back arched off the bed.
Duncan settled between her thighs, pressing inside her with a long, slow surge of his hips. Each cell in her body rang with recognition. Her nerve endings crackled like a lightning strike beneath her skin. Every feeling she’d ever felt for him coalesced to fill her up in that moment, and her body didn’t feel big enough to contain it.
“I love you,” she said again. Clear and calm and permanent.
“Temperance.” Duncan rose over her, eyes bright, cheekbones flushed. His hair was exuberant chaos, waves spreading in all directions like a spent party popper. He grinned. “Stop talking, and show me.”
LATER.
Duncan supported his weight above her, arms trembling.
“Let go.” Temperance urged him to put his whole body on her.
He eased gently down, but the weight of him made an involuntary breath puff out of her open mouth. He was heavy.
She loved it.
“See?” The single syllable came out as an airy grunt. “You didn’t hurt me.”
“I still might,” he whispered against her hair.
“I’m small, Duncan. But I’m not fragile.”
“You’re not small, you’re bite-sized.” He fit his teeth around the upper curve of her shoulder, then her chin. Her earlobe. She squirmed beneath him, even more breathless from laughter. “You’re not fragile, either.” Abruptly, he raised up to his elbows to cup her face in both hands. His eyes were soft, but his mouth was set in a serious line. “I had a dream last night.”
Her hands went soft. Tender. “Oh, no.”
“No, no—it was okay. Wasn’t a nightmare. We were sitting around a campfire, and it was peaceful. Just you and me. Comforting.”
“Were we naked?” she teased.
Duncan made a faux sound of annoyance. “You are never serious.”
Temperance giggled.
“You always make it about sex.”
More laughter.
“You remember that quote, Love must be as much a light, as it is a flame?” he said.
“Yeah.”
Duncan pressed a kiss to the tip of her chin, then to her expectant mouth. “In the dream, you said to me, ‘The flame is the light,’ and then I woke up.”
She searched his face for a long time. “Well. I am a poetic genius.”
He groaned and dropped his face to the pillow. Temperance drew her knees up past his hips and locked her ankles at his back, skittering fingernails up his ribs, across his shoulders, into his hair. When he raised his head, they simply watched each other laugh.
She made a memory of the moment, like one of those little rectangles of glass with a scene etched inside.
DUNCANsnoozed, stretched out on the bed with a sheet over his lower half. Temperance sat beside him wearing only the plain white T-shirt he’d taken off the night before, indulging in her first-ever close examination of the tattoos on his arms. They ended at defined lines about an inch above his wrists, and again where his clavicle intersected with his upper arm. They all blended together in a colorful mosaic, though some were more vivid than others due to age.
He opened his eyes as if he’d sensed her scrutiny.
“So, what’s the deal with all the tattoos?” Temperance said. “I have to know.”
“I like tattoos.”
“This is commitment, Duncan.” She ran a finger along a remarkably realistic crow on his shoulder. It was mostly black ink, shaded with deep blues and purples.
“Well, you know about the first. My second was when I was eighteen and hotheaded. I wanted to hurt myself, but I got the ink instead. Then I couldn’t stop.”
“I’m sorry,” she said, gently.
“Don’t be. I love them. I’m just sad I’ve run out of space.” He propped pillows against the headboard to sit up a bit.
Starting on the left, Temperance explored. She gently tugged his arm to lay it across her lap. His biceps was mostly covered by a wide cuff of the County Galway tartan, where his Brady ancestors were from. Below it was a light blue band to represent the Galician flag on Gia’s side. A nautilus shell, a blue butterfly, and an especially whimsical fox intertwined with a rose on the inside of his left forearm. She laid her fingers to it. “What’s this one?”
Duncan flexed his hand to make his muscles bunch beneath her touch. “The Little Prince, by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. There’s a fox, and a talking rose, and—” He cut off and looked at her with a tilted smile. “Christ. Never realized how weird it sounded out loud. There’s a bunch of lines in it that resonated with me. ‘The shame of it was that they loved each other. But they were both too young to know how to love,’ and ‘You become responsible, forever, for what you have tamed.’”
“Wow, you are a total marshmallow,” Temperance teased.
Duncan pressed his free hand over his eyes and laughed. She bent forward to kiss the fox-and-rose tattoo.
“What about Dory here?” She ran her thumb along a blue tropical fish with stripes.
“That isn’t Dory, you weirdo. Dory is a blue tang. This is an emperor angelfish.”
“Oh, forgive me.”
Again, that nervous laugh. “It’s from the aquarium scene in Romeo and Juliet. That song was playing—‘Kissing You’—right when we—ah—sealed the deal at the Boonies.”
“You can say it.” Temperance laughed and pinched him lightly in the biceps. “Oh my god, you can’t say it. Right before we had sex the first time. How did you even remember that?”
He gave her a pained look.
She traced the faint stripes on the fish. “Duncan. I recognize this. You drew this, didn’t you?” She sat up straighter and pulled his forearm closer to her face. “You designed all of these.”
Duncan tucked his fingers in the front of his hair. “Yeah.”
Temperance straddled his belly just above his hips. She pointed to each tattoo, and received a brief story for each. After, the only uncharted spot that remained was the soft interior of his right biceps. When she prompted him to lift his arm so she could see, he hesitated.
“I didn’t design the one under there,” Duncan said.
His reluctance only made her more curious. It had to be awful, like an amateurish scrawl of an eagle, or a kanji he thought read “strength” but was actually something like “dog water” or “arthritis.”
Temperance leaned over him and slid both hands along his arm to lift it. “Come onnnn,” she coaxed.
Duncan relented. He rested his hand behind his head and subtly flexed his biceps.
She planted her hands on his chest and pushed. “You have done that on purpose all these years.”
He caught his bottom lip in his teeth, smiling. “Have I?”
Temperance scooted higher on his belly and bent to inspect the tattoos illuminated by the morning sun through the window. Duncan didn’t take his attention from her face.
Her breath seized in her chest. Whatever it was, it was beautiful.
It was a rectangular image, a little smaller than the size of a playing card. Artfully done in shades of periwinkle, pink, and pale green, it was more faded than the others. One of his older pieces. Inside an intricate scrollwork frame stood a winged figure in the center, dressed in a flowing white robe and holding two golden chalices with a swirl of water flowing between. A single bare toe was dipped into water at the bottom.
It looked like an angel, but Duncan was far too secular to get a tattoo with religious connotations. The longer Temperance looked, the more he squirmed beneath her. With a self-conscious groan, he rubbed his eye with a knuckled fist. The gesture was disarmingly pure and a little bit anxious.
“It’s a tarot card,” he said. “It can mean a lot of things, apparently. For me, this one symbolizes persistence, patience, and peace.”
Temperance laid her hand flat over the tattoo. His skin there was unbelievably soft. “It must have hurt.”
Quietly, he said, “More than you can imagine.”
Silence passed between them. The hairs on the back of her neck rose. “Duncan. What’s the name of this card?”
His Adam’s apple raised and dipped in a hard swallow. “It’s the temperance card.”
There weren’t any words that could properly serve the emotions she felt in that moment. The feelings were bigger than language. She trailed her fingernails from his wrist to his biceps.
“This spot was where you got your bee with me that day. You covered it?”
“Look at the space inside the upper-right corner of the card,” he said.
Temperance’s hair dropped over her shoulder to glide across his chest. In the space he described was the tiny honeybee identical to the one on her ring finger. The ink was faded to a brown black, and it was small enough that it looked like it could be part of the design of the temperance card.
“Bee. For Brady.” Duncan rubbed his thumb over her tattoo.
Temperance collapsed in a heap against his chest and cried.
Fourteen years they’d lost.
They’d grown and changed, but the ways they fit together had always remained the same. Time was the most precious currency there was, but it couldn’t be created or generated like wealth. You simply needed to spend what you already had as carefully and intentionally as possible.
“What is it, baby?” Duncan said.
“I spent fourteen years missing you, even when you were sitting right beside me. I never stopped loving you, Duncan.” Temperance held his face in her hands. “I think the way we loved each other was just too big for two eighteen-year-olds to know how to handle. We changed, and the world around us changed. But every version of me has loved every version of you, and deep down, I was always waiting.”
“We both were. Right where we left us.”
She was never letting him go again.