CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Everest is lying on his bed, catching something he’s flung into the air, when I storm inside.
“Ryka?” he says, sitting up. His sleeves are rolled up, and I note that his skin is smooth and unmarred, all traces of the rot gone. “I left Beam with Ender; they’re at the main tent if you’re looking for them.”
Breath whistles from my chest, each one hard fought and not enough. “Is it true?”
The muscles in his arms ripple as he leans forward, eyebrows scrunched. “Is what true?”
I clench my fists by my side. “The research you said you were doing, to change the past. My past. That’s what triggered your coma?”
His eyes widen with surprise, then settle into something unreadable. “Quill told you.”
The lack of denial is jarring. Anger, confusion, pain seep into every pore of my body. “She shouldn’t have had to.” I take a step forward. “How could you? I can’t let you do this tomorrow. Not at this cost.”
The world is tilting beneath my feet. His withholding of information is a stab to my heart. At the cost of giving me a choice, it feels like he’s taking it away. I’m trembling with it, the magnitude of the revelation.
Everest shakes his head. “This isn’t how I wanted you to find out about this.”
“When were you going to tell me?” I ask. “Tomorrow, before I leave? Or when I never see you again?”
Anguish cuts jagged edges in my throat, and I’m suffocating in here.
Everest looks distraught. “No, you don’t understand. Nothing will happen to me tomorrow – at least, not physically. That’s what I’ve been working on.”
We both stay rooted to where we are. Him on the bed, his ankles locked as if to keep him there. Me, a few feet from him, weighed down by the moment. Time is neutral, but it is not equal. This day, this night, tomorrow; they are bigger than anything I’ve ever faced before, and it’s crushing me.
“Cyrus will help,” Everest says. “We’ve made sure of it. I would never ask you to choose like that, not without telling you first. I messed up with my tests; that’s why the rot spread through me, but it was a miscalculation. It won’t happen again.”
Pressure releases from my chest in minuscule amounts, sharp pain penetrating my ribs. Everest is many things, but he is not a liar. Even now, unfettered honesty lies plain in his expression.
“Is that what you were talking about that day?” I recall the conversation I’d heard outside his tent. “Is that what he wanted you to tell me?”
He scratches the back of his head. “Yes, that was the day we figured out the key. But I wanted to tell you alone, at the right moment. There was so much happening with the artifacts, and you weren’t slowing down at any point–”
“So it’s my fault that you didn’t tell me sooner?”
“No!” He looks like he’s going to get to his feet but decides not to, pinching his nose instead. “It’s my fault. I should have told you sooner, and I was going to up in the mountains, but it was hard enough telling you what the plan was. Telling you that I could let you go.”
There’s a tightness to him that I’ve never heard before. He says, “I didn’t think it would matter, not when we’d figured out how to avoid the rot.”
I stare at him. “How could you think it wouldn’t matter?”
Not after the last five hundred years, not after the last two weeks, not after last night.
I’ve been angry with, frustrated at, and in the early years, sometimes hated, Everest. But it’s been a long time since he hasn’t mattered.
So long that I can’t imagine a world where he doesn’t stay with me, even if we’re not together.
“It’s easier sometimes,” he says softly. “To pretend that it won’t matter.”
It’s all we’ve been doing, playing pretend. I bite down on my tongue but still can’t withhold the spite. “Just one more day, and you won’t have to anymore.”
I don’t mean for it to come out so bitter. This tent has inched in towards me, and its drapes threaten to smother me whole.
His hand catches my wrist as I step away. “Don’t go.”
It’s like a chain heated in a forge has clamped around my arm, but I can’t pull away.
I don’t think I should stay, but the words snag in the back of my throat.
I’ve felt like a boulder balanced precariously at the edge of a lethally steep cliff while he’s been here, a shadow of his former self, and the sight of his familiar crooked smile, illuminated by the low candlelight, is enough to send me over the edge.
He pulls me closer until my knees graze his, and he’s looking up at me like I’m a half-lit moon he’s aching to see in full.
I trace my thumb across the line of his jaw, the same way I did all those years ago, and the desperation in his heavy-lidded eyes transforms into heady want.
The hand around my wrist tightens. “Ryka,” he groans.
The tether snaps. I bend down, the palm of my hand cupping his cheek, and we’re so close, the decades of desire and fear a palpable electricity I can feel on my lips.
There have always been so many reasons not to do this; but right now, knowing that it may as well be one of the last times I’m alone with him, I can’t remember a single one.
I kiss him.
At first, it’s slow, uncertain despite years of remembering the last – like a book we stopped reading after the first chapter. Everest’s hand slides up my thigh to my waist. The heat of his touch through my dress is so blinding, I groan against his mouth.
Everest stiffens at the sound. I pull back an inch, terrified to see if he wears the same regret I did after our first kiss. Instead, he looks as wild as I feel, like the world might fall apart if we stop now.
In one swift motion, he pulls me over his lap and under him, so I land with my back against his cool sheets.
This time when he kisses me, it’s deeper, probing, and I’m arching against him, running my nails up his back.
He hums with pleasure; it rings through his chest and into me, like a tuning fork at full resonance, and I can’t get enough of it.
I’m at the mercy of every ounce of greed that I’ve stifled over centuries, every moment that I’ve wondered what it would be like to be with him drawing vengeance against the times I decided I shouldn’t.
I bend under his touch as he strips off my dress, caresses my waist, the hard peak of my breasts. I’m on the verge of coming apart when his fingers stroke me between my legs, against the slickness that invites him inside.
“I want you,” I whisper, tugging at his waist. It’s a truth that I don’t know how to explain – it goes beyond physical desire or attraction. It’s a soul-wrenching want, the need to be so close to him that for just a little while, he could be my entire world. That I could be his.
He draws back, and I seize the opportunity to unbutton the front of his shirt, revealing a panel of skin beneath.
My hands roam across his chest, every bit of contact a point of discovery.
It’s unusual to learn something new about a person you know as well as yourself, after you’ve uncovered every other part of them.
I savor this – not the bareness of his body as he peels off his pants, but the minute changes in his expression, the gentle intimacy that softens his eyes until I could melt into them.
I fall back on the bed, pulling him with me, but he resists, resting on one elbow while the other cups my neck.
This Everest, cheeks and lips flushed, hair mussed, looking down at me like I’m the most precious thing he’s seen, is disarming.
“Are you sure?” he asks., echoing my uncertainty.
But I’m beyond asking myself that, on the verge of falling apart if we don’t. But this decision is so big, and behind his want is a flicker of fear that I recognize all too well. I touch his cheek. “Are you?”
Because we both know what tomorrow brings, and I can’t be the only one who decides. He holds my stare, then tilts to kiss the hand on his face, following the line of my arm down until his teeth graze my ear. “I’ve never been more sure of anything.”
Another kiss, gentle on my lips. His fingers trail down my body, and his mouth tracks his touch, between my breasts, down my stomach.
His hands part my thighs and I fist the sheets as he kisses me between my legs, his tongue probing against the wetness that slicks my folds.
My back bows off the bed, but his forearm presses down on my abdomen, holding me still as he drags his tongue down my core, then gently sucks on my clit.
I gasp, writhing against the sheets, and he’s humming as he continues to lick me, kiss me, his spare hand joining his mouth.
A finger slides into me and I’m screaming his name, the air shimmering silver, and I’m not sure if it’s magic or the utter madness ravaging my mind as I come apart under his touch, melting against his mouth.
My body shudders, cool air rushing to occupy where his head was, because he’s kissing me again and I can taste myself on his lips.
It drives me insane. I wrap my hand around the length of him and he groans, hardening in my palm.
His arms shake as he positions himself above me.
Our eyes meet, and now I’m certain that was magic before, a silver thread binding our souls.
It sparks and dances between us, filling the air with a warm electricity.
“So beautiful,” he says, and I know he’s not talking about the light as he pushes inside me.
The sensation is like being drenched by a storm that I’ve seen coming from a distance.
I’m alight, burning like a dying star, searching for every last breath.
I’m more naked than if there was no tent sheltering us from the rest of the world, more afraid than losing a grip on the timeline.
Everything about Everest drives me mad – losing him and having him are two edges of the same unbearable sword, but tonight I fall on it willingly.
His hand cups my breast, and the brush of his thumb on its underside bows my body. My hips thrust towards him and he moans, so I do it again, cherishing the way it catches him off guard, drawing a shortened breath.
“This is–” I start to say, realizing we’re going too fast, that if we devour each other whole, this won’t last nearly as long as I need it to.
“I know,” Everest says, kissing me like he can wipe away my fears, drawing me back to the present with him.
Time shifts around us. The hanging magic in the air erupts, turning the parts of my body that he touches a brilliant silver, filling the space between us with an ethereal glow.
It spreads across the tent, and I pull back, watching as the candles that floated around us halt on their course, their flames still, as if held by some unseen force.
The wind holds its breath, casting the tent in silence, and I realize what he’s done, frozen this moment, removing us from everything bearing down upon tomorrow.
“You and me,” he says, still looking at me. He plants a kiss under my ear, and the silver of his magic radiates from that point of contact, all across my body. “For now, it’s just us.”
He says it like a vow, and the gravity of time obeys, winding around us in a million silver threads.
But it’s not the magic that’s forced my heart to my throat, or us being immortalized in this moment that feels so rare.
It’s always been him, and it’s always been us.
Silver sparks off the tip of my finger as I trace a line up his arm and towards his face.
He leans into my hand, eyes briefly closing against the touch of my palm.
“Just us,” I whisper, pulling him back to me.
I can’t get enough of him. I want to bottle the way he says my name, capture the devotion as he grips my hair, raining sweet kisses down my neck as he moves inside me.
He’s never touched me like this before, but he’s studied me like a map for so long that he could now trace blindfolded.
There are a million sensations coursing through me, and he’s orchestrating each one like a thunderous symphony that comes together just right.
It’s obliterating, devastating, the warmth of his legs between my thighs, the caress of his tongue along my lips.
I lift my hips to meet him, and desire feels too frail a word to describe the fire that sweeps over me.
I cry out loud as the fingers he’s slid between us quicken, as the tension in my core rises to its crescendo.
I come apart in his arms, saying his name over and over again. He follows me over the edge and there’s a bone-splitting pain that radiates through me when the world begins to piece itself back together, when I realize that I’ll never feel anything like this again.