Chapter 78
Skylenna
Three Years Later
My screams go on for miles, scaring the birds from their nests.
My feet hit the ground in a panic as I sprint through the woods. My skin is still wet from the lagoon, sticking to my dry clothes.
Almost there.
I can hear the thundering footsteps behind me. As they catch up too fast, my pulse ruptures under my skin.
The trees open up to the purple lavender and swaying trees. Tall blades of grass dance. The spring sun beams over the opening in a cloudless sky.
I scream again as I can hear that voice gaining on me.
“NO!”
A large body plummets into my back and tackles me to the ground. Hands grip my sides and tickle the soft underside of my ribs until I’m bucking and shrieking in a delirious spell of laughter.
“You’re so slow!” I holler, turning my bright red face into an arm to bite.
“Slow?!” Kane barks out a laugh.
“And old!”
“We are the same age, my love.”
He stops tickling me as I feign offense, recoiling back in disgust.
“Same? Same—I’m sorry—I thought you just said same age.”
Kane lifts an eyebrow but continues to watch his front seat performance.
“You are two years older than me,” I clarify sweetly. “Some might even say twenty years older with the pace at which you run.”
Kane’s hearty laugh is perfection. The rough sound burns in my heart.
“But I caught you,” he adds.
“Great point, I’m glad you brought that up.
” I try to wiggle out from under his weight with no success.
“One, I was jogging, practically speed walking. Two, you ran with every bit of old man energy you had left in the tank. Every bit of it. Our family is blessed, Kane. Do you hear me? Blessed you didn’t keel over from cardiac arrest. Or high blood pressure. Maybe even arthritic complications.”
“You are beating the joke to death.” But he’s still barking out more laughter.
And the tickling starts back up again. He kisses my neck, between my breasts, then back up to the tip of my nose.
“Why’re you running from me, honey?”
Now I’m laughing. “Because we had sex twice this morning, and now, you’re trying to go for a third!”
“Was it twice?”
“Yes!”
“No.”
“Yes, it absolutely was.”
“No, I don’t think so.”
“You’re not counting it because you were a little too quick at the draw at five a.m.”
“That did not happen.” He kisses my jaw, then cheekbone.
“I was there.”
“That must have been Greystone.”
I snicker. “Oh, no. You can’t blame other alters when you had a gentleman’s misfire.”
“Mmm—I’m pretty sure it was him.” Kane gives me a silly smirk. “And of course I can blame these misfortunes on Greystone. What other purposes does he serve?”
I squirm as he unbuttons my dress.
“Are you going to let me reclaim my dignity after you regrettably blinked this morning and missed my entire performance?”
I cackle. “I am so sore, Kane! I’m not twenty anymore.”
Mid-forties is off the table. We refuse to acknowledge it.
“Honey, I saw you swimming in that lagoon, and I got so hard again. All jokes aside, I really need you to open your legs for me.”
Despite my soreness, I’m already getting wet.
“Give it forty-eight hours,” I say.
“Are you that sore?”
“Yes.”
Kane’s lustful gaze furrows in concern. He props himself up an inch.
“I don’t want you to hurt.” That frown drops to my open legs spread around his thighs. “Will you let me lick you to make you feel good?”
I drop my head back and groan.
I really am sore, but fuck, that sounds so good.
“I’ll be so gentle, I swear, honey,” he murmurs.
And I nod, lifting my dress to expose my glistening cunt.
With bent knees, I widen myself for him.
Kane massages my thighs as he angles himself to a comfortable position in the grass.
One he can rest in while he enjoys my taste.
There’s no doubt in me that he might have a small obsession with eating me out.
But not quickly. No, he likes to go for quite a long time.
We’ve been locked in our room for hours before as he massages me until I’m so relaxed, I could easily float into a lucid dream.
Then, he’ll lick me slowly, and it goes on so long that the sensitivity becomes a live wire of sparks and short-circuiting fires inside me.
It’s one of the most out-of-body experiences that he begs of me weekly.
He starts off peeling my lips apart, humming as he gets a single taste of my arousal on his tongue. He’s careful with the pressure, kissing me with an open mouth as that one taste drills an unquenchable need in his brain.
I breathe heavily from my mouth, getting a better set on my elbows to watch him.
And he just keeps going, lapping away at my soaking cunt. My thighs vibrate over his shoulders, and I fight against his hold on me to rock against his mouth.
“Don’t fucking rush me. You taste so good. I’m in heaven.”
I moan, grinding like a needy, desperate virgin who has simply never felt an orgasm before. Because it always feels like the first time. Almost half a century of knowing each other, it will always feel like the first time.
Except now, we are addicted to each other.
You’d think that would fade and dim like a dying campfire over time.
But it doesn’t. Quite the opposite. We have trouble keeping our hands off each other.
I find myself fantasizing about the next time we’re alone again.
Our kids often yell at us in amused disgust.
“Kane, I am so close.”
He chuckles against me, then growls as he dips his tongue inside me.
Once, twice, and then begins fucking me with it.
I grip the back of his head and beg to come.
Scream. Howl. The fire of my orgasm spreading too quickly.
Its overwhelming pins and needles kick me off the edge, and I buck like I’m possessed against his mouth.
Always like the first time.
“Oh god!” I’m slick and unnaturally sensitive against his tongue that lingers. “I love you. I love you so much.”
“Again.”
“Give me a minute.”
“I want to taste more of it.”
After half a minute, he sucks on my clit, pulling each orgasm so much faster than the last. I’m covered in grass and dirt by the time it’s over. And we lie under the sun, sleeping for an hour, then gathering a handful of lavender before we return home.
Kane carries me on his back, making additional jokes about how much better in bed he is than Greystone, and how I should definitely tell him that.
We make lunch and set it out of the front porch table to enjoy with Chekiss. Kane plays a record, and as we finish, we get to work on the garden. Chekiss orders us around with an iced tea in one hand, pointing and organizing where each seed should be planted.
At sunset, we give DaiSzek a bath in the lagoon. It’s a failed effort as he takes a nosedive in the mud. Afterward, he sleeps on Niles’s grave, just as he has done the last three years since the day we buried his old friend.
In the late evening, we get a visit from Sapphire and Niklaus.
Her late-night cravings kicked in during her second trimester, and now she begs for my freshly baked cinnamon sugar cookies.
Krimson and his girlfriend, Clara, show up not even ten minutes later.
He somehow always knows when I’m baking something for his sister.
At midnight, Dessin gets peer pressured to drink with Krimson and Niklaus. And they end up seeing if Niklaus or Krimson can take Dessin, even now that he’s a bit older and not as fast.
The conclusion is that Dessin remains undefeated.
His last remarks to them are, “Maybe when I’m dead, boys.”
As I feel a kick in Sapphire’s belly, she watches me thoughtfully, mouth pulling down at the corners.
“What is it?” I ask.
She taps her belly. “Bringing a baby into this world…it’s not as scary.”
“What do you mean?”
“I’m having a little girl,” she says thick with so much feeling behind it.
“If I were to have her a few decades ago…I would have been sick over it. Thank you for changing this world to be a better place for my daughter, Mom. For me. I still get nightmares over how it used to be. I can’t imagine my daughter having to grow up in that fucked up society. ”
I hold her hand and smile.
“One day, you’ll make it an even better place before you leave it too.”
Sapphire and Niklaus run Demechnef together. They’ve built a golden lamp post in front of the new women’s sanctuary in memory of Niles. They’ve funded housing for older women who have been trapped in abusive marriages with their husbands.
They’ve already done so much, and they’re only getting started.
As much as it still guts me that my daughter had to travel to the most horrific moments in history, it’s made her and her husband better people with fuller hearts.
“Are Aunt Ruth and Uncle Warrose still coming next week?” she asks.
“And Renly.”
“Still apprenticing her?”
I smile. “She actually decided to name him her successor.”
Her brows lift. “To the Mazonist throne?!”
“Ruth doesn’t believe in bloodlines leading a lineage. She wants a well-deserving, pure of heart leader to take her place when she’s gone. And she couldn’t think of anyone better than the man Niles gave his life to save.”
As my children leave and the house grows quiet, Dessin reads to me on the couch. It’s two in the morning, and he ends up carrying me to bed. DaiSzek is already lying in his own cot on the other end of the room—never missing his bedtime.
“Want to stay up all night and talk again?” Dessin asks.
I chuckle. “No.”
“Final answer?”
The humor quickly turns sour in my stomach. He sits up in bed, caressing my hip. Dessin is usually unreadable, but this is his give away. Something is bothering him, and he’d rather stay awake all night than go to bed and see it in his nightmares.
“Is it the children?” I ask.
He glances down at my worried expression, then shakes his head.
“Has something happened?” Please, don’t make me dig for it.
“You and I have had a lifetime of loss,” he whispers into the dark bedroom, voice a low baritone of rough bark and the tremor of an earthquake.
“We have…”
“I don’t know how much more we can take.”
“Why would you say that?” He’s getting to a point. It’s like watching a tsunami build into a tidal wave over your head, a breath before it wipes out all life around you.
His throat elongates as he swallows. “It’s Chekiss, baby.”
I sit up. My breath catching like a butterfly in a net.
“What? What happened?”
“His lungs.”
“Did he tell you something and keep it from me?! Has he been to a doctor? We can get more than one opinion. He’s really not that old!”
“He doesn’t know, I don’t think. It’s something I’ve been keeping an eye on. I listen to his breathing, his laugh, his cough. It’s gotten worse. I’m not sure he has too much longer before the lining of his lungs thins and gives out.”
“Gives out?” My eyes widen.
“He’s seventy-eight years old.”
I wave a hand dismissively. “People can live past one hundred.”
“Not all people were drowned by Meridei for several years. And he was in the asylum for twenty years. Who knows what else he saw in there.”
“But…things have been good. They’ve been good! It took us so long to stop hurting after Niles. We can’t—no!” I remember the first treatment I saw. Chekiss was barely hanging on in the hands of Meridei. Why didn’t I notice he was getting worse?!
“Neither of us wanted to see it, Skylenna.”
I ball my hands into fists, but Dessin pulls me against his bare chest to quell the firestorm of guilt, grief, terror, and hopelessness that is threatening to take me down.
“How do we—what do we tell the kids?” I ask numbly.
“Chekiss can decide that. We’ll talk to him about it tomorrow.”
I shake my head. My stomach folding over and crouching down with nausea.
“I—can’t. Please, just talk to him first.”
Chekiss is the only father figure I’ve ever truly had. I love him unconditionally. Unfortunately, I am not strong enough to have that conversation with him. But I know my husband is.
“Okay, baby. I’ll take care of it.”