Chapter 12 #2
When Ben finished playing, the group split up.
Sylvie announced loudly that next time there would be a bouncer.
Sara and Ben had already disappeared into Ben’s office and from the look on Sara’s face, Maris didn’t think they were going to check the books.
Eric had Robin tucked under his arm, whispering something into her ear that made her blush and smile at the same time.
Maris hugged Sylvie and walked outside, and Garrick fell into step next to her as if it were the most natural thing in the world.
Because we live on opposite sides of the same wall, she told herself.
The town was quiet at this hour, the storefronts dark, the gas streetlamps flickering.
The breeze off the river was cool from the approaching fall and she shivered, pulling her pashmina closer.
Garrick extended a wing, not wrapping it around her exactly, but blocking the wind.
Her traitorous mind went directly to the memory of how they’d flared when they kissed.
They turned down her street and the smell of the river faded behind them, replaced by the fragrance of the night-blooming flowers she’d planted to have something sweet waiting for her in the darkness.
Her heels clicked quietly on the pavement.
She still couldn’t believe she’d worn heels for the first time in forever.
Even in the heels, she still didn’t quite reach his shoulder and that definitely wasn’t why she’d chosen them.
His footsteps made almost no sound at all, which should have been unnerving but was oddly comforting instead.
“Thank you,” she said, “for the cider.”
“You seemed to enjoy it.”
“You noticed from across the room.”
“I notice you,” he said simply, the words lingering in the dark. Her heart did the complicated undignified thing again.
They came to the cottage with the small light she’d left on glowing in the kitchen window. Behind it, past the overgrown stone wall, the dark bulk of the manor loomed against the stars.
She got her key out. She should say goodnight.
She knew she should say goodnight. There was a whole careful list of reasons—Toby asleep at Dot’s nana’s, the job, the difference in their lives, the way this could go wrong in a hundred ways and take her heart and her son’s with it.
She stood on her kitchen step with the key in the lock, and every one of those reasons lined up neatly and sensibly in her head.
She turned around.
“Do you want to come in?” she said. “For coffee.”
There was a silence. His eyes flickered, and she saw the warm gold kindling at the edges. They both knew that coffee was not what she’d asked for, and that she’d asked anyway, wide awake and entirely on purpose.
“Yes,” he said.
Her kitchen had always felt cozy with white cabinets and old appliances she’d told herself were retro and pots of herbs on the windowsill. The instant Garrick came through the door, ducking under the frame and his wings folded tightly against his back, it went from cozy to small.
“I’ll—” She turned towards the counter and the coffee pot, towards something that would give her hands and her nerves something to do. “The kettle’s—”
“Maris.”
She stopped, and turned back. He hadn’t moved from the doorway.
He filled it, the low gold light over the stove catching the stone texture of his skin, the sharp line of his jaw, and the wings folded down like a closed door.
His eyes weren’t grey anymore. They were completely gold now, banked-fire gold, and fixed on her with an intensity that should have frightened her and didn’t.
It never had. She’d never been afraid of him. Not once.
“I don’t want coffee,” he said.
“I know.” It came out steadier than she felt. “Neither do I.”
She crossed the small kitchen. Or he did.
She was never entirely sure afterwards which of them moved first, and it hardly mattered, because they met in the middle.
Then his hands were on her, one enormous clawed hand spanning the small of her back and the other cupping her jaw so carefully, absurdly carefully for a male who could crush stone, tilting her face up. And he kissed her.
It was not like the garden, and it was not like the greenhouse.
The garden had been a spark, startled and half-finished.
The kiss had caught fire in the greenhouse, but then Toby had interrupted them.
This time there was no one to interrupt and the kiss ignited like dry tinder to a spark and turned into an inferno.
His mouth was on hers and she was rising to meet it.
His tongue swept into her mouth and a sound came out of her she hadn’t known she had in her.
He made a sound too, from somewhere in his chest, that she felt more than heard.
Then his wings moved, flaring away from his back in a soft leathery rush that filled the little kitchen and half wrapped the two of them in shadow.