The Jealous Husband #2
The young man’s hand rests on her arm, casual and proprietary, and he is smiling at her with the easy confidence of someone who has never considered that he might not get what he wants.
I am across the room before I realize I am moving.
My arm slides around her waist. Casual. Possessive. Unmistakably claiming.
“Husband,” she says, and her voice is smooth, amused, revealing nothing of whatever she is thinking. “I was just learning about the lantern festival.”
The young man’s smile falters. His eyes move from her face to my hand on her hip, to the expression I am not entirely controlling.
“We should go.” My voice is steady. The rest of me is not. “We have preparations.”
“Preparations?” She tilts her head, and I can see the laughter threatening at the corners of her mouth. “For what?”
“Husband things.”
Husband things. Tianlong says. Truly, your eloquence astounds. Three thousand years I have waited for a bonded worthy of my wisdom, and this is what I get. Husband things.
I steer her toward the door. The young man does not follow. I do not look back to check.
Outside, the air is cool and my heart is pounding and I have absolutely no idea what I am doing.
“Husband things?” she says.
“I panicked,” I admit.
“You’re the emperor. You’ve negotiated treaties.”
“Treaties do not flirt with you.”
The words hang between us. I hear them, and I cannot take them back, and I am not entirely certain I want to.
Her expression shifts. Something warm moves through her eyes, something I do not have a name for. She leans toward me, just slightly, and I can see her finding this endearing rather than ridiculous—can see her tucking this moment away somewhere soft.
“Are you jealous?”
“Emperors do not get jealous.”
“Your dragon is laughing at you.”
“I am,” Tianlong confirms aloud. “Loudly. This is the finest entertainment I have had in centuries.”
“I’m glad my suffering amuses you both,” I say.
“Always,” Lián says. And then, softer: “The jealousy is cute, though.”
“Did she just call the Emperor of the Jade Throne cute?”
“She did,” I say.
“I like her more every day,” Tianlong says.
I open my mouth to defend myself. To explain that this was strategic, that I was maintaining our cover, that I did not cross a crowded room because some merchant’s son put his hand where my hand should—
She kisses me.
Not like the first time. This is slower. Deliberate. Her hand cups my jaw, fingers gentle against my cheek, and she kisses me like a question—like she is asking something she does not know how to say out loud.
What are we doing?
Is this real?
Do you want this too?
I answer the only way I know how. My hand finds the small of her back. I pull her closer. I kiss her like I have been dying to kiss her since the moment she opened her eyes this morning and found me watching.
She tastes like tea. Like wanting. Like the first uncomplicated thing I have felt in twenty-two years.
When she pulls back, her thumb traces my cheekbone. Her eyes are soft in a way that makes my chest ache.
“We should talk about this,” she says.
“We should.”
Neither of us talks about it.
We walk back to the inn in silence, her hand brushing mine. Twice, my fingers reach for hers. Twice, I stop myself. The space between us feels different now. Smaller. More dangerous. Full of things neither of us is ready to name.
That night, she does not face away.
She faces me.
We lie on our separate sides of the bed, Dumpling a warm weight across our feet, and she is looking at me in the darkness. I can see the gleam of her eyes, the shape of her face in the moonlight through the shuttered window.
Only inches between us. The same as every other night. Except now I can see her, and she can see me, and neither of us is pretending to sleep.
“This is dangerous,” I say.
“Yes.”
“I do not—” The words catch. I have never been good at this. At wanting things out loud. At admitting that I am more than duty and discipline and the weight of a crown I never asked for. “I am not certain I know how to do this.”
“Do what?”
“Want something for myself.”
She is quiet for a long moment. The moonlight shifts across her face, and I watch the thoughts move behind her eyes—all the centuries of running, all the people she has lost, all the reasons she should climb out of this bed and disappear into the night.
“I don’t do this,” she says finally. Her voice is rough. Unguarded in a way I have never heard. “I don’t stay. I don’t let people matter.”
“I know.”
“It always ends the same way. They die. They leave. They grow old while I stay exactly like this, and then I’m alone again, and every time—” She stops. Swallows. “Every time, I tell myself never again.”
“I know.”
Her hand moves across the sheet. Slowly. Deliberately. Finds mine.
Our fingers intertwine.
It is nothing. It is everything. It is the most terrifying thing either of us has ever done.
Tianlong, I think, and I am not certain if it is a warning or a plea.
But for once—for the first time since he chose me, since he burned away the boy I was and made me into something that could carry an empire—the dragon says nothing at all.
We lie in the darkness, her hand in mine, and neither of us speaks. The cat shifts at our feet, makes a small sound of complaint at our stillness, and eventually relocates to Tianlong’s travel pot in the corner.
“Your cat is going to be impossible tonight,” I say.
“He’s not my cat.”
“He sleeps on your face.”
“Near my face.”
“Lián.”
She is quiet. I can feel her pulse against my palm, quick and steady and alive.
“Fine,” she says. “He’s my cat.”
Something loosens in my chest. Something I did not know was holding tight.
She has claimed something. Admitted that she owns it, that it matters, that she is willing to stay for it. A cat is not much. A cat is not a promise. But from a woman who has spent eight centuries learning how to leave, it is a beginning.
Her fingers tighten around mine.
The night deepens. Neither of us sleeps. And for the first time in twenty-two years, I do not want the morning to come.