Chapter Twenty-Five Taissa #3
Kion glances back up at her. The lines of his face are softer, somehow. “Even the caricature?”
“Absolutely,” Taissa says seriously, “not. Everything except that. That was funny.”
“To you.” But his lips are twitching again, and she’s determined to make him smile.
“I’ve submitted it to the Louvre.”
“Of course you have. Menace.” As his eyes twinkle, she realizes that he’s staring, fixedly, at her neck. When her fingers rise to touch the spot, she finds the delicate skin of the hickey he left. Taissa’s lips part as his hand tightens, infinitesimally, around hers.
Morgana, his expression…It’s raw. Hungry.
Taissa’s heart skips a beat. (Teenage Taissa is doing somersaults of joy.)
But then he’s pulling away from her, clearing his throat, his hand slipping from her grasp. Already, she misses the warmth of him. “I’ll get the bed ready for you,” he says gruffly, avoiding her eye.
“The bed?” she asks, blinking.
“I’ll take the sofa.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” she snaps. “You’re a massive mountain of a man. I’m not sure you can fit horizontally on the couch.”
“I’ll use an Expansion glyph.”
Taissa rolls her eyes so hard that she swears she sees her brain for a brief disconcerting moment. “Do you know how to use one, Locke?”
Kion glares at her. She glares right back.
“No,” he finally chews out, “but I’m sure you do.”
“Oh, I do.” Taissa taps the leather cushions pointedly. “But leather, hm, it isn’t a good conduit for expansions—”
“Cho,” says Kion seriously, “I’m beginning to think you’re just trying to get me into bed with you.”
“Maybe I am,” she blurts, and then holds her breath because it’s very possible that she’s been misreading all of this and is once again as delusional as her teenage self—whose crush apparently never really died.
That Taissa Cho is simply not his type: She’s neither blonde nor leggy, and isn’t the heiress to an enormous Seelie fortune.
Instead, she has crocheted upward of a dozen scarf-noose hybrids for him and shouts at little girls to get off her lawn.
For a single, breathless moment, she watches as something in his eyes brightens, as they travel once again to the hickey that’s bloomed on her skin. As his throat bobs and his chest hitches, as he stares at her with those hungry eyes.
Taissa feels herself begin to smile—
“I can’t, sweetheart,” Kion says, voice hoarse.
Rejection stings like a hornet’s attack on her chest, but she forces herself not to show it, concentrating instead on unholstering her qyl and etching the Expansion glyph onto the sofa’s seat cushions (yes, so she’d lied before—leather is a perfectly good conduit).
Taissa doesn’t look at him as the sofa stretches out, instead concentrating on pulling herself together as she drowns in embarrassment.
“That’s okay,” she hears herself saying, as if from very far away. “I understand.”
Kion is standing very still. She tries not to meet his eyes (she doesn’t want him to see the disappointment, to feel obliged to want her), but she can’t help it. Their gazes meet. And then Kion is turning around, walking into his bedroom.
Taissa smacks her palm against her head and curses herself thoroughly for her stupidity.
She’s in the middle of a creative, muttered expletive (calling oneself a complete idiot can be surprisingly therapeutic under some specific circumstances) when Kion reappears with a stack of pajamas, placing them on her lap.
His clothes. She’s sure to be swimming in them.
“Thanks,” says Taissa, at the same time at Kion rasps, “I want to.”
Her head jerks up.
“But I get…” He shakes his head, staring fixedly at the wall. “I get attached too easily. I don’t know why. But I know that you might not want that. I’ve been told…” His jaw clenches. “I have been told that it gets tiring.”
“Kion…” It’s not what she had expected him to say. Hope fizzles back to life in her chest, followed by outrage. Who the bloody hells took this man’s affection, so rarely given, and called it tiring?
Oh, she’s right about to kill someone.
Taissa clenches her fists and tries not to absolutely lose her mind in front of him. Before she can say anything more (like that she would never find it “tiring,” that she had bloody posters of him all over her walls, that he’s Kion Locke, for Morgana’s sake), he’s already speaking, low and soft.
“I’ll take the sofa, sweetheart.” A bit of a wry note enters his voice. “Don’t make me drag you off it.”
“Ach, you numpty,” mutters Taissa. “I’d like to see you try.”
Mischief suddenly overtakes the hesitant vulnerability on Locke’s face. Taissa only has time to squeak before he’s snatching her up from the sofa and throwing her over his shoulder.
“Locke!” she howls, laughing, beating his back with the T-shirt he gave her until he tosses her onto the bed. Breathless, she gazes up at him, knowing she’s flushed with something more than simple laughter.
His eyes glint with victory as he makes his way back toward the door. “Sleep well, Taissa.”
She doesn’t.
Instead, she lies awake for a good long while, in the sheets that smell like him, on the pillow where his head rests, in his clothing.
It makes sense, she thinks, that Kion wouldn’t be sure of her…
feelings. Morgana, she’s not quite sure, either.
It really is like they’ve just met for the first time.
And it makes sense that he’d get…attached. How many people had shown him love and care during his childhood? Far too few, she suspects. So this is what she’ll have to do, Taissa decides as her eyes begin to flutter closed. She’ll have to…take things slow.
They’ll be friends.
Taissa snuggles deeper into his bed.
Good friends.