Chapter Thirteen #4
He takes her hand, thumb brushing over her knuckles. “You know me well.” A quick squeeze and he releases her. “Shall we rejoin the festivities?”
Anna smiles.
She didn’t know it was possible to wear so much color.
Every visible inch of her is saturated in a mixing of hues.
It’s as amazing as it is wonderful. She needn’t have worried about the pale shadows on her skin, not when everyone in the street is so thoroughly covered in powder.
She laughs as a stranger, dark brown eyes shining as brightly as Anna’s own, smears a handful of blue into her hair before darting away.
The street, the people, are all a pallette of color—a painting without the constraints of a canvas. It’s hard to tell where the body of one begins and another ends in the crowd. She turns to Khiran, another handful of powder at the ready, and her heart drops.
He’s not behind her.
Frantic, she searches for him, but there’s so many people and they wear the color like a mask.
She can’t even scan the crowd for the purple of his kurta because she knows it stopped being that color hours ago.
In a sea of moving bodies, she spins, panic rising.
If they’re separated he can’t find her. What if—
A hand grips her shoulder, fingertips biting into her flesh like teeth, turning so quickly she nearly trips over her own feet. Khiran stares back at her, face a mural of purple where the red and blue powder mixed. The breath she releases is stuttering, sharp in ways that prick her lungs like glass.
“I have you,” he assures her, his voice nearly drowned out in the crowd.
It doesn’t matter, she can see the promise in his eyes even though it’s tangled with a fear that mirrors her own.
“I haven’t taken my eyes off you.” The hand at her shoulder drops away, reaching for her right hand.
It feels like his fingers folding over her palm might be the only thing grounding her.
He ducks his head, their faces level. “I won’t lose you, Anna. ”
There’s something unsaid in the words, a trembling edge to his voice that tells her he’s shaken, too.
She swallows, nods. Her finger burns where his ring used to sit, a scarred reminder of how fragile things have become.
In her mind, she knows being separated in the street is easily fixed.
She knows it would only be a matter of meeting him back at their room.
Her heart doesn’t feel it.
Fear beats in her chest, a tattoo against her ribs she knows she may never shed.
Khiran’s hand squeezes hers before lacing their fingers. Ghosts of what could have been darkening his gaze. “Would you like to go back to our room?” Anna can hear the wish straining the edges of the question.
“Yes,” she breathes, eyes closing as she wills her heart to calm.
To be sensible. Slowly, the drumming in her ears recedes as they push against the crowds.
Khiran’s hold on her hand never falters, as if seeing her is no longer enough.
Compared to what they had, to the promise of magic melded of blood and bone, Anna’s not sure if having him in her sight will ever feel like enough.
They rinse in the tub, color coming off their bodies until the water turns a shade of purple so dark it’s nearly black. They wash until the water runs clear and only the stubborn stains are left behind. There is a trail of Holi powder retracing their path across the floor of their room.
Khiran’s chest is warm against her back as she reclines against him, her head cradled in the curve of his shoulder as he diligently massages coconut oil into the stains on her arms to coax the color from her skin.
She can still hear the excited chatter of people outside the stone walls of their room, the sound of their laughter filtering in through the cracked bedroom window.
“It’s terrifying.” The confession is a sigh, shaky and warm against the shell of her ear.
He coaxes her hand to turn, his thumb tracing the stained lines of her palm as if he could read their future there if he only looked hard enough.
“Not being able to feel your fear. I thought the idea of not being able to find you scared me, I didn’t realize…
When I saw the fear in your eyes and I didn’t feel the echo of it in my chest…
I never recognized it for the gift that it was—knowing you were safe with a certainty I could feel as easily as if it were my own.
” He swallows, pressing his cheek to her temple.
“Anna, I cannot lose you. I cannot lose you and not know if you’re safe or if you’re in pain. There would be no greater agony.”
Grief is a vice. It coils like a noose around her heart, her throat.
The finger that used to wear the ring that tied them together aches with a phantom pain, burning with accusations.
She hadn’t been prepared when she drove that knife into her flesh—she hadn’t thought about the after.
She hadn’t had time to. Their lives were in danger and she did the only thing she could to protect their future.
She hadn’t been prepared for that first blinding moment of panic. Hadn’t been ready to face the fear that came with knowing he only has mortal means to find her.
There’s an apology on her tongue, barbed and bittersweet, that she refuses to part with.
It tastes too much like regret, and she is too old to mourn what she cannot change.
She turns in his arms, kneeling between his legs.
Water sloshes along the sides of the tub as she moves.
His face is as stained as her own, a watercolor of purple and pink, the blue-green of his eyes vivid.
She dips her fingers into the bowl of coconut oil beside the tub and traces the shape of his brow, his nose, his lips.
She massages it into his skin, the color swirling beneath her fingertips as she draws it to the surface.
When she wipes it away with a dry cloth, most of the stains lift away.
Some remain stubborn shadows. “Tell me where you’d take me,” she murmurs, washing away a smudge of color lingering on his chin.
“If we weren’t running, if we could go anywhere, what wonders would you show me? ”
He kisses her, his lips warm and tasting like coconut as his palms cradle her jaw.
“I would show you shores made of pearls of salt instead of sand,” he breathes, the words whisper soft against her parted lips.
When his mouth slides against her own, the touch is so light it teases.
“I would show you a forest beneath the waves, trees of coral and fish so bright they look like jewels scattered in the light.”
Anna swallows, breath hitching as his hands travel lower—tracing her breast and settling in the curve of her waist. “All of it,” he breathes. Gently, he coaxes her knees apart, straddling his thighs, while he whispers promises against the beat of her pulse. “I would show you all of it.”
She sighs, melting against his touch. “Tell me,” she urges, commands, her hands mapping over the lean lines of his chest and her fingertips grazing the star-shaped scar along his rib cage. The reminder of the magic, the connection, they’ve lost. “Tell me more. Please.”
More, so her pulse races because he’s too close instead of too far. More, so she can drown the fear of losing him by being lost with him.
He tells her of cenotes with water so blue they feel crystalline as his lips map out the rise and fall of her chest. As her hands thread into his damp hair, he describes a desert so full of color it looks as if it was painted by the brush of an artist as her body arches in an invitation to travel the length of her neck with his teeth.
Her hips roll over his, the sweetest of friction, and his words stumble, twisting into a breathy curse as he grips her—long fingers fanning over her hip while the other cups her breast.
His tongue curls against her collarbone, shoulders straining beneath her fingers, as he tells her of an island of lizards so large, people call them dragons.
Of rolling green mountains that reach up like fingers to touch wisps of cloud.
Turquoise oceans dotted with islands so alive and green they look more like paradise than a place.
The words hitch in his throat as she sinks down on him, pulling him close and taking him in.
His touch shifts from gentle to desperate, his hands dragging over her back as she decorates the smooth skin of his shoulders with crescent moons in the shape of her fingers.
He breathes her name into her skin, a rasping prayer, and Anna whimpers—buckling under the adoration in his voice.
She is rising and falling like the tide, water lapping at the sides of the tub as diligently as the fingers slipping between their bodies and stroking her.
A mewling whine rises from her throat, sweet and warm as honey.
Khiran’s hand travels from her hip to tangle in her hair, tilting her head, so he can taste the sounds falling from her lips.
Underwater, her toes curl as her body tightens around him.
A coil wound so tightly she can feel it humming under her skin, ready to spring loose and sing.
Her thighs tremble, weak with need, but Khiran’s hips move beneath her, his fingers still stroking.
He speaks against her mouth, lips brushing over hers with every syllable. “I would give you the world, Anna.”
Maybe it’s the shape of her name, or the whispered touch of the promise.
Or, maybe, it’s just him. Anna only knows that the tension coiling in her lower stomach has snapped—her spine arching and her hands grasping.
Later she’ll feel guilty for scratch marks along his back and shoulders, but right now all she knows is pleasure and the sense that, if she doesn’t latch on to him she may float away.
She curls into him, gasping as he continues to move beneath her.
Inside her. His hands glide over her skin, gripping the undersides of thighs and lifting her from the sunken tub.
The tile is shockingly cold on her back and shoulders against the flush warming her skin.
He hovers over her, droplets of water dripping off his body onto her own as he curls a hand around her hip, coaxing her back into motion.
The desperation in his movements is gone, replaced with a deep and gentle rhythm, but the heat in his eyes burns bright.
“We aren’t done,” he murmurs, stare hooded and drunk off the feel of her. He reaches up, lacing their fingers above her head, the tile cold against the back of her hand. “Not yet.”
Anna knows the promise extends far beyond the ways he’s touching her.