Chapter 18
18
SOMEWHERE, DEEP DOWN, there’s an alarm bell ringing inside me. It’s so faint under the warmth of this blanket, the heat of his arms around me, the familiar sweet fire of Zander’s lips on mine.
It’s gentle. Like a question instead of the usual Beltane exclamations. Like we have eternity to sit by the river and kiss each other like we’re new. Maybe we do. I could be on board with that. Because all the places I’ve cracked apart today have been filled in—by joy, by love, by this kiss.
“We can head back to Wilde House,” Zander says against my mouth.
He’s giving me an out—well, sort of. His hand sliding up my spine to curve around the back of my neck doesn’t give me much space for outs . His mouth traveling down my neck has me forgetting, momentarily, that he’s said anything at all.
Wilde House. People. Our ghosts.
All the relatives have probably cleared out by now. We can reset. Go back to how things were before the Undine started issuing orders.
I know I should take that option. I’m sure the wise move is to step back from this, because it’s too much. The past twenty-four hours have been too much .
Maybe it’s because I know I should that I don’t. Can’t. Won’t. “We could go to my apartment instead.”
Zander’s thunderstorm gaze goes dark and thrilling. He stands, pulling me with him, and then we’re flying. I think that we can worry later. That we can deal with anything and everything else...later.
When we land, it’s not in my bed as I expect, because that’s how we usually do things. We break the seal, we go a little crazy, we rip each other into pieces in as many ways as possible—
Tonight we land on the stairwell that leads up to my apartment door.
Maybe we’re both being a little more careful with each other tonight. Because it’s not Beltane. Because things are different in ways I really don’t want to analyze right now. I unlock my door with a quick, muttered spell since my not-so-magical keys are back in Zander’s truck at the Rivers house.
The truck. The night. This. “Isn’t your dad going to wonder why your truck is sitting outside his house all night?”
I push the door open and head into my apartment while Zander mutters a few words to magic his truck outside my shop. “Problem solved,” he says, following me inside.
He carefully locks the door behind him. He shrugs out of his jacket. His gaze never leaves mine, but he doesn’t reach out for me either. Like we would if this was a normal night between us. Meaning if this was Beltane—not that I ever let our Beltane thing happen in my space.
This changes everything. He said that to me what feels like forever ago, even though it’s barely been two weeks. Two weeks can’t change everything , is what I want to argue, though he hasn’t said it again now.
I think of Zelda dying. Her last breath would have been a moment, nothing more. It changed everything.
I think of this baby inside of me. The making of her only took a very long night and a single moment where my magic was too tired to work.
Little moments with such big consequences.
Sometimes everything changes so gradually that it’s impossible to notice. Like growing up. Like accepting what other people have chosen for themselves that you might not have chosen for them. Like having friends who shift into a coven that’s trying to save the world.
Then, other times, change happens so fast you don’t really notice until it’s done. Until you’re sorting out the repercussions and glamouring away your pregnancy.
I’d rather have his hands on me than decide what this is tonight, but he’s standing at the door, and I’m standing a few feet away. I’m not sure I know who I am right now because I feel nervous .
Like this is our first time, when I’ve seen this man naked so many times I can’t begin to count. When he’s been inside me every way there is to be inside a person, repeatedly .
Maybe it takes an eternity or two to stand there, watching each other like this, in the quiet of a fall night that isn’t lit with Beltane fires.
Then, slowly and deliberately, Zander makes his way across the room to me.
I am rooted to the spot. My heart is going haywire. Nothing is settling in me the way it should. My control, my walls, the reassuring presence of my comfort and my boundaries—they aren’t all weak tonight, they’re missing.
Like they never existed at all.
Especially when he reaches out and holds my face with his hands. His thumbs sweep across my cheekbones. His gray gaze isn’t filled with thunderstorms, not this time. It’s something softer, quieter. A gentle rain, maybe.
I tell myself I hate that, but I don’t. It feels like it’s filling me up. Like I’ve been thirsty, so thirsty, for far too long.
We could magic our clothes off each other. We could rush. We could insult each other a little to get the edge back into this. We could do all the things we usually do.
But we don’t.
He lifts the oversized top I’m wearing up and over my head. I unbutton his flannel with less-than-graceful fingers. We’re wearing matching Rivers pendants, and his hands smooth over my bare skin as I slide mine up his impressive back.
Our mouths fuse. Our hearts beat out some rhythm all their own, but together.
Together.
He backs me into my bedroom with lazy strides and deeper kisses. No rush, just doing our level best to rid each other of clothes without our mouths parting. A game we lose and win together as he takes me to my bed.
Then there’s nothing but his calloused hands against my skin, my fingers in his hair. Then the perfect, smooth slide of Zander on top of me, around me, and finally inside me. Everywhere.
Puzzle pieces that have always fit too well to bear.
I could stay here, right here, wrapped up in Zander and never think or worry again. Just this. Just us.
But, “Let me in, El,” he whispers at my ear.
“Pretty sure you’re in.” I settle myself, gripping him with my thighs to accentuate the point and bring him deeper. So deep it makes me shiver.
He smiles, his fingers tangling in my hair. “You know what I mean,” he says before pressing his mouth between my breasts. Where my heart thuds hard.
Because I do know.
He wants me to open that internal channel I blocked a long time ago. He wants me to let him into my head as well as my body, the ultimate intimacy that witches have. That humans can’t imagine. I don’t have to open it up for the sex to be world-shattering, if the past ten years are anything to go by, and usually this sort of thing is a no-brainer.
I refuse whatever he asks. Then we take it out on each other in every inventive way we can.
Things are different tonight.
We’re going to be parents to a baby girl. I cried in front of him, when I pride myself on never crying, and certainly not with witnesses . What Elizabeth said to me last night seems to echo in my head. Sometimes a woman gets tired of being angry.
Anger has protected me for a long, long time, but tonight I find I’m tired. Tired of wanting what I can’t have. Tired of fighting anything and everything. Tired of too much truth and nowhere to hide.
I let out a shuddering breath. His gaze is hot on mine, his body on top of me, the way I like it best. The way I have always liked him, too much.
He could break through the blocks I put up. I’m sure we’re both very aware that he could have from the start, but didn’t. Part of me wonders, suddenly, if I blocked him in the first place so he would break through ...
Tonight he wants me to let him in of my own volition.
“It’ll be okay, I promise,” he tells me, echoing the kind of vows we made each other long ago. “I’ll always protect you, Ellowyn. Always have. Always will.”
I tell myself to be careful of promises, that they too often turn out to be curses.
Tonight I don’t care.
Or I care too much about other things.
Either way, I let them go. The protections I’ve held tight around me for years. The walls I built to keep him out of the one place he could always hurt me. Because I knew perfectly well that keeping him out like that, treating him like a human, hurt him too.
And when the walls crumble all around us, I can feel his sigh inside of me.
There we are.
I want to cry. Again.
Because his voice inside me, with no one else in this link between us, is the scratch to an itch I’ve been pretending I don’t feel for a decade. For every moment of my adult life.
The tears don’t fall though, because we move together. Slow and hot and infinitely, gloriously patient .
The past ten years, on every Beltane night, it has been rushed and hot and needy. Edgy, angry, desperate. So much so it’s become habit. I tell myself it’s unhealthy and mean. Toxic. That’s the only thing I let myself remember when an inevitable thought about sex with Zander slips through the barricades.
I tell myself that’s how it’s always been.
I don’t say it out loud, because I know better.
Because there used to be this .
My body. His. This careening feeling in my chest that used to feel like drowning is more grounded, but I still spin until I fly. This time I’m not so lost, so desperate to find an anchor to drown me and sure it’s going to be him.
I’m not that girl any longer. He’s not that boy.
We can anchor each other, and we do.
We fly, but we stay connected.
Inside and out.
I find that even when I think I want to hurry it all up, chase all this sensation, something spools out into a kind of sweet, heavy light, slow and hot. It doesn’t stop the unraveling—the pulsing, gasping cliff fall of release.
Zander’s low laughter inside me drives me up all over again.
I tell him what I want. More.
He responds in ways he shouldn’t, in ways I shouldn’t let him. Always.
On and on we go, light and hot and forever , until there’s nothing left but the both of us, shuddering our way through a meteor storm.
Out there in the cosmos, upending everything.
Open your eyes, baby.
It’s only then I realize I closed them a while ago, as if I’m trying to fight back the sea change that I can feel inside me, sweeping us both away. Maybe I don’t want to see where we’ve ended up.
I would love to claim I can’t be ordered around, but I open my eyes on command. I let my gaze meet his, and there are no words for this. There are no words for us .
I feel something inside me tremble as Zander presses a kiss to my mouth. Then again as he smiles while he’s there, then rolls over and tucks me next to him, as if it isn’t momentous that he thinks we’re actually going to sleep together when that, obviously, has been outlawed between us forever.
In fact, now that I think of it, I’m not sure we’ve ever slept a whole night together. We were teenagers with parents who wanted to know where we were—because they knew what we were likely to get up to.
It’s okay if you want to stay here, I tell him, piously, because we’re safety buddies . We have to stay in pairs. That’s the only reason it’s okay.
Say it out loud, El , comes his sleepy, amused voice inside me. Daring me. Go ahead.
I don’t. Because I can’t.
Instead, Zander reintroduces me to the cosmos, and I don’t care that I cry all over him when he turns me into starshine and comet tails. Then holds me as we float back down to earth.
This time I don’t talk shit when he holds me against him in the dark of my bedroom. I settle in, breathe him deep, and sleep.
When I wake up some hours later, I can see the sunlight outside my windows. Morning has come to Main Street. I can hear the odd car bumping over the cobblestone bricks and the voices of pedestrians—at this time of day, likely kids walking to school.
What I really notice is that I’m the only one in my bed.
I rub at my eyes. I smooth my hands over my bump, saying good morning to the baby. Then I sit up and listen like my life depends on it. I don’t hear any water running. No shower. Nothing in the main living area. The apartment is still and quiet.
A whole lot like Zander up and left without a word.
It’s good he left, I tell myself. It’s great . Otherwise, we might have to discuss what happened, and why would I want that? It was...well, it wasn’t a mistake , exactly.
Let’s call it a misstep . The reality is, we can’t make those. Not as grown-ass adults who are going to become parents.
This wasn’t a beginning as I might have imagined at certain moments last night. This was an ending, and I congratulate myself on how maturely I accept that as I twist my hair back and tie it in a knot on the top of my head. I take pride in how calmly I then get up and put on my fluffy robe, in how not at all angrily I shove my feet into my owl slippers.
Though, speaking of owls... Aren’t you supposed to warn me? I demand of my familiar, whose tail feathers I can see out my window, indicating she’s on her favorite perch . When I’m about to backslide?
Ruth is resolutely silent.
Dick move , I tell her.
If I was angry instead of mature , I would make some owl stew commentary, but I’m not. So I don’t. What I am is starving— apparently a new stage of pregnancy, I tell myself, having nothing at all to do with any caloric outputs last night—and I walk with tremendous dignity and calm out of my room, ready to eat everything in sight.
Then come to a stop that is very nearly a stumble, because he’s here.
Right here.
Sitting at my kitchen table like it’s his. A mug in his hand— my mug, filled with what I can smell is one of my tea blends when I know he prefers coffee. A book is in his other hand. My book. Well, the book Georgie gave me that I put with the small amount of baby things I’ve accumulated so far.
Zander looks up at me and smiles, happy and friendly enough to make my heart hurt. “Morning. Didn’t know you were into fairy tales.”
I can’t seem to find my normal...anything. I can’t seem to find me . I stand there and gape at him.
Until he drops the book on the table and raises his eyebrows. “Everything okay?”
“Fine,” I manage to say then, belting my robe tighter. Because it’s that or start saying inadvisable things like, you’re here .
Or allowing myself to feel a swell of relief so big it threatens to take my knees out.
I tell myself that what I need is alone time. And food.
As if he can read my mind in addition to taking up space in it, Zander murmurs a few words, and a big plate of breakfast appears at the empty seat at the small, cozy table. He nods toward it. “I tried to wait, but I already ate.”
I drift toward the table as if pulled by some invisible force that I’m afraid is all me. Then, before I can sit down on the empty chair, he pulls me into his lap. He presses his face into my neck, and I melt against him and—
No, no, no. We’ve got to set some boundaries. Boundaries kept us going for ten years. Now we need some that will keep us going for a lifetime. Because ascension and the Riverwood and this baby girl mean there’s a lifetime of us, so we need to plan for it.
For her sake, I tell myself.
I force myself to get up because a world without those boundaries ends the way it did ten years ago, and I already did that.
I don’t need to be crushed like that again.
And for the first time in a long, long time, I let myself think that, actually, I don’t like hurting him either.
I take too much time retying the belt of my robe, and I give it way too much attention too. “We need to make some ground rules here.”
Zander says nothing. He doesn’t nod or shake his head. He sits there, kicked back in my chair at my table, watching me. Just watching me, which is weird enough.
What’s weirder is that I can’t read his expression at all.
I choose to keep right on talking, the classic response to weirdness of any kind. “You know, there’s the whole coparenting thing. The whole we really ought to get along thing, so we don’t screw her up.” I point at my stomach in case he’s confused by what her I mean. “Don’t you think us without ground rules is a disaster waiting to happen?”
“Why don’t you eat something,” he suggests. With a smile.
What he does not do is react to the statement I dressed up like a question so we wouldn’t have to analyze if there’s any truth in it.
This, too, is weird.
But he doesn’t look like he’s planning to do anything but sit there and wait. And I am hungry. So I sit in my own chair this time. I start to eat, and my entire body rejoices at the first bite. As I shovel in more, I try to order my thoughts. “A lot has transpired in a short period of time. Don’t you think we need to slow it down and think it through?”
I stop eating the pancakes only to stab at the eggs. When I look at him, his expression is still unreadable. I can’t think of anything less Zander.
I’ll admit I expected a hint of temper on his face, even if he tries to hide it. An actual argument—our happy place—but there’s nothing.
Just this ridiculously gorgeous man sitting across from me like this is the domestic bliss we gave up on years ago, and I don’t like the shuddering thing that seems to start inside me and fan out everywhere. I restrain it—I hope.
I try not to scowl at him. “Last night was great, but it can hardly be a...usual thing, right? We know where that leads.”
“Do we?” he murmurs. Not antagonistic. Not edgy.
If I didn’t know him as well as I do, I’d say he sounds almost innocent.
It’s too much, and we know how badly we handle too much , I tell him in his head, so there’s no escaping what I’m saying. Or maybe so I don’t have to worry if I’m speaking the truth. I want to be able to be friends with you, Zander. To raise our daughter without wanting to curse you. I think that requires a certain level of...emotional distance.
I happen to think I sound very reasonable and adult.
So I’m not sure why I suddenly feel depressed as fuck.
Zander’s eyes gleam. Say that out loud , he suggests.
I sigh. “Last night was a reasonable response to a lot of emotional upheaval,” I continue around a bite of bacon. “Nothing wrong with that. But we could be putting ourselves in a risky position, going forward. One that doesn’t put our child first. I just wonder if we need to take a very careful step back.”
He doesn’t interrupt. He doesn’t say anything else in my head, not to argue or agree. When I’m done, I sit there. Waiting.
But it’s like he plans to sit in silence and stare at me forever.
“Well?” I demand.
“Well what?”
“Don’t you have anything to say?”
“Not really.”
He gets up and rinses out his mug in the sink. I find this performative, given that we are witches and he could have done that with magic. “So you agree with me?”
Zander lets out a laugh at that. He turns to look at me, lounging back against the sink. My sink. Where I will now always picture him like this. “No.”
“No?” It’s lowering how squeaky my voice sounds. Or how hard my heart is beating.
He shrugs. “No.”
“It’s not fair to just say no .”
“Who said I had to be fair? Eat the toast, El.”
I look down at my plate and at the toast liberally slathered in peanut butter. I’m still starving so, fine, I eat it. Not because he told me to.
Then the next thing I know, he kneels next to me and takes one of my hands in his. Everything in me freezes. Or bursts into flame. Maybe both at once.
There’s no smile on his face. Everything he says is delivered very gently, but it lands like bullets all the same. “Life isn’t safe, Ellowyn. You can’t live your life setting up rules to keep yourself from getting hurt. Stepping back to keep the potentially bad things at a distance. You can put on all the armor in the world, but it doesn’t stop the hurt either. You know this.”
I want to argue, but all I can hear is Elizabeth saying, Anger doesn’t serve you .
Zander keeps talking. “They tell us life is long for witches. They tell us we have time. My mom didn’t have time. Zachariah didn’t have long either. Elizabeth did, but I bet her years felt a hell of a lot longer being so mad about everything.” He keeps looking at me in that way that seems to get inside me, beneath my skin. “I don’t want to be mad anymore, El.”
I do , I think to myself. I want to hold on to it so I don’t crumple.
We’re not going to do this again , I tell him, and okay. Maybe I’m a little panicked. Ever.
I say it so resolutely that it’s not until his eyes fill with amusement that I realize I didn’t say that out loud.
“Tell me that with your mouth, baby,” he says.
I want to. Or I want to be able to, anyway. Yet all I can do is stare back at him.
Caught there in all that gray.
Then he laughs at me as he gets to his feet. Laughs. At me. And doesn’t do a thing to hide it. I surge to my feet as he starts walking for the door, my cheeks hot and red.
I tell myself this is the anger I’ve been missing, though it feels more complicated than that.
You don’t call the shots, Zander , I throw at him, hot on his heels.
He turns then, and I don’t know what to do with this version of him that isn’t easy to rile up.
I open my mouth to say something that will show him , but he drops his mouth to mine before I can decide what it should be. Then he bends and does the same to the little swell of baby. He presses a kiss there and gives her an affectionate pat.
And ruins me, that easily.
He rises. “Frost and Rebekah are downstairs. He’s coming to the ferry with me this morning, and Rebekah’s staying with you. Emerson sent a schedule.” He nods behind me. “It’s on the fridge. I’ll see you tonight for dinner at Wilde House.”
Like...we’re a couple.
An adult couple who sleep in the same bed and share tea and...and...a life ?
“I don’t—” I throw at his back. “I can’t—”
It’s not clear if it’s the curse stopping me, or just me stopping me. But I have to revert to that inner channel where I can say whatever I like, regardless.
I don’t want this , I tell him, and I mean it.
He turns and grins at me. Grins. “You sure about that, baby?”
I magic a vase at his head, because I am only so adult. He catches it, and I don’t even think he uses magic. He’s always been naturally athletic in all the most annoying ways. He calmly places the vase on the end table by the door.
“Don’t miss me too much,” he says cheerfully, then exits.
I might even hear the sound of cheery whistling , like salt in the wound.
My fists are clenched. I’m sure my blood pressure is through the roof. The only thing that keeps me from screaming is the likelihood Zander would hear it and laugh again. The happy laugh that warms me from the inside out.
Or would if I didn’t want to murder him.
Rebekah sails through the still-open door, takes one look at me and smiles.
“Well,” she says. “It looks like we have some things to talk about.”