Page 66 of Big Little Spells

“Exile,” I whisper, the word coming to me as his story fades in and out all around me. I can see flashes of his life, all that history he’s lived through personally, and though I can pick out events here and there I don’t have a clear story. I can’t figure out the timeline. It’s not like earlier, where what I saw was fractured and didn’t make sense. I’m only allowed to see certain parts of the story. Some are blocked—which means he must know what I can see.

He knows, and he hasn’t tossed me across the country already. He kissed me.

I feel that sparkle all the way through me, but I’m still focused on what I can see. The thread of it is a feeling I know. I recognize it all too well.

I blink up at him. “You were exiled.”

“I’ve always been precisely where I want to be,” he says, one hand still holding my face.

But that’s not what I mean. Exile isn’t just a place. Exile is a feeling. It’s a distancing. It’s...this house and his glamour.

He chose his exile. More and more with every passing century, I see, and particularly in the past ten years. Ever since my little fire show on the bricks of St. Cyprian.

I don’t know what that means. What I do know is that I still haven’t touched him, and that suddenly feels like more than an oversight. It feels like I won’t live another moment if I don’t.

Right now.

I reach out and set my palm to his heart, following an urge that I know, immediately, I’ve been carrying inside me forever. And I slide a finger in between the shirt buttons so that it’s not just skin to fabric, but skin to skin.

I brace myself for some great insight, some new flash, but there is nothing. No bolt of truth. No harrowing look into his past. There is only his heart beating steadily against my palm, as if he’s as mortal as I am.

“You will be my downfall,” Nicholas says, his mouth against mine.

And then everything ignites.

Like we are falling stars, we catapult into everything and nothing.

We kiss until we’re no longer content with mouths or fingertips or clothes. Or rooftops, apparently, because we topple into a bed too big for any one person before I’m even aware that he’s moving us through the air.

I forget how to think. I’m just happy that there’s a bed and there’s him and I finally—finally—get to explore every last bit of every last fantasy I’ve ever had starring this man.

And there have been so many.

We are skin and bones and magic. We come together in his vast, wide bed, the moonlight pouring in through the windows all around and a skylight above. We tumble this way and that. We rush and then we take our time, teeth and curses, smiles and hands, learning each other.

Like this is the only test that matters.

We roll until I am on top, looking down. He is still and ever the most beautiful man I’ve ever seen. He is so beautiful that a great many choices I made, out there in the world, make a new kind of sense to me now that I’ve admitted that no matter how I might have hated this man, I always wanted him. No matter what I blamed him for, and still do.

But that has no place here. Not tonight. Nicholas reaches up and braces his strong hands at my cheeks, holding my dark hair back and piercing me with his gaze. The blue is a different blaze now. And the fire within me seems to reach for it. For him.

This is almost certainly a terrible idea, he says, very solemnly, inside of me.

My favorite kind, I reply, and turn my head to pull one of his fingers into my mouth.

I shift, there where I’m straddling him, bracing my hands against the fine ridges of his abdomen.

And then we are one.

I think, insofar as I can think at all, that I have never known true fire, true heat, until this moment.

I am alight. I burn, become ash, then burn again.

It isn’t a change within me, so much as a change around me. There is a portent, as if witch’s runes hang in the air all around us with every breath, every cry, every thrust and stretch and sigh.

As though coming together skin to skin was meant.

Meant.