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His mouth quirked. It wasn’t quite a full smile, but it was something.
“Okay if I take a quick shower?”
“Of course. Dinner won’t be for another forty minutes.”
By the time I’d finished cooking, I realized I hadn’t heard the shower run yet, and Gus still hadn’t come down. He often prayed alone in his room. Or maybe he was writing. I never knew what he was writing, but it was always something.
I tiptoed up the stairs, expecting to find a closed door.
I’d just knock. Let him know to come down when he was ready. Hopefully, before the meal went cold.
But the door wasn’t closed. The glow from his desk lamp illuminated a green streak on the hall floor, practically inviting me in. I followed the path of light into to find Gus sitting on the edge of his bed, his back to me.
“Gus?” I asked gently, hesitantly.
“Yeah.” It was a resignation. An acceptance.
It had hit him.
I’d been prepared for this. I padded closer, around the bed, my bare feet cold from a chill because I’d forgotten to dry my hair after it got drenched in the garden.
Gus’s shoulders were pulled down toward his chest, and his hands were nestled in the folds of the clerical robe he still wore, clasped between his legs. I didn’t think he was praying, though. He took a big, gulping breath and looked up at me. Tears streaked down his cheeks, his eyes so red and swollen, like he was crying out all his tears for a lifetime.
“I’m sorry, Decca. I’m so sorry.” His voice broke as he reached out for me, scooping an arm around my waist and pulling me tight to him, crying into my body. Clinging onto me like a buoy and he’d been cast overboard in a storm.
This wasn’t what I’d expected.
My heart broke for him as he wept. It was the worst feeling in the world. To do nothing while someone you loved was having their heart ripped out.
“Gus. I’m here.”
I’m so sorry, he muttered into my sweatshirt again and again. He didn’t have anything to be sorry about, but me telling him that wasn’t going to make a difference. So I said nothing. I stayed there for him. Let him use me as a Kleenex, a pillow, a doll, anything he needed.
“Dec.” He looked up at me, though he wasn’t far below me on the bed. Carefully, he pushed back the wavy strands of hair that had fallen into my face. “Thank you. For being here. For staying. For searching for the bones. Even when I wasn’t.”
Something shifted in his eyes. His mouth opened like he was about to say something. It looked like shock. Or like he was seeing me for the first time.
His hand moved up to clutch my face. I leaned into his palm as his thumb skimmed across my mouth. “You’re so beautiful. It’s hard to look at you sometimes.”
My eyelids fluttered closed as he worked his thumb across my lips, slowly, until my lips parted and his thumb dipped into my mouth. I sucked until he let out a rasping breath, hooking my jaw and dragging me down until our breaths met. “Decca. I need you,” he begged in a ragged whisper.
I could only nod. I couldn’t think of the words to explain how long my body had been craving his. How much I wanted to be his.
“Please, let me kiss you.”
“You can always kiss me. You always could,” I breathed before threading my fingers into his hair and pulling him to me, pressing my lips against his sweet, soft mouth as it yielded beneath me. The salty taste of his tears made me all the more ravenous. I needed to breathe him into me. I needed him to absorb me.
His hands gripped the backs of my thighs, bruising them as he kneaded up from my knees to just under my cheeks, grounding me to him.
He broke off the kiss and pulled back enough that I could see his wild, black eyes, his sensual lips, reddened, wet, and plump from our kiss. “This is how you looked the night you proposed. I had a dream...” he said to my mouth, as if he couldn’t decide if he wanted to get the words out, or kiss me again. “I took you upstairs to dry you off. Only,” he smirked. “I made you even wetter.”
Somehow, I let out a squeak. My knees softened.
“It’s okay, Crow. Let go for me. I’ve got you.”
Then I was plummeting off some high place. Headfirst. Dizzy. Swirling skies flashing around me as I fell. Nothing existed but him and me. The world had disappeared. We weren’t in his bedroom, but in a garden in the rain. With only each other for company. Butlike the first day of Adam and Eve in the Garden, all we needed was each other.
“What did you do?” I asked. “In your dream.”
