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“I want to be strong for you.”
“I think…maybe…tears are the proof we’ve been strong for longer than is entirely healthy.”
Scrubbing his face with the corner of his shirt sleeve, he murmurs, “Is that right?”
“Yeah. I’m almost positive.”
His smile shakes. “You are the most beautiful thing to have ever entered my life. I don’t know how to consolidate my desperation in a way that protects you from unsavory consequences.”
My nose scrunches. “Unsavory consequences like meeting your brothers?”
“Among other things.”
I wipe a tear off his cheek and feel my chest pinch. He is the most beautiful thing to have ever entered my life. And, as scary as it is to admit, sitting here with him in the quiet of a familiar space I’ve watched through my phone screen for so long makes the consequences too distant to recall clearly.
Out of sight, out of mind.
I could forever console myself next to him.
My gaze lowers to his lips as the stillness wraps itself around me in a hug.
“Brittny,” he whispers.
“If…” I begin, “…you didn’t care about the consequences… If you let yourself be selfish, what would you want?”
“You.”
My heart thumps. “More specifically? What would happen next?”
Holding my gaze, he says, “I’d take you to Norway, make you fae beneath the Northern Lights and kiss the cold from your cheeks. We’d only come back home after my brothers’ visit is over. I’d build you a cabin somewhere beautiful in some mystical forest that doesn’t want to eat its inhabitants, and we’d spend Thursdays baking something for movie night. You’d never have to go to work, because I’d give you everything you want, and we’d start our pack together whenever we’re ready. I’d…” He lets out a breath.
“What?” I coax.
“If I let myself be selfish, I’d stop trying to be good enough. I’d stop running myself ragged thinking about all the ways you deserve more than what I have. I would ignore your feelings. I would be what Willoughby likes to call an alphahole.”
“Do you think that would qualify you as an alpha and make all our problems disappear?”
The corner of his mouth softens. “No. Although it might make me more like my brothers.”
I grimace. “No, thank you. I prefer you the way you are.”
“What have I told you about thanking the fae?” He sighs as his hand lifts, stopping a centimeter from my face. Despair hardens his eyes as his fingers freeze, a hair’s breadth from my skin.
“It was a very intentional statement. I know my soul is safe with you, Ollie.” I glance at his palm. “Even if you’re thinking impure thoughts right now.”
“So many…” He rocks his jaw. “You do things to me, beautiful. Things I cannot begin to explain.”
Heat flushes me through. “You can touch me. If you’d like.”
“That isn’t a command.”
“Touch me. Please.”
His warmth settles against my cheek, perfectly stable. His thumb swipes, memorizing and reverent. “Turning you means altering you entirely.” His fingers slip under my chin, cupping. “You won’t be able to lie anymore, even in jest. Your chemistry will change. In enough time, you’ll lose all connection to what it feels like to be human. Your concerns will stop being whether or not you’re able to maintain your grasp on this world and more why would you want to.”
“Pila says we can trust that everything will fall into place.”
“Dryads don’t have mates. Pila can’t understand what it’s like to feel this consumed by the presence of another being.” Ollie closes in, close enough that his breath fans across my lips. “My many childhood failures haunt me. I don’t know how to provide for a wife or family. I have spent too many years taking the easiest road. From the moment you appeared in my life, I have existed in a state of longing laced with dread. The emotions very quickly became too much, so I bled the pain into lyrics and the desire into notes. I wanted you to feel loved without this weight.” His eyes close as he settles himself a fingertip away from a kiss. “Ignore what my friends have told you. Three weeks isn’t enough time for you to make these kinds of decisions. For you, I will stand up to my brothers regardless of how they may attempt to humiliate and insult us for not abiding by their expectations. I cannot, and will not, be like Markov who took his mate the night he found her, before either of them had a chance at all to learn each other.”
