Page 47 of Property of Prophet

She looks at me lying there in the cut and the afternoon light. Her expression does the thing it does now, the thing that started around week four, when she stopped managing me entirely and started something else.

Something in my chest says, now.

I knife up from the pillow. One motion, no hesitation, sitting up and closing the distance between us in the same movement, and my mouth finds hers before either of us has said a word about any of it. She makes a sound against my lips, not surprise exactly, recognition, the specific warmth of yes, this, finally. Her hands come up to my face and hold on. I feel her palms warm against my jaw.

I pull back enough to look at her. “Two days,” I say.

“I know.”

“I want you to know what I’m saying.”

Lily looks at me. Her hands are still at my face, thumbs at the angle of my jaw. Her eyes are very direct and entirely unguarded in the way they’ve only recently learned to be.

“I know what you’re saying,” Lily says. “I’ve known for a while...” A pause. “Stop talking.”

So, I do.

I kiss her properly this time, not the careful kiss on the porch, not the question. This one knows what it wants.

My hands find her waist and pull her in hard. She comes without resistance, her whole body resettling against mine the way something clicks into place when the alignment is right. She tastes of coffee, cold air, and underneath that, something with no clinical name that I am going to spend a long time learning.

I ease her back against the pillow. She goes, her hands still in my hair, and looks up at me with an expression I’ve been watching at a distance for weeks without letting myself understand what I was looking at.

I understand it now.

“I need you to know something,” I say. “Whatever I am when this is over, whatever the grace leaves behind, or doesn’t, you’re the reason there’s something to come back to.” I hold her eyes. “You are the thing I’m coming back to. Before we go any further, I need that said.”

“Prophet.”

“Yeah.”

“It’s been clear for weeks.” Her hand moves to the back of my neck, fingers pressing in. “Stop talking.”

Lily pulls me down.

I kiss her throat. The soft place below her jaw where her pulse runs fast, faster than she’d want me to know, because Lily doesn’t perform vulnerability. I feel it against my mouth and take my time with it, my hands working her shirt buttons while she arches into me. The sound she makes is not clinical or composed, nothing she’d use in any other context.

The shirt goes. The rest follows.

She has a scar below her left collarbone. It’s old, well-healed, the neat line of a surgical wound. I press my mouth to it and feel her breath catch.

Her hands tighten in my hair. “That’s—” she starts.

“I know what it is,” I say, against her skin. “Doesn’t change anything.”

Her fingers loosen, and she lets me keep going.

I take my time with her. I’ve wanted to do this for weeks, whether I admitted it or not, and I’m not rushing a fucking second of it. I work my way down her body, and she lets me, one hand still in my hair, her breathing coming apart by degrees. When my mouth finds her inner thigh, she makes a sound I’ve never heard from her. It’s unguarded, open, nothing managed about it, and her fingers tighten.

“Prophet.”

“Tell me to stop...” I say, against her skin, “... and I will.”

She doesn’t tell me to stop.

I take my time. She tastes of the specific, concentrated version of everything Lily is—precise, fierce, and entirely present. Her thighs tighten around my head. Her breathing goes ragged. She comes apart with her hand pressing hard against the back of my skull. The sound she makes, she bites back halfway through, then stops biting, then lets it go entirely. The letting go is the most honest thing I’ve heard from her in all my time here.

I come back up her body. She pulls me in before I’ve fully arrived, both hands at my face, mouth finding mine with an urgency that has nothing composed about it.