Page 55 of Luck Be a Genie

“Can I... give you a hug?” I asked, trembling with emotion.

His stormcloud eyes looked pained, but he gave me a small smile and nod, then stood. I walked forward, already crying before I wrapped my arms around him. I stood there long past the time he probably thought the awkward, messy human should be through.

Finally, I pulled back, wiping the tears from my face with the back of my hand.

“Thank you,” I whispered. Then I turned and walked out the door.

Chapter 21

Lucky & Nick

Shutting the door behind me, I immediately knew from the expression on Nick’s face that he’d heard everything.

He looked shattered.

I walked into his arms and we stayed there in the hallway for a while until Nick took my hand and we made our way back to my room. Inside the room, I stepped into the bathroom to change briefly, taking off my long-sleeved shirt and exchanging it for a short-sleeved one, and changing my bra for something without an underwire.

We still hadn’t said anything to each other.

I didn’t know what to say, and I don’t think Nick knew either. It was a little like what I imagined receiving devastating news when you went in for a routine checkup might feel like.

I felt flattened and terrified, but also completely determined.

I didn’t care what the odds were; I was determined to beat them.

Realistically, I knew I still might lose, despite my will to survive and my mental strength and determination. But I couldn’t help but give everything I had to imagining a successful outcome. I couldn’t afford to do otherwise. Nick couldn’t afford for me to do otherwise.

I lay down next to him. He’d already toed his shoes off, and was lying on top of the covers with his hands behind his head, staring at the ceiling.

When I joined him, he turned to his side and wrapped his arms around me. We lay like that for hours. Neither of us were hungry, so we skipped the kind offer of dinner from the king.

I wondered if Nick wanted to talk me out of it. One last-ditch effort. But he never did. I think he understood that I wasn’t going to be talked out of it, and that I felt a hundred percent like it was the right thing to do.

After night fell, I started drifting in and out of sleep. Neither of us wanted to be separated on what might be my last night, so Nick stayed with me. I drifted, but I don’t think Nick slept the whole night, because whenever I woke, I would open my eyes to find him studying me as though he was trying to memorize my face and burn it permanently into his brain.

Finally, somewhere around daybreak, I came awake to his fingers gently trailing down my face, across my eyelids, and down my jawline.

“Thank you for staying with me,” I whispered.

He still looked shattered. If anything, it had only seemed to deepen as the hours had passed. “Wild horses couldn’t have dragged me away from you, sunshine.” His voice was quiet. There had been a stillness to the night, as though the world itself had gone quiet, suspended between life and death. That same stillness seemed to linger into the morning, and I knew he was feeling it too.

“Sorry I didn’t choose vampirism.”

“It would have killed you to be locked away from the sun for that long,” he said, touching my hair now. “You’re like a flower always seeking sunlight. You would have withered away without it. Living half a life is no life, sunshine. I understood that from the beginning.”

Another hour passed.

It was now seven in the morning.

“Lucky, will you marry me? Right now?”

I blinked. “Now, now?”

He nodded. “I’ll blink someone here who can marry us, and I’m sure Arthur and King Asharien would be willing to be our witnesses for the ceremony.”

My smile felt tremulous when I kissed him. “I’d love to. Let’s get married.”

Fifteen minutes later, I’d changed into a white sundress, wanting something of my own. Nick had blinked into a white tux, and we were standing in front of a very bemused older wizard who also had a license to perform marriages. Nick had apparently had to blink up some clothes for him, because he’d arrived stark naked from a recent shower. I wasn’t there for that, because I’d been hurrying to get ready.