Page 64 of Into Ember

“You’d spoken maybe forty words to me,” he says, “the day you heard I needed a place to live. You lit up, and you told me there was one open right across from yours, and you walked me to the manager’s office yourself and vouched for me. A stranger. You didn’t ask who I was. You didn’t ask what I was doing there. You didn’t ask for anything back. You gave me a home, and you forgot you’d done it within a week.” His thumb crosses my knuckles. “I never forgot. She took in a broken stranger, cared for him, and never once asked him for anything — and that was how he knew. You have been her since the day I met you. Just knowing you existed. Just knowing you?”

He shakes his head, slow.

“You brought me back to life.”

I make a sound. It isn’t a word, it isn’t dignified, and I’m leaning forward before the water finishes moving, and I kiss him.

He kisses me back — warm and careful. One hand coming up to my wet jaw, so careful. All of tonight’s terrible relentless respectfulness in it — and then he starts to pull away, because of course he does, because this man has spent the entire evening being good and he plans to die that way.

Not today.

I grab his arm. He’s mine now.

And he absolutely knows it. He just doesn’t know that I know it.

“Get in the tub, Erik.”

“What?”

He’s genuinely shocked. Actual blinking like I said something in a different language. Years of watching me and now knowing I can do that to his face? It goes straight to my head like wine.

“You heard me.” I raise an eyebrow at him, which takes everything I have. “Unless you didn’t mean what you said.”

For a second he doesn’t move at all.

Then he grins — the real one, the one I’ve seen maybe five times in all these years — and he stands and reaches back over his shoulder and pulls his shirt off, and I try to look away.

I want the record to reflect that I tried.

I did not succeed.

I have read a thousand descriptions of the male body. I am a professional. I have opinions about pectoral adjectives that I have defended in writing, and none of it, not one overwrought paragraph of it, prepared me for the reality of him. Shoulders that block the candlelight. The long muscled line of him going down and down, damp where I soaked his shirt, and a dark trail of hair below his navel that my eyes follow like it’s load-bearing. He drops his clothes on the stone floor of this ridiculous royal bathroom one piece at a time, unhurried, watching me watch him, and Xaviar — Xaviar, I’m so sorry, but you had exactly one advantage, which was being fictional, and you’ve lost it.

Utterly.

Completely.

Compared to the man standing in front of me, Xaviar looks like a bad Tuesday.

And I am the leading authority on good ones.

The last of the clothes go, and the candlelight does to him what he claimed it was doing to me, and there is — a lot. Of him. All of him clearly done waiting, and, okay. Okay! Great. Wonderful. Terrifying.

Because that goes where?!?!

He steps into the tub. Water surges up the sides and takes two candles as casualties, and neither of us looks. He sinks down across from me with the steam moving around his shoulders and just — waits. Hands on the rim. Being good.

That won’t do.

I move through the water and climb into his lap.

His breath leaves him in one long line. His hands land on my waist and stop there, fingers spread, gripping me like his life depends on it. His jaw is tight and his eyes have gone almost black.

Skin. So much warm wet skin under my hands, and it’s his, and I’m allowed.

I kiss him again. Slower. His mouth opens and his hands tighten and pull me flush against him and yes, that, more of—

“Elara.” Against my lips. Wrecked already. “I can’t—”