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Beyond it, the sea stretches endless and black. Poet urges me on until we pass through a gap in the ancient hedgerow and I see the small structure tucked into bramble and wind-marred hawthorn. “This is your cabin?”

Poet nods. “It was. It’ll belong to the next kids one day. My parents don’t come out here.”

We near the cabin. Full length windows catch the moonlight and rustic wood blends into the landscape. Stubborn grasses grow against the foundations and the whole thing looks as though the land wants it back.

It’s very Whitlock. Very Poet.

Tonight, it is us.

Poet returns the key to me. I let us inside—I get the sense he wants it to be that way—and take in the open plan layout. A bedroom, in essence, with a small bathroom off to the side, and the perfect view of the sky, the land, and the ocean beyond it.

For a moment, I am transfixed.

“Oscar?”

I turn to face Poet and instantly forget about the view. He has taken his shirt off and dropped it on a chair built from weathered oak.

Lean muscles.

Strong chest.

Heat rises in me, melding with the energy I brought with me from home, and a low sound rumbles in my throat. One Poet can feel as he lays his hand on my chest, that he can hear as he briefly closes his eyes to it.

I slide my hands over his warm skin, tracing the scar at his flank, and wind my arms around him. “I want you.”

“You can have me.”

“No, I mean…I want you.”

“I knew what you mean, Oscar. I want that too.”

“To be clear, you want me to fuck you? Because I think it has been on my mind all day.”

Poet snorts. “Trust me, it has.”

“How do you know this if I don’t know it for myself?”

“You get this look in your face when you’re thinking about sex stuff we haven’t done yet.”

I can believe that. Sol has said something similar to me without being so specific. “So maybe we need to do all the stuff tonight, so I don’t give myself away anymore.”

“We can do whatever you want.”

Want is not a big enough word for how I feel about Poet tonight. For how I have felt about him for so long it’s hard to remember a time in my life when I didn’t. “I want to fuck you,” I say, in case it’s in doubt. “But I know it might be a lot.”

“You are a lot.” Poet sends a pointed glance to my cock. “But I’d be lying if I said I haven’t thought about you railing me the whole time we’ve known each other.”

“The whole time?”

“Pretty much.” Poet’s grin is dirty, but humour fades as I advance on him, and the energy fizzing in my blood gets the better of me.

I kiss him hard, embracing the spirit in me that has burned for him from the start. I feel almost savage with how much I want to possess him—to claim him as mine in the last way left to us beyond marriage.

I want to marry him.

And I think I will—I know I will. I see us in River and Rubi, in Folk and Seth. In Jekka and Iggy, even. But other people are a long way from my mind right now.

I press my entire being against Poet and he meets me without flinching. Because he is strong and he will never be a man who yields. He is choosing this, and that choice makes my blood pump harder, and gives the restless energy in me somewhere to go.