She should roll her eyes.
She opens instead. I watch her mouth close over the silver, watch her pupils darken, watch a thousand committee rooms and cameras fall away.
When she swallows, I feel it like a hand around my throat.
“Come,” I say, standing, offering my hand.
She hesitates long enough to remind us both that pride still has a vote, then places her palm in mine. We move into the space beside the table where the old terracotta used to live; candlelight flickers in the panes, the sea is a rumor beyond the glass, and her body fits to mine like a memory that took up residence and never paid rent.
We dance.
It isn’t complicated. It doesn’t have to be. One palm at her spine, her other hand caught in mine, the kind of sway that makes time consider resigning.
My thumb draws idle circles at the base of her back; she breathes in, and I feel every inch of it.
Halfway through the song I stop pretending to be disciplined. I dip my head. She tilts hers. Our mouths find each other like they knew the route all along.
The kiss is nothing like the ballroom kiss and everything like the first one behind the greenhouse door. Slow at first, sure, grateful for the permission. Then hungry, then worse. She presses closer; I take it. Her fingers climb my shoulders, hook at my collar, slide into my hair. I back her into the glass; the pane is warm from the room and she’s warmer, and the necklace winks like a constellation.
When we break for air, we’re still in the same breath. I can feel the shape of her mouth against mine when I speak. “Take what you want. If you dare.”
She closes her eyes for a heartbeat, opens them with decision burning through the honey. This time she doesn’t hedge or barter or hide behind optics.
“This,” she says, clear as a vow, as she pulls me back under. “I wantyou, Vasso. Now.”
Naomi
I sayit and the room changes.
The music swells, the candles flare, and Vasso looks at me like he’s been waiting a decade to hear those exact words in this exact place.
His hands bracket my face, reverent and sure, and then we’re kissing like it’s a way of speaking. Fast, then slower, then not enough no matter how much we take. The glass at myback is warm; the diamonds at my throat are cool; my pulse is everywhere.
He lifts me, palms firm under my thighs, and sets me on the long table.
The linen sighs. The scent of jasmine and mint crowds close with the heat of him. This is where it happened the first time—awkward and perfect, laughter bitten off between kisses, a dropped pot shattering at our feet while we promised things bigger than our years.
Now the memory runs under us like a current, and I feel every difference. We’re not careful. We’re not innocent. We’re something hungrier, older, sharper, and somehow, impossibly, sweeter.
His mouth finds my collarbone, the hollow at my throat, the place just below my ear that makes me forget my own name. I tilt for him, greedy.
He mutters my name against my skin as if it’s a prayer he doesn’t want anyone else to hear. When his palm skims the necklace, instinct has me reach to unclasp it—too bright, too much, toohisin a moment where I want to be nothing but mine.
He catches my wrist, gentle but unyielding. “No.”
“Vasso—”
“I want you wearing my diamonds,” he says, voice roughened with something darker than desire. “I promised myself—I swore—if I ever had you again, I’d watch you take me witheverythingthat’s mine on you.”
The words land with a bite of ache I don’t expect. A vow to himself, made in a life where I was a wound and a goal.
It should make me furious. Right now it makes me shake.
“Please,” I whisper, not sure what I’m pleading for—mercy or more. He answers by easing me back with a care that has my eyes stinging, then sliding one palm down my spine to pull me closer to the edge, closer to his heat, his breath, his hands.
His mouth maps me like a man cataloging proofs—here, here,there, and I hear myself, helpless sounds I don’t recognize, a litany of yes and more and his name like an exhale that keeps breaking.
He doesn’t rush. He ruins. He asks with his mouth and I answer with my body, and when the floor drops out from under me, it’s a rise that tears me open and puts me together again in the space of a heartbeat. “Look at me,” he says, and I do, because I can’t not.
