Of course, now he had Cela in her underwear to deal with. And worse than that: a thrilled Cela with her face pinkwith excitement, her damp hair whipped by the wind to seafoam and her underwear so sodden that it was nearly transparent.
“See? It’s wonderful, isn’t it?” Her voice lifted on a crest of excitement.
“You’re right. It’s amazing.” Because he couldn’t do what he wanted to do, which was sweep her into a kiss and then lay her down right there on the porch, he held the door instead.
They went inside, and Cela collected her discarded clothing from the floor. Separate as always, they toweled off.
“Going to bed?” Tyr asked when he came out from checking on the sleeping twins again. He tried to keep his voice normal. They were both starting to come down from the shared energy of the storm, leaving him feeling depressed and uncomfortably landbound.
“Not yet,” Cela said, although she stifled a yawn. “I want to sit up for a bit. I think it’s breaking up. The moon might come out—you know?”
He did know. So he sat with her on the window seat for a while, but they were both drooping with weariness. Rain continued to pound on the roof, sometimes slackening and then growing stronger again. The world outside the window was pitch black, no break in the clouds anywhere.
“I think I’ll stay up for a little longer.” Cela smiled at him. “One of us should go to bed, or we’ll both be useless in the morning.”
Tyr got up and made her another cup of tea. She took it from him with the careful glide of her fingers that they had practiced now until they were good at it, transfering objects from the hands of one to the other and never coming into contact.
“Sure you don’t want me to stay up with you?”
“No.” Cela sipped her tea, and her warm smile glimmeredagain. “Oh, that’s good. No, I’ll wake you if anything happens, I promise. I’m going to bed soon anyway.”
But she didn’t. When he got up in the silvery dawn, she was curled on the window seat, fast asleep, the tattoo peeking from under the sleeve of her sweater. Outside, rain pounded a steady drumbeat on the lawn.
CELA
Hope,Cela found, was a tiring thing to carry around with you. They discovered the next night that whatever quality the moonlight had provided for their one wild night of passion was no longer in effect. Their tattoos under the light of the just-past-full moon, as it gleamed through ragged bands of clouds, remained as solid as ever.
“It’s a little less than a month until the next full moon,” Tyr pointed out. “We’ll be ready.”
Knowing they could look forward to a short reprieve from their torture was, in its way, harder than having no relief at all. You could get used to imprisonment if it was all you’d ever known, Cela thought. But experiencing the world outside the prison and then having to go back in—oh, that was the true hell.
For a few days, she drifted miserably through her work at the café, continually distracted by thoughts of Tyr. But it was impossible to stay completely unhappy for long. There was too much to see and do and experience in this new world of hers. Even if leaving Griffin Island had plunged her into akind of sweet torment she had never imagined, it had brought many other things as well.
Like movies, for example. Having gotten over her difficulty with watching TV, she was starting to love it. Tyr had got them a secondhand TV and DVD player, and they watched a different movie every night. Cela borrowed piles of DVDs from Gaby. She especially liked the ones with bright, colorful covers, featuring fast-paced action, funny dialogue, adorable characters, and songs.
“Are you sure you want to keep watching these?” Gaby asked a bit dubiously as Cela happily accepted another stack of DVDs. “We do have some that are more—well—grown-up.”
“No, I like them. Tyr likes them too.”
He did, actually—or at least he watched them with her, laughed at the funny parts, and she caught him humming the songs while working in the greenhouse. Cela understood that the movies were meant for children, and it was true that sometimes they watched movies made for adults. But in general, she didn’t like those quite so well. They were more serious and heavy, and made her feel things she didn’t want to feel. She liked knowing that in the kids’ movies, even if things were sad and scary along the way, there would always be a victory and good feelings awaiting her at the end.
She wanted that guarantee. Life certainly didn’t provide her any.
But—what she had now was good, wasn’t it? She gloried in the slow pace of life at Tyr’s house during her days and evenings off. Tyr was almost always home; the greenhouse was open for business now, and Cela was pleased with his delight when customers began to stop by. They didn’t buy much, mostly just looking at what he had to offer and occasionally taking cuttings off the fruit trees. But she heard many peoplesaying things like “Glad the old greenhouse is open again, I hated having to drive all the way to Greenville for seed starts and supplies” and promising to come back for apples in the fall.
The twins grew and thrived. Gaby introduced Cela to her kids’ pediatrician, promising that it didn’t matter if they shifted during their appointment, because Dr. Langston wasn’t a shifter himself, but came from a blended family with a shifter stepmom mated to his dad.
The kids weren’t perfect angels at their appointment—there was a lot of bawling—but they did at least stay human-shaped to be weighed and measured. It seemed that they were precocious by human standards, but growing perfectly normally as baby shifters, the doctor assured her.
And they loved Tyr. It was clear that they didn’t think of him as anything other than their dad, and Cela could tell the feeling was mutual.
She couldn’t help thinking of Kav back there on Griffin Island. Would he change his mind? she wondered. Did he miss his children?
Would he want them back?
It was thoughts like this that kept her up at night. If she could just let go of it, she might be happy here, she thought—sitting on the porch steps with a book and a glass of lemonade beside her, the twins playing in the grass, Tyr out among the greenhouses cheerfully whistling a song from one of Gaby’s kids’ movies as he worked.
She could be happy—couldn’t she?
