Tyr moved into the room, gliding softly. The curtains were drawn in the bedroom, and the only light was a glow-bug nightlight beside the bed, casting a gentle green-gold pool of light. Tyr was wearing a tight black T-shirt, so Cela could see that his tattoo was just as solid as ever—or did it seem a bit more faded around the edges?
He leaned over the crib, murmuring soothing nothings to the babies, stroking their hair or, in Aven’s case at the moment, his fluffy baby fur. Cela took a step closer and heard him crooning, “Go to sleep, little babies. Your mama needs some alone time now.”
For Cela, they had been nothing but restless, but under Tyr’s gentle hands, they snuggled together and fell asleep.
“Amazing,” Cela murmured, looking past his shoulder at one baby girl and one lion cub, cuddled together and fast asleep. “You’re a miracle worker.”
In her tired and overwrought state, she almost swayed against him before she caught herself. Tyr, not seeming to notice the slip, looked at her with warm eyes.
“Let’s go outside and see how much of a miracle worker I can be.” He made a little gesture, as if to take her hand before stopping himself. “After you?”
Cela quietly left the babies’ room and started toward the front door.
“Not there,” Tyr called softly. “This way.”
They went through the house to the back door, which opened into a sort of mud room that let them out in the backyard. There was a small window in the door, which also had a small ornamental curtain that Tyr had drawn. Cela gave him a baffled look, but he stepped back and let her do the honors.
She opened the door that she had opened a hundred times before to walk down the back steps to the back lawn and the orchard. All of that was the same, dazzling in the moonlight.
What was different was a pavilion on the lawn.
Cela remembered seeing similar ones for sale when she went shopping with Tyr at the big store up the highway, which in fact was probably where he had bought it. There was a canvas roof over a frame with loose netting at the sides, letting in breezes but not bugs. At the moment, it meant that the interior was flooded with moonlight, and would continue to receive it from every angle until the moon sank behind the trees.
Within the pavilion, a bed had been made up from an unzipped and unrolled sleeping bag piled with cushions and blankets. Outside, a few little tea-light candles had been set up, dotting the lawn in front of the sweeping mesh curtains like fairy lights. A simple picnic had been spread out on the lawn between them.
“I was thinking we could stay out here all night, if you want,” Tyr said quietly from behind her. “We can go in to check on the twins when we need to. We’ll be able to hear them if they start crying. I just wanted to make it nice for you.”
The fairy lights suddenly blurred. Cela looked down at her arms, blinking back tears, and before her eyes the tattoo began to dissolve.
“Tyr,” she breathed, as her arm became bare in the moonlight.
And then he was taking her in his arms. “It worked,” she gasped into his shoulder. “It worked again.”
“It did.” He said the words between kisses, planting them on her hair, her ear, her neck. “I checked before I came in toget you, just to make sure. It does come back once you’re out of the moonlight, but slowly. We’ll be fine.”
“Don’t talk,” Cela gasped. She was in motion too, breathing the words between frantic kisses, her lips pressed to his neck, the slight prickle of his jaw. “Don’t waste a single minute. I need you—I need—now?—”
Tyr scooped her up, and she gasped, clinging to his neck as he carried her across the lawn. They only made it halfway to the pavilion, with Cela squirming in his grasp as if she needed to have all of herself in contact with all of him. There were too many clothes in the way. They toppled onto the lawn, twined together, petting and panting and both of them intoxicated from the warmth of each other’s skin.
“I couldn’t do this for you properly before,” Tyr said against her mouth, between frantic kisses. “Let me take care of you now.”
He picked her up again, carried her to the pavilion, and laid her on the bed. There, by the light of the moon and the candles, they made slow sensual love, a perfect counterpoint to their first frantic coupling. They explored every inch of each other’s bodies, and Tyr brought her to the edge, kept her there, and finally sent her crashing over. She was pleased to elicit the same from him, and then there was more gentle stroking and touching, until they were both finally ready to go again.
They made love until they were exhausted, and then simply lay together, petting and touching. Tyr’s movement gradually slowed, and beside her, surrounded by a tangle of sweaty blankets and thrown-aside cushions, he slept.
Cela lay for a while, not wanting to sleep and miss a single minute of it. She gazed up at the moon in the sky, blinked and must have fallen asleep despite her efforts—because it had lowered, nearly kissing the treetops.
It’s almost over,she thought. A great wave of lonelinessbroke across her, so bleak that she could hardly breathe. Lying beside Tyr, on what should have been one of the best nights of her life, she abruptly felt so alone that she could almost have closed her eyes and vanished completely.
How could they keep doing this? she wondered. How could they live their lives in desperate nights of lush passion with an entire month’s desert in between? Knowing what they were missing only made the awareness of the misery to come all the more acute and depressing.
Cela sat up carefully, extricating herself from Tyr’s sleeping limbs. He barely stirred. She sat there for a few moments longer. The moon was only half visible above the trees now, the shadows swallowing the lawn. Slowly Cela allowed her fingertips to glide across Tyr’s bare arm ... and then they were above it, not touching it ... and then the moon was nothing but a sliver, gliding into oblivion.
Cela quietly picked herself up and stole away, leaving Tyr sleeping in the pavilion.
By the time she was back to the house, the moon was down. Inside, in the bathroom, she watched her tattoo reappear, slowly emerging from her skin like ink blooming in water until it had resumed its previous position. She tried pressing on it with her fingers as it appeared, even scratching the skin, but it made no difference. It was just as much a part of her as it ever had been.
Cela rested her hands on the sink and began to cry.
