Thunder booms, distant and deep, the storm matching my pulse. He drops my wrist. Rises, then steps back, but I won’tlet him retreat. I follow, my fingers brushing his arm where the tattoos still glitter.
“This looks like language,” I marvel.
He shrugs. “I don’t know.”
My eyes meet his. “Do they feel like that to you? Communication?”
“They feel like a longing that I shouldn’t have.”
My voice catches in my throat.
“If you stay here any longer,” he says, voice fraying. “I won’t stop.”
“Don’t.”
Light and sound swell. The cabin hums, walls trembling with the same frequency that’s been haunting the range.
I don’t know how it’s possible. How any of this is.
“Josephine.” My name leaves him like a prayer, like surrender.
The word collapses the space between us. I lift my face as his lips descend—not spontaneity—inevitability.
The roots of the same tree finding each other again.
Heat, light, breath.
The cabin disappears in his kiss, leaving only the sound of our names dissolving into each other.
The hum threads through us, a living current. My hands on his burning chest, his heartbeat answering mine.
Everything burns away to radiance.
Desire bends the air between us into something older than language.
Chapter
Nineteen
ASH
The floorboards hum beneath our feet. Light seeps through the cracks like veins of silver.
My heart drowns in my chest for want of her—resonance igniting me from the inside out.
Only ever spoken of in whispers and shame. Now it burns clean as truth. Pulsing through me. Terrifying. Purifying.
The thing I’ve spent an entire lifetime hiding from and searching for. The thing that could wreck me.
Our breaths sync, each exhale altering the sound of the storm outside. The wind answers like a bow drawn over wire.
Josephine palms my chest, her tiny hand fragile against the heat of my flesh, light slipping between her fingers. The flesh that hums for her.
A low chord shudders through us—warmth, vibration—and I don’t know where it starts or ends, only that it binds us until we feel like one thing.
The mountains sing through us. The words float inside my head. Our eyes lock. Her breath catches.
Not hearing the words—feeling them.
