“No? Not even when I am painfully aware that I reside with my belly to the earth and you could use such feathers to take to the heavens where I cannot hope to hold you?”
“You are my ground, and I am your sky. I will ever return to rest in your arms.”
“And if I don’t wish to persevere through the moments you deign to leave them?”
“I’ll take you with me.”
He chuckles. “How?”
I smile, much too merry for this morbid conversation. “I’ll clasp your snake body in my talons and take you on a wonderful little trip through the clouds.”
“What a danger you intend to carry with you,” he murmurs.
“You’re not dangerous.”
“I assure you, I am.”
“Only when you want to be.”
He goes silent, and emotions rock through him, too many to decode, too convoluted to name. At last, he says, “What…a statement.” He runs his nose along my bare skin, kissing every bump of my spine. “My darling…”
I relax, nearly drowsy. “Yes?”
“It is the last of this month.”
Monday. The thirty-first. “I suppose it is.”
“Do you still want to marry me in the next one?”
My flesh hums at the mere possibility. “Yes, I do. Have…you found hope of a cure?”
“I…don’t know. I may have.”
I try to push myself up; he keeps me down. “Castor!” I blurt, twisting as far as I can manage. “Really? You have?”
“Perhaps.”
Perhaps. Perhaps he’s found a cure. Perhapswe’ll be marriedsoon. “How did you have time, on top of everything else?”
He draws snakes up my revealed flesh, coiling the shapes across my wingbones. “I am nothing if not determined to have my way in most eventualities.”
I wriggle.
“Stop squirming,” he purrs, body lowering against mine. “I don’t want to let you up yet. You’re so pretty like this…trusting me.” A low sound vibrates in his chest, and I shiver. “Not a single scrap of me bothers you. It’s like you don’t even remember that I cut you minutes ago with a knife, purely so I could taste the ambrosia of your essence and tease myself with the power you allow me to have over you.”
“I cut you, too, if you’ll recall.”
“Do you know how very messed up that is? I have only recently in my meditation of late come to the harrowing conclusion that I have not been researchinghealthyrelationships. Dark romance, who’d have guessed, revolves largely around toxic depictions. To that end, I believe healthy lovers should actually not be stabbing each other.”
“Why do we need to be healthy?”
He sighs, and I revel in the heat of his breath. Quietly, he murmurs, “I’d like you to be healthy. I want the very best for you. Which means I should probably get past this habit of proving your care for me. You have faced enough suffering at the hands of those meant to love you. I should stop expecting that I need to coax you one step further into my madness, lest I go too far one day when you have not had a chance to work up to it. I need to trust you. I need to…do better.”
“I think you need to trust you. Trust that even yourworstis better for me than anyone else’s best.”
With yet another sigh, he settles his forehead between my wingbones. “I shall try, for your sake, to make certain of that. I love you dearly, Mine.”
“I am coming to love you, too,” I murmur, dwelling on the press of him, his weight, the slim heat offered beyond the coolness of his skin,everything. “About the cure. What is it?”
