"Anya." His voice is barely a whisper. "Tell me to stop and I'll stop."
I reach up and put my hands on his face. Both sides. My right palm on his smooth cheek, my left on the scarred one, holding him steady, making him look at me.
"Don't stop," I say. “Don’t ever stop.”
Connor
Her hands are on my face, and I can't think.
Both palms. One on the good side, one on the ruined side, holding me like neither one matters more than the other. Her thumbs trace the line of my jaw, and when her left thumb brushes the ridge of the scar, I flinch out of instinct, and she presses harder, not letting me pull away.
"Don't hide from me," she whispers.
I close my eyes. The dead one is already dark, but I close the working one because the way she's looking at me is too much, too open, too full of something I don't know how to receive.
"Anya." My voice comes out wrecked. "I need you to know something."
"Okay."
"I've been trying not to think about you." A breath that shakes on the way out. "Every day this week, I've been trying, and it hasn't worked. Not once. I can't focus, I can't sleep, I can't be in a room with you without..." I trail off because the words feel too big for my mouth. "Every night, every morning, I've had to take care of myself just to function. Just to sit across from you at breakfast without losing my mind. And it doesn't help. Nothing helps. You're in my head constantly and I can't get you out."
She's quiet for a moment. Her fingers trace along the scar, down through the brow, past the dead eye, to the corner of my mouth.
"Good," she says.
I open my eyes and blink at her.
She's smiling. Like hearing that I've been falling apart over her is the best thing anyone's ever told her.
"I want to be in your head," she says. "I want to be the thing you can't stop thinking about. Because you're the thing I can't stop thinking about, and it's nice to know I'm not alone in it."
I kiss her. Slower than the altar, slower than the garden. I take my time because I need her to feel what I can't say, that she's not a transaction or an arrangement or a solution to a Council mandate. She's the woman who said yes when anyone else would have run, and I've been hers since the second she didn't look away.
Her fingers slide into my hair and she pulls me closer, rising onto her toes, and I wrap my arms around her and hold her against me, and for a long moment we just stand there in the dark, kissing like we have all the time in the world.
Then her hands drop to my jacket and push it off my shoulders, and the mood shifts.
"Wait." I catch her wrists. Gently. She looks up at me, confused, and I can see the flash of worry that she's done something wrong. "It's not... I'm not stopping. I just..." I bring her hands to my mouth and press a kiss to each palm. "I want to go slow."
"Why?"
"Because it's your first time."
Her cheeks flush. "How do you know that?"
"Diomid told me." I brush a strand of hair from her face. "He didn't say it to embarrass you. He said it so I'd understand what you're giving me."
She looks at me for a long moment, and I can see her deciding whether to be annoyed at her brother or grateful. Grateful wins, barely.
"I'm not fragile, Connor."
"I know you're not fragile. But this matters. You matter." I tip her chin up with one finger. "So, we go slow. And if anything feels wrong, you tell me, and I stop. No questions."
"And if everything feels right?"
"Then I keep going until you tell me to stop."
Her breath hitches. She nods.
