“Thinking I could take you to lunch?” he asked, eyes suddenly soft and pleading.
If that was the look Kieran gave everyone he slept with, it was no wonder he’d worked his way through all the single ladies of Slow Falls.Anyonewould fall for that.
“Yeah?” I asked, surprised.
“Yeah.” Kieran paused to press another kiss to my stomach. “Well, I’d been planning on breakfast, but you just told me you have a meeting, so…”
I couldn’t have stopped myself grinning at him if I’d wanted to. It was like we’d never grown up at all.
… well, thesexwas like we’d grown up, but the rest of it…
The rest of it was so easy. It was as if nothing had changed between us.
We were still Felix and Kieran, inseparable. Made for each other, people said back then.
I was starting to think those people had been right after all.
“So is this the meeting where you tell them Alex and Eliothaveto get together or the whole story falls apart and at least three people will be really mad about it?”
“Three?” I asked.
“Well, Morgan for one, he’s counting on you. Angelica, on behalf of her nephew—she told me he just came out to her and I got the feeling she’d raze cities for that kid. And then there’s me.”
“You?”
Kieran nodded. “Me. I can see it, between the two of them. Can’t wait to get to book five.”
My stomach dropped. “If you’re invested in Alex and Eliot being together, you’re gonnamurderme over book five.”
Kieran’s eyes widened. “What did you do to them?”
Oops.
This was the part I’d been afraid of him getting up to. The part where it got really,reallyobvious who they were.
“You’ll have to read it and find out. Just… remember there’s another two books. Remember I haven’tfinishedbook seven. Nothing’s set in stone yet.”
“I know where you live,” Kieran said, fixing me with a look that might’ve worried me if he wasn’t tracing gentle circles on my hip with his thumb. “If you hurt them…”
“They have to be hurt to grow,” I said, running my fingers through his hair again.
Hearing that in a creative writing class I’d been sitting in on with a cute boy whose pants I wanted to get into was the thing that’d turned me back into a writer after years of telling myself I was going into software development.
I’d needed it to be true. I needed pain tomeansomething.
“Who says?” Kieran asked.
“Thousands of years of Western storytelling,” I responded. “In order to get what you want, you have to sacrifice something else you want. It’s not satisfying, otherwise. There’s a whole theory about it. I’m happy to lecture you sometime.”
“You know, I think I’d like that,” Kieran said.
“Really?”
Kieran nodded, crawling his way back up the bed and settling next to me on his side, head propped up on his fist. “I missed your voice for a lot of years. And I like the way your face lights up when you’re talking about things you care about. So yeah, I think I’d like it. Even if you’re gonna tell me that pain is necessary.”
“No one would be who they are without the pain they’ve suffered,” I said. “It sounds mean, I guess, but someone who’d never had a single bad thing happen to them would beboring. I’m not saying people should be… starving or dying on the streets or left screaming in pain or anything, but… it shapes us. The bad stuff. More than the good.”
Kieran reached out, cupped my face with his hand, and kissed me so softly it was almost enough to make tears well up in my eyes.
