Then he pulls me closer.
He kisses me in that same bruising sort of way he did after that impromptu rave. He pulls me down with him, he gets his hands in my hair, and he keeps kissing me.
He kisses me like there’s no beginning, no end, just this.
And I can feel that fire dance inside of us, but he doesn’t crank up the heat. This is different. This is sacred.
This time, maybe for the first time, we don’tfuck. That’s not the right word.
Because this is true love. This is the real fate that’s held us in its grip all this time. This is the two of us, coming together. Becoming one.
This is the only way we can get our souls entwined.
Ty explores every part of my body. He pulls me over him so I can straddle him, and so I can see him worship me. With his hands. With that look on his face.
Over again we turn and I hold him inside me, doing my best to lock my legs around him, though he’s so broad and his muscles are so hard—
It’s as if I can’t take him deep enough.
Still, we fit. Whatever we do, we fit.
I stop pretending that there’s any possibility of me feeling whole without this man. My mate. My king.
My destiny.
When we come, we do it together, and it feels like pure joy.
We hold each other for a very long time. So long it begins to feel like a different kind of communion. But eventually, I turn over and I look at him.
“I miss the stars,” I confess. “That’s one of the reasons I like the cottage so much. I can see them from my window.”
“Baby,” Ty rumbles. “I can give you the goddamn stars.”
He pulls me with him out into the tunnel and then outside. We sneak back up to that hilltop, but we don’t join the party that’s still going on around the fires. We skirt around it and head for the next hill,where Ty and I avoid the sleeping packs from the Southwest and climb halfway up a very tall pine tree.
We keep going until we make it to an old lookout spot with a still-sturdy platform.
He sits with his back against the tree trunk and wraps me up in his arms. I lean back into him, my back to his chest, and we don’t say a word.
Maybe we’re beyond words.
I tilt my head up to look at all the stars high above me on the second-to-darkest night, bright and beautiful as if to whisper the truth—dawn is coming.
Dawn is always coming.
I feel no death goddess darkness encroaching tonight. There are nothing but constellations up above us and the whole, complicated, magical galaxies that Ty and I have made between us.
For a moment I can pretend that the solstice isn’t coming. That we can always feel exactly like this with no test, no fight.
That it can be only the two of us, with the world like the far-off Milky Way, something to look at and marvel at that doesn’t affect us in the least.
Just for a moment, I lean into him and let myself believe it could.
13.
I wake up on the morning of the solstice to the sound of raised male voices in the tunnel outside the den. But whatever alarms that might set off in me subside when I hear Ty’s deep rumble of command threaded through those voices. I bury my face in the soft pillows that smell like him. And me. And us.
I feel shaky, but it feels like leftover joy. As if I took the stars to bed with me when Ty and I finally made our way back and wound ourselves around each other in what was left of the dark. The voices outside get louder, like a wave, and I can’t exactly advocate for an equal partnership with my whole chest and also pretend to sleep through things that sound unduly dramatic for a Sunday solstice morning.
