My nose scrunched. “Well, I loved it.”
His brow arched.
“Not the fact that you were hurting," I clarified, “but the fact that you have feelings and are willing to share them with me. That's special. It's more intimate than anything we have done in the bedroom.”
I picked his face back up, pulling his attention back to me. “I’m not going to force you to talk about it, but if you need to—even if you just need to cry—I want to be the person you can share those feelings with. Okay?”
He nodded into my grip, and despite his claims about not wanting to cry, his eyes glossed over. “The days I spent without you were the worst days of my life. And I don’t even mean the time I spent being tortured. I mean all of the days where I could no longer call you mine.”
“I’m not that great.”
“You are perfect.”
A tear dripped from his nose, splashing silently on the duvet below us.
“Talk to me.” I prayed to the gods that he would choose to open up at that moment. I knew what happened when he held on to his emotions for too long, and I didn’t want it to get to that point.
“Fuck, how did looking at a godsdamn map turn intothis?” He wiped his nose then glared up at the ceiling lights.
“Serious conversations at shitty times. Our favorite pastime.”
He huffed a laugh, then leaned into me, resting his forehead where my heart was underneath my skin.
“I’m afraid that if I tell you, it will hurt you. I don’t want you to blame yourself any more than I know you already do.”
My heart fuckingshattered.
“You don’t need to hide the hard stuff from me. Remember?” I pressed my lips into his damp hair.
He blew air through his nose, then said into my chest. “It was worse every day I spent there. More strikes with a chain. More beatings. More cuts and bruises and broken bones. Every time I thought something was healing, he made the wound ten times worse. I’m sure you've seen them, but I have plenty of scars to remember every single thing that happened when I was there.”
My stomach twisted into a knot so tight I was unsure if I’d ever be able to eat again.
“And that's as much as I feel like getting into it, if that's okay with you,” Sebastian finished with a heavy breath, finally pulling his head out of my embrace.
I nodded through my queasiness, noting the small spot of wetness on my shirt from where his eyes had laid. “Thank you for sharing that with me.”
“Thank you for letting me.”
Leaning forward, I brushed my mouth against his. “I love you. I’m so sorry.”
I’m so sorry that you were brutally tortured because of me.
He broke our kiss to say, “I’m just glad it was me and not you,” then resumed it in a hungrier fashion.
Despite the moment not being home to the greatest conversation, the intimacy that clouded our room was to die for. We hadn’t had this in so long, and it felt so godsdamn good to be able to share something so sacred with him.
Unhurriedly, he pressed me back onto the mattress and lowered himself over me, deepening the angle of our kiss and the soft thrusts of his tongue between my lips.
My arms found their way around his neck, locking under the base of his hair and pulling him closer to me.
Our mouths curved together perfectly, devouring each other in a way that was much less frantic than our usual kisses. Itwas gentle and sweet. It was a kiss of pure love and devotion. Nothing more and nothing less.
At that moment, I knew. I justknew.
Everything we had been through had brought us here. Every stupid little argument. The bigger fights. The breakup. The stupid mistakes. The trauma. All of it led ushere, and I couldn't be more grateful to the gods.
He was the man I would marry, godswilling. The man who would father my children. The one who would support me when things were tough. We would be at each other's bedside when one of us was ready to cross over, holding hands while the other drew their final breath.
