He takes a breath but then his face freezes mid-rebuttal. The fissure I thought healed rips open, and my heart squeezes painfully. I don’t know what else to say, or how to go from here. I need him to say something. Anything!
He blinks, closes his mouth, and nods.
“That is why your heart ached when you saw the children playing?”
My nose burns and my vision blurs. He remembered, and he put it together so easily. He cares. He notices. Do I deserve someone so good?
“Caitlin, do not hold your troubles in silence,” he says, brushing my cheek.
I lean into the touch and hold his hand against my face, transferring his warmth into strength.
“I said we’d talk about it later but then we didn’t and I’m so sorry,” I whisper. “Before you tie yourself to me forever, in all ways…reconsider, because I might be infertile.”
He wraps an arm around my back, pressing us closer together. “I do not need progeny.”
“But you made a nest. Nests are for having babies,” I cry.
His hand slides from my cheek and grabs the back of my neck. He forces our lips together with desperate need. I kiss him back, my tearsinfusing the sweetness of the moment with a bitter taste. He releases me and pushes our foreheads together.
“I made it for you. Only you, with no expectations of anything else.”
“Sylvia is pregnant,” I murmur. “With their second baby. And Jade is young and I’m…not.”
Bastian chuckles. “Your life so far has been but a single breath of what it will be.”
“I have so many genetic defects and illnesses.”
“I will heal you.”
“What if you can’t?”
“Then I will love you!” he proclaims. “Exactly. As. You are.”
A lump swells in my throat. “I’m emotionally unstable. I’m no good.”
“Are you trying to make me reject you, or are you giving yourself an excuse to reject me?”
I look up at him. This close, his eyes sort of merge together in my blurry, tear-stained vision. I laugh unexpectedly, but it quickly turns into a sob.
Bastian’s hand tightens on my neck and he kisses me again. My breath hitches between each press of his lips, the next growing more demanding than the last. His tongue slides along my upper lip. I open to him and he groans as he steals inside. The pad of his thumb smooths over my cheek and wipes away the last tear.
He sees everything. He knows everything. He wants this.
He wants me.
Gone are thoughts of sadness and my perceived inadequacy. All that remains is yearning. A dire craving to make him an inexorable part of me, forever.
“Yes,” I moan into his kiss.
He grips a fistful of my hair and pulls back, looking down on me with feral hunger. “Yes what, Caitlin.”
“I want you.”
“Tell me, then,” he says and tightens his fist.
My scalp tingles and my mouth pops open in a gasp. I breathe through the delightful sensation of dominance, of being captivated by him.
He looms over me, his voice rumbling deep in the chest as he asks, “What are you?”
