His smirk is partial, sad. But he brushes the curls back from his face, and there along his hair line—thorns that crisscross all the way back to the back of his head.
All this time.
My mouth crushes back to his. His hands slide from my face to my hair, the grip shifting from reverent to something with considerably more intent, and I feel the precise moment he stops cataloguing and starts just wanting, the exhale against my mouth, the way his body comes fully into the space between us like it’s been waiting for permission.
I give it.
His warmth moves through the water toward me. The specific warmth of someone who’s been holding back for a very long time and has finally,finallydecided not to.
I pull him closer.
His mouth finds my jaw. My throat. The spot below my ear that makes my brain go genuinely offline—which he’s clearly already catalogued because he goes back to it twice, deliberate and unhurried, and the sound that escapes me is embarrassing in the best possible way.
“Still taking notes?” My voice has gone somewhere I don’t recognize.
“Comprehensive research.” His lips move against my skin. “Very thorough methodology.”
“I hate you.”
“Mm.” He doesn’t sound remotely concerned. “Your heartbeat says otherwise.”
I grab his shirt. Pull. He comes willingly, and the waterfall drowns whatever either of us might have said, and that’s fine because I’m done talking and from the way his hands are moving, he is, too.
The water is cold. He is warm. The contrast becomes its own kind of sensation as his hands trace up my spine—steady and specific and nothing like accident. The bioluminescent light shifts blue-green across his face, and I think, distantly, that this is the kind of thing you can’t unfeel.
The specific careful attention of someone who treats everything he loves like a primary source.
I’ve been touched before. That’s not what this is.
This is beingstudied. And I didn’t know until right now that there was a difference, or that I would fall apart at the seams over it.
“Finnian.”
“Here.”
“I need—” My brain is offline. My vocabulary has apparently gone with it.
“I know.” He does. He always does. That’s the part that’s going to wreck me later—how completely he already knows. His hands find my hips under the water, grip certain and unhurried, drawing me closer until there’s no more water between us. Until I can feel every point of contact.
Until I can feel exactly how much he wants this.
“For the record,” I manage, “this is incredibly inconvenient.”
A startled laugh escapes him—the genuine, surprised kind that gets out before he can stop it. “The timing is not ideal.”
“Dark Forest. Truth venom aftermath. Cold water.”
“Would you like me to stop?”
“I will end you.”
“Also noted.” His mouth finds my collarbone. My shoulder. The warmth of his breath against my skin is a specific and targeted form of destruction. “I’ve been wanting to do this,” he says against my throat, not quite steady, “since you argued with me about the Moonshadow mistranslation. For the record.”
“For the record,” I echo, “you were wrong about that translation.”
“I know.” He sounds genuinely delighted about it. “You were furious. It was devastating. I didn’t recover.”
“You’re recovering fine right now.”
