Page 83 of The Witch They Crave

He doesn't do that. He does the opposite.

But how do I know it's real, I think, and I don't say it, because saying it would make it true.

"Because I wasn't going to hand you a reason to explain it away." He says it evenly, but there's an edge under it now, something with teeth. "You'd take the word tether and you'd use it to decide none of it was real. That whatever you feel when you look at me is just leakage. Bleed-through. Someone else's signal in your chest." He crosses his arms over his chest. "So let me save you the trouble of the theory, Calypso. If you don't know how you feel about me—if you truly can't tell your own heart from mine—then you should go back to your room. Right now. I mean that. I am the last person on this earth who will ever make you stay somewhere you don't want to be."

It knocks the breath out of me a little. "That's not—I didn't come here to be—"

"I'm not finished." He closes half the distance, and his voice drops, and it isn't cold, it's the furthest thing from cold. "The tether can carry a feeling. It cannot invent one. It has nothing of its own to give—everything crossing it started in a person first. And you felt something for me before our magic ever touched. You know you did." His eyes hold mine, steady, merciless in their patience. "The first time I corrected your stance and you forgot how to breathe. The morning you argued with me about the historiography just to keep me in the room. You flushed every time I stood too close and you filed it under problems and moved on. That was months before the tether. That was you. Just you."

And—he's right.

I deflate a little bit.

I think back to it against my own will: the first weeks, before I understood anything about him, the way he'd catch my wrist to correct a channeling exercise and my whole body would forget its assignment. The way I'd catalogue the disruptions to his control like they were evidence of a crime I couldn't name. The way I lay in a salt cellar and thought about hazel eyes when I should have been thinking about survival. None of that came through any tether. There wasn't a tether yet.

"That's not fair," I say, and it's barely a whisper.

"I'm not trying to be fair. I'm trying to be honest, which I have been catastrophically bad at with you." His jaw works. The wall wants to come up. He holds it down through what looks like sheer will. "I won't manage you. I won't decide what you can handle. You asked me not to and you were right to ask. So here is the unmanaged version: I have wanted you since before I had any right to, tether or no tether, and I will feel it whether you stay or go. That part was never yours to catch or lose. It's mine. It has been mine for a long time."

The room is very quiet.

I read people for the lie—the angle, the want they won't say out loud. It's the one skill that's never failed me. I turn it on him full force and it comes back empty. No angle. No play. Just a man who handed me the truth and then stepped back to let me leave with it.

That’s what unnerves me.

Because I don't trust. It got trained out of me a sedated year at a time, until the only safe assumption left was that everyone wanted something and the wanting would cost me. Since then, I haven’t given my true self over to anyone. Maybe Nellie, but not like this.

Not in the way I want to with Aamon.

So the bravest thing I've ever done—braver than the chapel, braver than the vault—is this.

I don't go back to my room.

I cross the space he opened between us.

He goes still when I reach him—that struck-note stillness his whole body does when I touch him first. I flatten my hand over his bare sternum. His chest isn't moving; he doesn't breathe, mostly doesn't bother. So the slow breath he takes now, the one that lifts my hand, is a thing he does for me. A concession.

"If you're managing me right now," I say, "I'll know."

"I'm not managing anything." His hand comes up and closes over mine, pressing it flat against him. "I've never been less in control of anything in my life. That should frighten us both."

"It does."

"Good."

And then he kisses me.

His lips meet mine, and it's nothing like the mornings—the stolen ones, rationed out with the door cracked and one ear on the hall. There's no clock on this. He kisses me slow, like he's got the rest of eternity and means to spend a good stretch of it right here, one hand still pinning mine to his chest, the other sliding up into my hair to tilt my head exactly where he wants it.

I feel the shape of him against me and my whole body goes molten. His mouth opens mine, unhurried, tasting, and a sound I don't recognize climbs out of my throat and gets swallowed between us. My free hand fists in the damp towel at his hip. I want it gone. I want all of it gone.

My magic answers, because it always answers him—it lives a half-inch under my skin and responds to everything I feel before I process the touch. Heat floods up under my sternum, pushing toward my palms, and my stomach drops with the old dread: careful, contain it, you'll level the room—

—except his magic's already there.

It slides into mine the way it does in training, except nothing about this is training. It finds the surge and doesn't crush it. Doesn't flatten it. Doesn't do the thing the fail-safe does that makes me want to claw out of my own skin. It just holds. Steadies. Gives the heat somewhere to go that isn't out through my hands and into the walls. The same thing he's done for months with two fingers on my wrist—except now there's nothing clinical left in it, and he doesn't pretend there is.

"Breathe," he says against my mouth. Not a command. Closer to a plea.