Page 47 of Laced in Longing

She doesn’t flinch. She doesn’t shove me off or scramble back or start bargaining with her mind about tumors and hallucinations the way she has every other time I’ve gotten close. She allows me this moment, regarding me as I trace each beautiful feature. I’ve never wanted to weep before, but I’m close to it now, mapping the arch of her brow like I’m reading something written there in a language only I speak.

“Exquisite,” I breathe, the only appropriate word in this moment.

This is the exact moment I realize I’ve ruined myself.

There’s no going back from this. There was never much hope of it regardless, but now—now that I know what she feels like and I’ve had her life force under my hand—there is no version of the future where I let her go. Not to another life. Not to the next roof or knife or the next slow-motion vanishing act her sad little mind keeps trying to conjure. She’s mine, she’s always been mine, and now that I’ve touched her, I’d tear both worlds down to the studs before I’d release her.

And that scares me. Because I can feel the hunger already, the thing that lives within my soul where mortals grow their hearts, uncoiling and stretching while asking for more. How bad will it get when I taste her? Fuck, to feel the whole of her. Every scar and freckle calls to me. And the sounds she will make⁠—

Enough.

I drag myself back from the edge of the cliff. As much as I need her, there is a line I will not cross, not for all the wanting in either world.

It would be so easy to take her. She’s spread beneath me, flushed and pliant, and some ugly, ancient part of me knows she wouldn’t stop me right now. But she must say yes. The choice has to be hers. Made with a clear head in a place she’s comfortable, not wrung out of her on a rooftop she came to die on with her defenses in ruins. I respect her too much for that.

She is the one thing in existence with the power to clasp a leash on the worst of what I am, and I’ll be damned before I prove myself unworthy of the hand that holds it.

So I answer her instead.

“I am,” I say, my voice a strange cadence in this physical form. A breath escapes her as I force myself to sit up—one of the more difficult things I’ve done because every part of me is screaming to stay pressed against her.

A hundred emotions flit across her face at once—disbelief, fear, wonder, each one raw and powerful. She’s cataloging me. My lips tilt while her eyes peruse, and whatever internal argument she’s been having ends as she decides to reach for me.

Her fingers find the place where she thinks the silk exists. They touch my jaw instead.

She tenses, sucking in a breath as her fingertips rest against the bare line of my face, and I watch confusion war with the shock of it.

“It isn’t there,” I tell her, holding very still, terrified she’ll pull away. “The covering. Your mind gives it to you because you cannot bear my face as it truly is—not in this world, at least. But there is no fabric, Maven. There never was. It’s only me.”

Still, she doesn’t run.

She shuffles onto her knees, leveling our bodies. And by every Bright God, she does the thing I have wanted for longer than most civilizations have existed:

She touches my face.

Both hands now. Chilled fingers begin at my jaw and trace the edge of it, slow and careful. Up over the line of my cheekbone. The bridge of my nose next—her fingertip travels the entire length of it, and my eyes sting, actually sting. I don’t dare blink for fear of losing a single second of this. Her thumb finds my brow, presses lightly, and follows the shape. The pad skims the corner of my eye where she’d have to feel how wet I’ve gone, but she doesn’t say anything, just keeps learning me with her hands the way I’ve dreamt every night since I first laid eyes on her.

My breathing stops. The air holds in my chest as I silently beg her to continue. She may not see it, but she is building a face in her mind out of nothing but touch, painting me blind, and she deserves my absolute stillness while she does it.

The last feature she traces is my mouth. A delicate finger slides over my lower lip, and I have to close my eyes then—need to—because it’s too much.

It’s everything.

The urge to do the same to her demands to be met, but I remain as I am. I memorized everything about Maven’s face and body long ago. In each lifetime, no matter her circumstances or location, she looks exactly the same. Just as beautiful, with her gray eyes and voided hair, as all her lives before. While her last name changes, nothing else does.

This magnificent creature will always be my Maven, my flower, and it’s time she learned me as well.

She’s still touching my mouth when she catches herself.

I know her too well, and feel the shift—the second her body remembers to be embarrassed. Her hands drop as if they’ve been burned, and she rocks back onto her heels as both cheeks deepen their pink hue.

“I’m sorry,” she blurts. “God, I don’t know why I—that was weird, I shouldn’t have⁠—”

“No.” It comes out rougher than I mean it to, and I gentle it. “Don’t. Do not ever be sorry for wanting to touch me.” My eyes catch her gaze, and I would almost believe she could see them if I didn’t know better, with the way she holds my stare. “I have waited lifetimes for that. For exactly that. I would wait a thousand more just to feel it happen for the first time again.”

Something crosses her face, darkening those eyes. She pushes up onto her feet, wobbling, and backs toward the stairwell door with both arms wrapped tight around herself.

“I have to—there’s something I need to do,” she says, and it’s a lie, a clumsy one, her voice thin and shaking. “Alone. I need to be alone. I just—yeah.”