Page 101

He doesn't defend himself. That's the challenge with Gage. You wind up to hit him and he just stands there and lets it happen.

"I don't know what it is," he says. "I've never seen it before."

"Then guess."

"Your magic runs loud." He says it slowly, like he's picking each word off a shelf. "Mine runs quiet. When we're touching, maybe they just complement each other."

"That's not an answer."

"No. It’s a guess."

The wind moves through the maples and drags a wave of dead leaves across the yard, and under it I catch that sweet rot smell for half a second before it's gone.

"If you want me to stop helping you," Gage says, "I'll stop. Tonight. For good. You'd have to figure it out alone, and it'd be slower, and it'd be worse. But you'd own it."

He means it and that bugs me. Every single person circling my life this week has tried to tell me what to do. Evelyn. Lila. The thing at my window with its reading glasses and its endearments.

And this man, who is six and a half feet of bad decisions and secretly bakes cupcakes, is offering to take himself out of my life so that my magic and decisions can be my own.

Why does that turn me on so much?

"Shut up," I say.

Then I grab two fistfuls of his shirt and pull him down and kiss him.

He goes completely still. One second. Two.

Then his hand comes up into my hair and he kisses me back.

He tastes like woodsmoke and cider. His mouth opens over mine and he makes a low sound against my lips, half a groan and half a growl, and heat goes down my spine and pools low and mean.

My back hits the siding but I don't remember moving. His forearm braces above my head, and his other hand slides under the hem of my sweater and spreads flat over my ribs, and my skin lights up under his palm like the kindling did.

"Oh, Maren." My name comes out wrecked.

"Don't talk."

He doesn't.

His mouth drops to my throat, careful over the fading chain bruise, then not careful at all under my jaw. I get my hands under his shirt and find the old scar along his ribs, ridged and warm, and he shudders hard enough that I feel it through the wall.

I hook my leg around his and he lifts me like I don't weigh anything, and the sound I make is something I don’t recognize.

His hips press mine into the siding. I can feel exactly how much he wants this. Six months of him watching me and pretending to study a tree is finally right there, hard against me, and I have never in my life wanted anything the way I want him.

"Gage. I want you," I say as he is kissing my throat and starting to go lower.

"I want you too."

And, then he stops and goes rigid. Not the good kind.

His head comes up and looks over my shoulder, into the yard.

"Don't move," he says.

I turn my head anyway.

The fire is burning. It came back at some point and I never saw it happen.