Chapter 183 183

Chapter 183 183
Lucian's POV:

She reached down between us. Guided me back into her, and the sensation hit again, everything at once, that tightness and warmth and her weight settling over me, and I gripped her thighs and the gold flared and my palms were hot against her skin and she didn't flinch. Didn't pull away. Didn't even blink.

She moved. Slow at first, finding what worked, her hands flat on my chest and her head tilted back, and I could see the line of her throat and her closed eyes and the way her lower lip caught between her teeth when the angle was right.

"God," she breathed. "Yeah. Like that."

I didn't know what I was doing but she did, and she was moving in a way that worked for both of us, and my hands were on her thighs and they were warm but not burning and the sheets weren't smoking and nothing was on fire.

"I want to be closer," I said.

"Then sit up."

I sat up. Her legs went around my waist and my arms went around her and we were chest to chest, face to face, her forehead against mine and our breath mixing. She moved against me and I moved with her and the angle was different, deeper, and I could feel everything, her heartbeat against my chest and her breath on my mouth and her hands gripping my shoulders.

"Lucian..." My name. In her mouth, against my lips. "Look at me."

I looked at her. Her brown eyes, three inches apart, her face flushed and her hair stuck to her neck with sweat and she was the most real thing I had ever seen.

And I felt like I was going to fucking explode.

"Let go," she said.

"Something's going to—"

"I don't care." She kissed me. Hard. Her hands in my hair and her legs tight around me. "I don't care if the whole room burns. Let go."

I let go.

The orgasm hit from the center out, this full-body wave that had nothing cautious in it, nothing held back. The gold went everywhere: through my hands into her skin, through my chest into hers, out through my eyes. The lamp on the nightstand flickered. The alarm clock display blinked. A spot on the fitted sheet under my thigh started to warm and brown. The room got hot, ten degrees, fifteen, the air thick.

Emma gasped. Not pain. I checked her face. Not pain, but this full-body shudder that went through her from where my hands pressed against her back and her thighs, the gold heat moving through her skin, and she was holding me tight with her face in my neck and my name broken up between breaths and I held her as tight as I dared because I was falling apart and she was the only solid thing.

She came. I felt it, her whole body tense and shake against me, her nails in my shoulders, and the sound she made was quiet and desperate. It was her, responding to me and the gold and the heat of my hands.

We stayed like that. Tangled, her legs still around me, my arms still around her, both of us breathing hard and neither of us moving. The heat faded slow. The lamp steadied. The spot on the sheet stopped browning.

"Lucian," she said. Against my neck. Muffled.

"Yeah."

"The sheet has a burn spot."

"I know."

"And the room feels like a sauna."

"I know."

"And your eyes are still gold."

"I know."

She pulled back. Looked at me. Her face was flushed and her hair was everywhere and her eyes were bright and she was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen in my eighteen years.

"Hi," she said.

"Hi."

"So that happened."

"That happened."

"Any fires?" she asked.

I looked at the sheet. A brown mark the size of my palm. The pillow on the floor with its scorch mark from earlier. "Two, technically."

"Both contained."

"Both contained."

She started laughing, shaking her whole body, her face against my shoulder, and I started laughing too because the relief was enormous and the pillow was on the floor and the sheet was burned and the room smelled like scorched cotton, AGAIN, and we'd done it. We'd actually done it and Emma was in one piece and the house was still standing.

I eased her back onto the bed and dealt with the condom, which was awkward, and lay down next to her. On her narrow bed, in her small room, with the corkboard and the sticky notes and the postcards from Portland, San Francisco and somewhere that looked like Italy. She rolled onto her side facing me and I rolled onto mine facing her, our faces close on the pillow.

"So," she said.

"So."

"That was your first time."

"Was it obvious?"

"A little." She traced a line from my shoulder to my elbow with her fingertip. "But in a good way. You were, I mean, it was..." She shook her head. "Really good. Like, really, really good."

"You don't have to—"

"I'm not being nice. I'm being honest. The gold thing at the end? When you let go? I felt it. The heat, it went through your hands and into my skin and it was, I don't know how to describe it, this warm wave that went all the way through me, and I think that's why I..." She stopped. Her face was pink. "Let's just say the dragon thing has its perks."

I stared at her. "The gold made you..."

"I'm not having this conversation."

"It did. The gold actually—"

"MOVING ON."

I grinned. The stupid grin, I couldn't help it. She hit me with the non-smoking pillow and I caught it and pulled her close and she pressed her face into my chest and I could feel her smiling against my skin.

"We have about forty minutes before my mom gets home," she said.

"Forty minutes."

"Want to just stay here?"

"I want to stay here forever."

"Forty minutes."

"I'll take it."

We lay there. In her narrow bed, the afternoon light coming through the window and falling across the corkboard where a sticky note said "look up how fire works AGAIN" and I thought about the irony of that and about the scorched pillow and about Emma's face when she said "let go" and about Marlen's voice in my head saying "careful you don't set her on fire" and about how I hadn't.

I hadn't set her on fire. I'd set a pillow on fire, sure, and the room temperature went through the roof, and the lamp did a thing, but Emma was here, unburned, lying against me with her leg over mine and her hand on my chest counting my heartbeats.

I hadn't hurt her.

Maybe I wasn't going to.

"Hey, Emma?"

"Mm."

"I love you. I didn't say it before. In the forest you said it and I didn't say it back because I was, I don't know, everything was too much and I couldn't form words. But I do. I love you. I've loved you since the coffee and the ID card and 'why are you so hot.' Probably since before that. Probably since the second I saw you with your Hemingway shirt."

She was quiet for a moment. Her hand stopped counting.

"I know," she said. "I've known for a while, actually."

"How?"

"Because you wrote me a poem about it. And you told me your biggest secret. And you healed my sister, and you told a five-year-old the truth about dragons before you told me because she needed magic in her life more than she needed to be safe from yours." She looked up at me. "That's love, Lucian. All of that. You just didn't have the word for it yet."

The gold was warm behind my eyes. Steady. Not pushing, not threatening. Just there, like a pilot light.

"I have the word now," I said.

"Good." She kissed my chest. "Now get dressed before my mother walks in and you have a much harder conversation than the girlfriend one."

I got dressed. Fast. She got dressed too, and we changed the pillowcase, the scorched one shoved into the bottom of her laundry basket, which she said her mom never checked because Emma did her own laundry and thank god for that. We opened the window to air out the room and sprayed some body spray from her desk drawer, coconut-scented and probably two years old.

"Subtle," I said.

"Better than 'my dragon boyfriend set my pillow on fire during sex.'"

"Fair point."

We both washed and then went downstairs. She made instant coffee, which was terrible, and I ate three granola bars from the cabinet and we sat at the kitchen table looking like two people who definitely hadn't just done what we'd done, and five minutes later the front door opened and Mrs. Thomas came in with Evie, who was covered in finger paint and carrying what appeared to be a sculpture made of toilet paper rolls and glitter.

"LUCIAN!" Evie screamed, and launched herself at me with the force of a small missile. I caught her, paint and all, and she smeared green on my shirt and I didn't care because she was smiling and Emma was smiling and Mrs. Thomas was looking at us with that expression she got, the one where she was trying to figure out what was going on in her house and whether she should be concerned.

"We were studying," Emma said.

"Uh huh," Mrs. Thomas said.

"AP Bio."

"Right."

She looked at me. Then at Emma.

"Dinner's at seven if you want to stay, Lucian," she said, and went to the kitchen, and I thought: she knows. She doesn't know what she knows but she knows something and we're going to have to be a lot more careful or a lot more honest, and I wasn't sure which was scarier.

Evie was showing me her sculpture. "It's a dragon," she said. "See the wings?"

I looked at the toilet paper rolls, the glitter and the pipe cleaner that was supposed to be a tail.

"Obviously," I said. "That's a great dragon."

"His name is Captain Chompy."

I looked at Emma. She looked at me.

"Captain Chompy," I said. "That's a great name."

Evie beamed and went to show her mom and I sat at the kitchen table with green paint on my shirt and Emma across from me drinking terrible coffee and the afternoon light coming through the window and I thought: this is it. This is what I was afraid of losing. This is what the running and the hiding and the secret was always about, this exact thing, a kitchen table and a girl and a five-year-old's dragon named Captain Chompy and the ordinary, boring normalcy of a weekday afternoon.

I wasn't going to let anyone take it from me.

Not the Order. Not the fear. Not the fire.

Nobody.