Chapter 49 Morning
POV: Carly
The first thing she registered was light.
A thin strip of it coming through the blinds and landing across the pillow next to her face and she lay there for a moment in that specific half-conscious state where the brain has not yet caught up with the body and everything was just warm and quiet and fine.
Then her brain caught up.
She turned over slowly.
Niko was asleep behind her. His arm was around her waist and his face was slack and peaceful in a way she had never seen it when he was awake. The dark blonde curls a complete mess against the pillow. His lips slightly parted. The multiple necklaces had shifted during the night and lay against his chest in a tangled quiet cluster.
She stared at him.
She was in his room.
In his bed.
Wearing his clothes.
She was absolutely still for approximately three seconds and then everything from last night came back in a warm rush that started in her chest and spread outward and she felt her face do something she was glad he was not awake to see.
She turned away and looked at the ceiling and lay there with his arm still around her and tried to be a person who processed things calmly.
She was not processing things calmly.
She was replaying every single moment of the past twelve hours in vivid order and feeling each one land fresh and she was warm from her forehead to her toes and she pressed her lips together and stared at the ceiling and told herself to breathe.
She turned back toward him.
He was still asleep.
She propped herself up slightly on one elbow and looked at him properly. Really looked. She had studied his face a hundred times in classrooms and corridors and across tables but always with the awareness that he might look back at any second and she would have to cover it. Now there was no covering required.
The scruff along his jaw was slightly longer than usual. His eyelashes were longer than she had registered from a distance. There was a small mole near his jawline she had noticed before and a few others scattered at his neck and collarbone. The scar she had found in the dark last night was visible now above the waistband of his boxers, pale against paler skin.
She reached out slowly and pressed her palm against his cheek.
His skin was cool and smooth under her hand and he made a low sound in his sleep but did not wake. She rubbed her thumb across his cheekbone the way he did to hers and felt something settle deep in her chest that she was going to have to deal with eventually.
Not yet though.
Her fingers drifted down to his neck and traced the mole there lightly. Then to his chest where she found the necklaces and turned one of them between her fingers. The sapphire one. It was always there. She had noticed it a hundred times and never asked about it.
She pressed her hand flat against his chest.
No heartbeat.
She kept her hand there and waited and felt nothing and she had known intellectually that he did not have one but feeling the absence of it was entirely different from knowing about it. The stillness under her palm. The slow shallow breaths that were not necessary but happened anyway like a habit from a life before.
She found herself fascinated rather than frightened.
That said something she was not going to examine yet.
"Mmm." His voice came out low and sleep roughened from nowhere. "Don't stop."
She yanked her hand back.
He was smiling with his eyes still closed.
She scoffed. "I didn't mean to wake you."
"You were exploring me like a map." He said. Still not opening his eyes. Still smiling.
"I was not." She said.
He opened one eye.
She crossed her arms.
He opened the other eye and looked at her with that expression. Full and blue and completely awake despite the lazy delivery of the past thirty seconds.
"Good morning." He said.
She felt the warmth move through her chest again and looked at the bookshelf. "Morning."
He reached over and caught her wrist gently before she could create more distance and pulled her back toward him.
"I'm joking." He said. "It felt nice."
She let herself be pulled back and lay beside him and looked at the ceiling.
"How'd you sleep." She said.
He made a sound that was somewhere between a sigh and a laugh. "Best I've had in a long time." He said. "I don't think that's a coincidence."
She looked at him sideways.
He was looking at her directly.
She looked back at the ceiling and bit her lip.
He groaned.
She turned her head. "What."
"That." He said. Pointing at her mouth.
She blinked. "What?"
"The lip thing." He said. "The biting. You do it constantly and you never notice you're doing it and it drives me completely mad."
She stared at him.
He looked very seriously inconvenienced.
She felt something mischievous and warm move through her and before she had fully decided to do it she did it again. Deliberately this time. Caught her bottom lip between her teeth and held it there and watched his expression shift.
His eyebrow went up.
She did it again.
He tilted his head slowly. "You're playing with fire."
She let the lip go and licked over it just to see what happened.
What happened was Niko moving faster than she registered and then she was on her back with his weight above her and his lips on hers and she was laughing into the kiss which she had not expected and the laugh dissolved into something else entirely as his mouth moved against hers with that specific unhurried certainty that made her forget entirely what she had been about to think.
She kissed him back with everything she had.
His hands moved to her sides and she pulled him closer and the morning light came through the blinds in warm strips across the covers and she thought this is what it is supposed to feel like and stopped thinking after that.
Author's Note:
She deliberately bit her lip to see what he would do and he absolutely lost his mind and I love her for it.