Page 27 of Mischief

"I'd bring the espresso machine, duh." I walk two fingers up the center of his chest.

"There's no room for the espresso machine." He catches my hand and flattens it over his heart.

"I'd get rid of the dresser." I prop my chin on his sternum so I can look at him.

Gods, he's beautiful like this.

The wall down, the eye nearly healed up, that rare soft thing in his face he only ever lets me see.

"You don't need clothes anyway," I tell him. "I like you better without them."

He smiles, and for once it reaches all the way up, crinkling the corner of his good eye, and I want to climb inside it and live there.

Then it fades.

The way it's been fading for two weeks now, his eyes drifting up to the ceiling, and I feel him go somewhere I can't follow him to.

"Hey." I flatten my palm over his heart. "There it is again. Where do you keep going?"

"Nowhere." His hand starts moving on my spine again, a little too smooth, a little too fast.

"You said that last time. And the time before that."

I keep my voice soft, because I've learned the hard way that pushing him makes the wall higher, and I'm so tired of the wall.

"You came home hurt and told me about your father and your sister, and then you closed a door somewhere inside you and you've been bracing it shut ever since."

My thumb moves over his heart, back and forth.

"I'm not asking you to open it all the way. I'm asking you to stop pretending it isn't there."

His throat works.

His hand goes still against my back.

"If I told you everything," he says, so low I have to hold my breath to catch it, "you'd never look at me the same again."

"That'snottrue." I say it fast, before he can let himself believe it.

"You don't know that. You don't know what's behind the door, Tindra."

His voice catches on my name and cracks down the middle, and his arm hauls me in tighter, like he's bracing for me to get up and walk out this second.

"There's things about me. About where I come from. If they ever came out, your family would?—"

"My family wouldwhat?" I push up onto my elbow so I can see all of him. "Bodul. Look at me."

He does.

"Whatever it is, whatever you're so sure it is, I chose you. When we started this I chose you, and I've chosen you every single day since, in secret, in a storage closet, with my whole family a wall away. And I'd do it again tomorrow. There is nothing behind that door that changes one thing about that."

He looks at me for a long moment.

His eye goes bright and wet at the rims, and my heart climbs into my throat, because this is it, he's finally going to let me carry it with him.

"Everyone's at the lake," he says instead.

He pulls me back down against his chest and presses his mouth into my hair.