Page 31 of That Defining Moment

“Completely.” The word came out without hesitation. “He kissed me. At the cinema. In the bathroom, after everyone had gone, and it felt —” The flush deepened, spreading from his neck to the tips of his ears, and he pressed his face half into the pillow. “It felt the way it’s supposed to feel.”

Lysander’s hand had gone still on Cassian.

“Don’t be scared, Lysander.” He said it gently. “I wanted the kiss. I wanted it so much. And when it happened, I felt it all the way —” He took Lysander’s hand and moved it, placing it flat on his own stomach, just below his navel. “Here. My whole body responded to him. The way the doctrine says it should when you’re with your true Evermate, when the vessel recognises who it’s been made to receive.” His voice dropped to a near whisper. “I produced slick, Lysander. For the first time. With Charles it never happened, not once, and I thought there was something wrong with me, that I was broken or closed off. But with Uriel it just —” He pressed Lysander’s hand harder into his stomach. “It came. Like my body already knew his touch.”

Lysander’s jaw had tightened, and the muscle at his temple was working, but he didn’t pull his hand away.

“Okay.” The word came out rough. “Okay, Cass. But Hamish and I need to meet him properly.”

Cassian wriggled forward on the pillow until his forehead was resting against Lysander’s collarbone, close enough that Lysander’s arm had no choice but to come up and settle around him. He tucked himself into the space beneath Lysander’s chin.

“You’ll like him,” Cassian said.

Lysander’s arm tightened around him. “I’ll be the judge of that, Cass.”

Chapter Fifteen

Lysander had expected to spend the hours before Uriel’s visit vibrating at a frequency that would shatter Hamish’s mugs, but instead he’d woken up on Thursday morning with a strange, settled clarity that he didn’t entirely trust. He lay in the grey pre-dawn of their bedroom, one leg hooked over Hamish’s thigh, and turned the feeling over in his head, before heading into the kitchen to check in on Cassian and his morning practice.

Cassian had been incandescent since they’d agreed to the dinner. He’d spent the previous afternoon scrubbing the cottage with fervour, attacking the kitchen tiles with a sponge and a bottle of Dettol while delivering a running monologue about Uriel’s qualities that Lysander had had to block out for the sake of his own sanity.

Beautiful soul.

Gentle hands.

Light pouring through him.

Lysander had nodded along and wiped down the surfaces behind Cassian, because Cassian’s scrubbing technique left a lot to be desired and he had a tendency to clean in spirals that missed great big sweeps of counterspace entirely.

Now Cassian was in the kitchen making chocolate mousse.

The recipe had come from Elisa at the library, handwritten on a piece of notepaper. The kitchen now looked like a chocolate bomb had detonated in it. There was cocoa powder on the ceiling, and Lysander was too tired to ask Cassian how it had got up there.

“It needs to set for four hours,” Cassian announced, sliding the bowl into the fridge carefully. “So nobody opens this fridge until dinner. Nobody.”

“I need milk for my coffee, Cass.”

“Then you should have thought of that before the mousse went in.” Cassian closed the fridge door and pressed both palms flat against it, as though the mousse might try to escape. “Four hours. The recipe says so.”

Lysander made his coffee black and took it to the kitchen island, where he sat and scrolled through his mobile while Cassian bustled around him, wiping surfaces that were already clean and rearranging the cutlery drawer for the third time. All that nervous energy had to go somewhere, and Lysander was content to let it go into the cutlery.

Hamish came in from the garden with a wild look in his eye that Lysander had come to associate with plant emergencies. “The basil’s bolting,” he said, as though this constituted breaking news. He washed his hands at the sink, dried them on the tea towel, and opened the fridge.

“No!” Cassian lunged across the kitchen.

Hamish closed the fridge. “Right. The mousse.”

“Four hours, alpha.”

Hamish leaned against the counter and looked at Lysander. Lysander lifted his mug in a sympathetic toast.

By five o’clock, the cottage smelled of the lasagne Lysander had taken charge of. Somebody had to cook an actual meal and Cassian’s contribution to dinner began and ended with the mousse. Hamish had set the table in the small dining room: four places, using the good plates.

Cassian disappeared into his bedroom to get ready, and the sounds that emerged suggested he was trying on everything he owned.

Lysander watched Hamish open the fridge as he cut crusty bread into thick slices at the counter.

Hamish stood there looking at the chocolate mousse. It sat in its bowl, dark and glossy, topped with a lopsided swirl that Cassian had executed with a butter knife.