Page 12 of Redline Communion

His eyes are steady on mine, too familiar to hide from and too close to pretend this means nothing. We come close enough together that neither of us gets the clean victory of pretending it happened separately.

Afterward, he holds me.

That is somehow harder than everything before it.

Eventually the urgency burns itself out and leaves us with the much less convenient problem of still being ourselves. Rafe reaches for his shirt and starts cleaning us up.

I stare at him for a second. “What the fuck was that?”

“Sue me,” he says. “I want to feel held for a minute.”

I roll my eyes, then take his hand and pull him back down.

We lie there without speaking, Rafe’s head on my chest, my hand moving down his spine without me telling it to while early evening turns the garage windows gold.

For one stupid, unguarded minute, I let myself believe we fixed something.

“Didn’t solve anything,” Rafe says eventually.

“No.”

“She’s still not talking to you.”

“No.”

“And I’m still gonna keep doing exactly what I was doing when you walked in.”

“I know.”

We’re quiet for a while.

Then he says, softer, “I’m not sorry wanting her out loud comes easier to me. I just wish you’d let yourself have it too instead of standing in doorways doing math on what you think you’re allowed to survive.”

I don’t have anything useful to give him back yet.

Somewhere across the property, Lorelei laughs.

Half of me wants to follow the sound.

The rest stays exactly where it is, with Rafe’s weight against my chest and my hand still moving slowly along his back.

I hold him a little tighter.

Neither of us asks me to explain it.

Chapter three

Built To Obey

Cassian

The words have to sit correctly in the mouth before they mean anything, and Alistair has never once let me forget it.

“Again,” he says. “From the vessel does not choose the altar.”

We are in his study, the room arranged the way it is every year around this time — three chairs, no more, because a fourth would suggest the conversation could be interrupted, and nothing about this conversation is meant to allow for interruption.

Dominic sits to my left, a glass he won’t drink from turning slowly between two fingers. Alistair stands at the window with his back to both of us, an instruction in itself: recite the doctrine to a man who isn’t watching, so the words have to hold without an audience willing to forgive a stumble.