Page 157 of Hush

I close my eyes for one breath, shame and tenderness moving together. “Then we go slow.”

“Yeah,” he whispers, voice laced with fear. “Slow sounds good.”

I kiss him again, and this time I do not rush toward taking. I learn. I return to what he taught me before the Varkhyn tore time apart. Lucas’s hands move down my chest, and I breathe in sharply. He stops at once, the bond flaring with question.

“Good,” I say before worry can root in him. The word is not enough, so I press the feeling through the bond too: good, wanted, loved, overwhelming because his touch still teaches my body that tenderness can be survived.

His mouth tilts faintly, not quite a smile but close. I cover his hand with mine and press it harder to my chest. My heart pounds under our joined palms, too strong, too frightened, too grateful. “Here.”

He bends and kisses the place above it. The tenderness of that small act ruins me. Tears slide down my face again, silent at first. I try to turn my head, but Lucas sees—of course he sees—and makes a soft, scolding sound.

“Don’t hide from me.”

“I am not hiding.”

“You are absolutely hidin’.”

“I am turning slightly.”

“That is hidin’ with extra steps.”

A laugh breaks through the sob in my chest, cracked and helpless. He smiles against my skin, and the bond warms with the pleasure of making me laugh, even as we’re both still wounded enough to bleed from memory. Then his mouth moves higher, to my throat, my jaw, my cheek, kissing the tear tracks there with a care that feels like worship and argument both.

“I love you,” he says between those kisses, the words not dramatic now, not deathbed or divine choice, but quiet and present.

I close my eyes, and another tear slips free. “I love you,” I say back, and the spoken words shake because they are still new and too large. “I loved you before I had the voice to say it. I loved you when you ran. I loved you when you came back. I loved you when you were angry. I loved you when you did not follow the light.”

I let my hands learn him again. He gasps softly, and the sound goes through me, not as triumph, but as relief. His body can still answer. His pleasure still has a voice. His life is not only breath and heartbeat; it is sensation, choice, desire, irritation, laughter, tenderness. It is Lucas shifting in my lap, wincing, cursing softly, then glaring at me before I can worry.

“I’m okay,” he says, and I lift my brows. He sighs. “Okay, I’m not okay, but that was more stiffness than pain, so don’t make your tragic face.”

“I have no tragic face.”

“You have at least four.”

“I have one face.”

“You have one human face and somehow still four tragic versions of it.”

I stare at him. He stares back, exhausted, smug, and alive.

The bond floods with my love so strongly that his teasing expression falters. He feels it because I do not hide it this time. I let him have all of it: the terror in the mine, the horror of his stillness, the first impossible spark when his hand touched my skull again, the gratitude that still kneels in me before Aestrata, the awe that he chose a life with me over peace without pain.

I let him feel the part beneath language, the ancient part, the guardian and the creature and the man he is teaching me to be.

Lucas’s eyes fill. “Damn it,” he whispers. “Warn a guy before you do that.”

“No.”

His laugh trembles. “Asshole.”

“Soft insult?”

“Very soft,” he says, and kisses me before the sob can take either of us.

The kiss deepens slowly, and I follow where he leads. He touches my face when memory makes me tense. I touch the mark on his shoulder when fear makes him drift. Each time, the bond answers. Here. Here. Here.

We are careful with pain and less careful with tenderness. He lets me ease him down into the furs, and for one terrible heartbeat, the sight of him lying beneath me flashes into the image of his lifeless body in my arms.