“I would never have left you on that ship,” I said.
She shook her head. “I mean from Hazlitt’s control.” Holding my hand, she directed it under the hem of her tunic and around to her back, setting it against her scar. “From this.” And with my palm at her back, she used the opportunity to step further between my legs, putting herself closer to me and effectively making my stomach flip. “While you were sleeping, I was sitting there, and I was thinking about how I feel more free now than I ever have in my life.” She wrapped her arms around my neck and touched her forehead to mine. “I’ve been out of sorts for so long, but now I feel as though I can finally start being myself again, and I have you to thank for that.”
“I’d do anything for you,” I said. Closing my eyes, I took a moment to marvel in the sensations of being so near to her. How it felt to be in her arms. What it was like to be surrounded by her scent. She was being so affectionate and open, and it seemed quite clear how she felt about me, but after so many months, I was almost terrified to tell her, “I still love you, Ava.” And in the stillness between us, I felt her heart stutter at hearing that. “More than life.”
Ava leaned back just enough to look at me, and when I opened my eyes and saw the grin on her face, I couldn’t keep my own lips from pulling into a smile. “I still love you too,” she said, and there was nothing else I wanted to do but kiss her.
So I did. I tightened my hold on her back to bring her nearer to me, I met her lips with my own, and I kissed her like it was the last thing I’d ever do. And it wasn’t just deep in the openness of it, or the way her tongue kept gifting my lips with its taste. It was in the way we were both so content not to rush this that it was slow and delicate, allowing me to notice all the things I’d miss if I lost myself completely. Like the way it felt to have my arms circled so perfectly around her waist, or her hips against the insides of my thighs. How it felt to have her heartbeat pulsing in my ears and in my blood, and to feel the heat of her body against the front of me, matching the already exhilarated heat in my cheeks. How it felt to have her fingers stroking the back of my neck and toying with the short hairs at the base of my skull.
It had only been my intention to kiss her for a minute… or two… but now I couldn’t stop. Didn’t ever want to stop, and she seemed just as willing for this to last as long as possible. After a while, she climbed onto the bed, a knee on either side of my hips so she could sit back in my lap. A while after that, I maneuvered us onto the center and lay beneath her, and nothing changed but the amount of unadulterated contentment that was building in my chest.
Though my hands slipped under her tunic, it wasn’t to satiate a lust. It was because there was a time I thought I’d never kiss her even once more, or get to remember what her skin felt like against my fingertips. I’d never allow that to happen again, and so I kissed her for what seemed like hours while my hands drank her in. They ran up and down her back so many times I lost track. Traced the shape of her waist while my thumbs counted her ribs or followed the lines of her hips. Caressed her cheeks and her jaw and her neck. I couldn’t get enough of her.
We kissed so long I felt hypnotized by it, until Ava’s lips curled against mine with a smile. It felt like the kind of smile to preface a laugh, and it pulled me out of my daze and I finally realized just how long we’d been doing this.
Ava stopped kissing me, lifting herself up enough so she could look me in the eyes. “Have you missed me all this time?” she teased.
My cheeks tinted, but now that her mouth was gone, it felt like something was missing. It was such an abrupt end, and I lifted my head to peck her once more. “Perhaps,” I answered. “Is it obvious?”
“A bit,” she said, dropping to kiss me again in return, “not that I’m opposed.” She rolled off of me to lie at my side, and I turned to face her, scooting as close as I could while draping an arm over her waist. For a long few minutes, we just lay there looking at each other, my hand drawing lines on her back and her fingers tracing my jaw. Eventually, she said, “I heard about how you saved me.”
“What did you hear?” I asked.
“That you turned into lightning,” she said with a proud smile, “and traveled three hundred miles and back in hardly three seconds.”
I chuckled, which only made Ava laugh because she’d seen me spark jump, and though it may have looked like I turned into lightning, that wasn’t exactly what happened. And it certainly hadn’t happened that fast. “It appears they like to exaggerate my accomplishments.”
“Apparently,” she agreed. “So you didn’t bring me back from the dead?”
I shrugged self-consciously and said, “…Your heart stopped.” Ava’s eyebrows rose with shock, and she pushed up onto an elbow to see me more clearly. “I started it again.”
“You brought me back from the dead,” she emphasized in complete awe, staring at the bed as if she could hardly process it.
“I wasn’t ready to lose you again,” I said. That look of awe didn’t leave Ava’s eyes as she met my gaze, and she looked so deeply impressed that I felt a bashful heat rise in my cheeks. “I’ve learned to use my magic. It’s making me capable of the greatness you always saw in me.”
She cupped my face, leaning in to kiss me once before settling back into the bed. “It’s not the magic that makes you capable.” I smiled gratefully at that. “Did you use magic to find me?”
“Nobody told you?” I asked. She shook her head, watching me with interest. “Silas… he finally realized he was on the wrong side.”
“Silas?” she repeated, a hard to read emptiness glazing her eyes, and I hummed a confirmation. It took a minute, but when she recovered from that surprised emotion, she looked at me with concern. “How did you take it when he returned?”
“I hit him,” I admitted as my gaze dropped. “Until I couldn’t hit him anymore.”
“Your hand,” she mused, recalling the gash in my knuckles from hitting Silas’s teeth.
“You noticed.” I sighed deeply when she nodded. “I might’ve killed him if he didn’t know where you were.”
Ava scanned my expression, and pursed her lips with a sympathetic smile. “You didn’t kill him,” she said. “Don’t haunt yourself with possibilities.”
I nodded, and we both fell silent to watch each other for another span of minutes. It felt so good just to look her in the eyes, and have her looking back at me. To be near her and comfortable and… safe. That wouldn’t last forever. The world outside my door was still moving, and that safe feeling wouldn’t be permanent until this war was over, but for now this was everything I wanted. And Ava seemed to understand exactly what I was thinking, and to feel exactly how I felt, because her deep blue eyes never left mine, and her face was set with contentment.
I reached up with one hand to cup her cheek, caressing beneath her bottom lip with my thumb. “I did miss you, Ava. More than I could ever express.”
She tilted her head just enough to catch the pad of my thumb with her lips, pressing a kiss to it. “I know,” she said, with a deep understanding that told me she truly did know. She’d felt it too, and though she wouldn’t say it, I knew it had been worse for her. Far worse. I could see it in the sudden distance that darkened her gaze, as if the very reminder had pulled her back.
“Do you want to talk about it?” I asked.
She watched me silently for a few moments, contemplating the question. “Yes,” she answered eventually, “but not yet. I’m not ready.”