He didn’t respond with words, only tilted my head further up with his fingers and kissed me again. Softly. Sweetly.
Then he untangled our limbs so he could cuddle me properly on his chest. It was the only thing I was willing to loosen my grip on him for.
His heart beat a steady drum-like rhythm beneath my ear and I sighed with happiness. My eyelids drooped. A strong sense of safety wrapped around me and I allowed myself to close my eyes completely, even though I wasn’t ready to go to sleep just yet.
“I want this moment to last forever,” I said, like some sort of cliché in one of Bella’s romance novels. “Is there some sort of Fae magic you can weave to just stop time?”
He kissed the top of my head and stroked my hair. “That would be a great solution.”
We lay there for long moments, the only sounds in the air our breathing and sighs. He hadn’t answered my question about stopping time, which I understood. It was probably too intense a subject to bring up so early in our relationship anyway.
But I couldn’t help feeling disappointed, so I decided the best course of action would be to change the subject.
I propped myself up on my arm, determined to learn more about him. “Would you live in a Fae realm forever? If you could, I mean,” I asked, tilting my head to the side and pulling my hair over my shoulder. The sweat that had accumulated was doing its best to keep my hair matted together, leaving me hot and bothered and not in the good sense.
He frowned at me. “What do you mean, if I could?”
I stared at him, confused. Was he saying that was an option?
“Hang on. Are you telling me you choose to work for the warlocks, and are deliberately staying in the magical realm when you could live and work with the Fae?” I asked. I didn’t see how that was possible. “Why would anyone choose this realm over Faerie? I mean... the Fae realm is so beautiful.”
He shrugged, glancing
away. “This is my home.”
Again, it wasn’t an actual answer.
“But...” that doesn’t make sense! I took a breath and forced myself to slow down. To understand. “Explain it to me.”
He sighed. “You don’t need to ask me about my past, Ava,” he said, staring up at the ceiling. “It’s fine, it’s done.”
I squeezed his arm. “I want to know everything. Tell me.”
He finally met my gaze, his eyes shadowed with doubt and worry. “How much do you know about me already? I’m sure Mallory must have told you something.”
I nodded. No point lying. “She did. She said your mother was a witch, your father was a Fae. That your mother died at birth and you were raised by your aunt. A Council member... I think. Or something like that.”
Which was pretty much all I knew.
“That’s it?”
I grinned. “That and the fact that everyone thinks you’re super scary.”
“Because I’m an abomination,” Tavlor finished for me.
I propped myself up further next to him and whacked him on the arm. “You’re not! You’re a miracle! And the best combination of two people who are insanely powerful. If you were ever told those things as a child it was because the Council wanted to control you, make you think that you were inferior. And you know why they did that?”
He shook his head. “Tell me.”
I smiled. “Because you’re smarter, and more powerful than all of them. They’re jealous as anything, and why wouldn’t they be? You’ll live three times as long as them, and have more knowledge, and more power.” Stupid idiots. “They should have been nicer to you, because now we’re gonna beat them, and I certainly don’t feel sorry for them.”
Tavlor was nodding, but I realized in that moment that I was doing all the talking and that wasn’t going to help me find out more about him. I needed to take a breath and do some listening if I was going to understand him, if I was going to truly know who he was.
“Sorry, you were going to tell me about you, about your past, and I’m butting in,” I said quickly, my cheeks pinching a red color across my skin.
I always did this. In my house, between my sisters and my mother, it was jump in, or cease to exist.
“It’s fine... you’ve got the idea.”