Chapter 738: Aggrieved Party
"Master. She thinks you can do this."
"Yes, she does."
"She is going to ask you to do this again, in approximately the third week of next month, and I will make myself technically, off-rotation."
"And you will be there for me, right?"
"I will be there, master, because you will be the one who promised it, and I will be the one who actually performs the labour while you stand around looking unstoppably godlike."
"Eira."
"Um?"
"This is a beautiful partnership."
"This is a contract negotiation, master, and you are losing."
He kissed Roxanne then — not with the weight of conquest, but with the easy, unhurried delight. The kiss made her laugh against his mouth, a bright, startled sound that vibrated pleasantly through both of them, and he ignored his fairy with the practiced ease and habit and every intention of continuing the tradition.
He cupped Roxanne’s jaw with one hand and brushed his thumb along the gentle curve of her cheekbone.
He watched her eyes close at the touch with that small, grateful trust that had become one of his favourite sights in the world — she had spent the whole of yesterday and the whole of this morning simply waiting for exactly this hand to arrive on exactly this face, and the knowledge settled in his chest like warm sunlight.
"You look good," he said softly.
"I feel good."
"You sure?"
"I do, my love. I really do."
He kissed her again.
It was not, at first, a hungry kiss. It was the kiss of seventeen withheld hours — slow, unhurried, his mouth finding hers with patient reverence, as though he were confirming something he already knew and simply enjoyed confirming.
Her lips parted under his with practiced sweetness, her hands moving from his neck up into his hair.
She made a small sound against his mouth — half relief, half pleasure, half the quiet, private sound like she had been counting the hours in silence and have finally, finally stopped counting — and he felt it travel down his sternum and settle warm and light in his chest.
The second kiss was different.
She bit, lightly, at his lower lip — a small, playful claim — and his hand on her jaw slid back into her hair and tightened just enough to feel the silk of it between his fingers. Her body arched into his with long, unhurried delight, two days of thinking about him poured deliberately into the press of her against his shirt.
There was carefreeness in it, a bright, laughing quality, as though the two of them had quietly agreed that joy itself could be a kind of defiance.
He pulled back just far enough to breathe.
"You are," he murmured, his mouth still grazing hers, "entirely unsupervised in this apartment. Anything could happen."
"You’re the one who came through a portal at noon," she answered, eyes sparkling. "I am the aggrieved party here."
"I’m just visiting."
"You have intentions, Phei Ryujin Tiamat, and we both know it."
"I have twenty minutes."
She laughed against his mouth again — real laughter that slowly rose from her diaphragm and shook her whole frame against him, light and unafraid.
He kissed her once more, and they did not, by tacit unbroken agreement, mention any of what had transpired yesterday.
Not Jonathan, the bedroom on the day of the rescue, the bruises she no longer carried, the unbroken twelve years she had spent before that bedroom.
He could still see the moment where she had clawed her way backward across the bed thinking he was her husband returning and the everything that happened until the moments when the underbreast Mark that had, on the moment he placed it, broken something open in his cosmic architecture neither of them had fully understood.
They never did not mention any of those.
It was a discipline they had settled into without conversation to decide to not mention it — it was exactly the way some couples, by mutual instinct, decide that certain rooms in the house of their relationship will simply remain unentered.
Roxanne’s past until yesterday was not closed because she was hiding from it. It was closed because she had moved out of it and the woman in his arms was the woman she had become after.
The man holding her was the man she had chosen after.
The room they were standing in was a room after, anything before that door was a country that no longer issued passports.
He had learned, very quickly, that pity disguised as concern was the one thing she would not tolerate from him.
And she had learned, very quickly, that he would never offer it.
Pity was in the end, worse than anything she could tolerate, and Phei had never been one to pity others, he knew how bad that was. Being helped out of pity and he’d never done such a thing to anyone, never will!
What they offered each other instead was this — the greeting at full run, the kiss with laughter still lingering at its edges, the cream slip dress and the warm Paradise light and the kettle settling somewhere out of frame and the small, flushed cheeks and the unhurried way she moved against him.
The romance was exaggerated in its theatre on purpose — every glance pitched a little higher, every touch held a beat longer, every endearment delivered with the small, theatrical reverence of two people who had decided to live, very deliberately, in the present tense.
Eira, who had perched herself silently and invisibly on the windowsill the moment Phei arrived — her crystalline form folded into the seam between visible and unseen, her presence registering to no eye in this apartment but his — rolled her eyes so hard that Phei felt the eye-roll travel through their bond like a small, fastidious earthquake.
"Master."
"Stop calling me, you’re ruining my moments."
"The portal," she said pleasantly, in his head, "remains open. The clock is ticking and your training schedule is not going to be extended."
"I know."
"Acknowledgement is not a synonym for moving toward the portal, master."
"I am savouring the moment, you romance-killer."
"You are renegotiating the moment, master, and the moment is expensive."
He smiled, very slightly, against Roxanne’s hair — a smile she registered as affection, a smile his fairy registered as the specific unrepentant smugness of a master who knew his fairy was footing the cosmic energy bill and did not, at this exact instant, particularly care.
Roxanne returned her attention to him. Her hands slid from his hair down to his shoulders. Her dark eyes, still flushed and bright, took on a small, wicked tilt.
"So you’re going to stay or...?"
"I have to go. For now. I have some training to do, love."
"You came across a frost portal seven hundred miles in the middle of training?"
"Mm-hm. Romantic, ain’t it?"
"Narcissist." She laughed with a small punch on his chest.
"So, answer me... did you come here," she said, with the careful elegant, setting up a punchline she had been rehearsing for the last ninety seconds, "for me when you’re hungry. Or did you come here fully satisfied by your other women, and require an audience to admire you in your post-coital glow?"
Phei’s mouth curved.
"That is a deeply uncharitable read of my motives."
"Is it."
"I came here for you, Roxanne."
"How much of you came for me?"
"All of me."
"Phei."
"All available square footage."
"I notice you said available."
"I am a finite resource."
"Oh, you are not."
"Excuse me?"
