29
AXEL
The room they've given us is something out of a dream Aurora would have had at sixteen.
Stone walls, low ceiling, fireplace already burning when we walk in. The bed is enormous, buried in white linen, positioned so whoever's in it can see straight out the floor-length window to the sky. Which is still moving. Still doing that impossible thing, green and slow, unhurried by anything happening down here.
I stand in the doorway and watch Aurora walk into the room ahead of me.
She turns a full slow circle, taking it in, her coat still on, cheeks still flushed from the cold outside. She looks at the fireplace. The window. The bed.
Then she looks at me.
"You planned all of this," she says.
"Margareta helped."
"Axel."
I don’t know how to take all this love and attention. I look away and scratch the back of my neck. "Viktor sourced the location."
"Axel." She crosses to me, takes my jacket lapel in one hand. "You planned all of this."
I look down at her. Her eyes are still slightly red at the edges from crying on the hill. Her hair is windswept. She has never looked better in her life.
"I wanted to give you something real," I say.
She holds my gaze for a moment, something moving across her face that I feel in my chest before she even acts on it. Then she goes up on her toes and kisses me, soft at first, her free hand coming to my jaw.
I pull her in by the waist.
She makes a small sound against my mouth, and the softness dissolves immediately, her fingers curling into my lapel, her body pressing into mine. I walk her backward toward the bathroom without breaking the kiss, reaching past her to push the door open.
The bathroom is warm, the floor heated, a deep stone bath along one wall, and a shower built into the opposite corner with glass on three sides. I reach past her and turn the shower on, then come back to her.
She's already working the buttons of her coat.
I move her hands away and do it myself.
Her coat falls. Then her sweater, lifted over her head. She shiver-laughs at the air on her skin and reaches for my jacket, shoves it off my shoulders. Her fingers find my shirt buttons, and she works them from the bottom up, deliberate, watching her own hands.
I watch her face.
Mine,I think, the way I always think it. But it lands differently now, heavier and warmer and nothing like possession. More like a declaration of certainty.
She spreads my shirt open and runs both palms flat up my chest, over my shoulders, and pushes it off. Her eyes travel down and then back up, and she bites her lower lip once before she can stop herself.
The rest of our clothes go quickly. No ceremony. Just necessity, both of us already wanting, the air in the bathroom warm and thickening with steam.
I walk her backward into the shower.
The water hits us both, and she gasps, tilting her face up into it immediately, eyes closing, the tension leaving her shoulders in real time. I watch it happen. Watch the cold and the travel and the weight of the last several weeks wash off her incrementally, her breathing slowing, her expression going loose.
I push her hair back from her face.
She opens her eyes.
I kiss her jaw, her neck, just below her ear, taking my time. My hands move down her sides, over the small new curve of her stomach, and I feel her breath change. I press my palm flat there for a moment. Just a moment.