“This isn’t about Wolfe. Though we need a witness.”
“To what?” I asked, taking a breath.
“Your unholy descent,” he growled into my lips. “To the moment I fucking marry you!”
I gasped, everything hitting me all at once.
“What do you mean,marry you?”
“What about those words don’t you understand?”
Lightning crashed between us.And just like that, Maine’s blue eyes faded into the industrial tint of rain on rust, filling up all the spaces with the gray fury of the Pacific.
“I am not interested in being your boyfriend, Daphne. I want forever or nothing at all.”
“Thay?” I blinked, wondering if this was real.
“But before you take me into your body, Daph, I need to know that you know I am never getting out,” Thay said, pulling the universe taut.
My eyes stretched in the center of his storm, and I couldn’t move.
“Do you understand? You will never save me from this. The things I have done, the man I am. There is no cozy house at the end of the world where I can heal from all this shit. I know that is what you want, what you’ve been waiting for, but it is impossible. The most you will ever get… is me.”
I placed my hand over the pounding of his heart and splayed my fingers around the way he thrashed. He was right; I did dream of a life where nothing would ever take from him again. One that left us alone to play in our shadows.
“That is fine because you are all I ever wanted,” I confessed into the void that made us. There was a sleepy way in which the next words fell from my lips. “You’re enough.”
Thay wanted to fight it, I could sense it in his muscles like a reflex trained to keep my head in the light, but he didn’t. For the first time in our entire lives, he let my words be true. And that is when I knew this was real.
“I remember the very first time I saw you in the window. You were twirling on your mattress in a dumpy tank top two sizes too small for your body, drawing circles in the Seattle light. My father had just come home, gin on his breath and reeking offive-dollar pussy. But instead of hating everything about that moment, I wanted to be in the middle of whatever world you were creating. A place where only you existed.”
“Thay,” my voice cracked.
“Even then, you pulled me in, Daph. I was yours long before I ever worked up the balls to crawl through your window. Knowing you existed was the only time in my life I truly felt safe.”
“And when our spines touched for the very first time,” I said, peering up into the smudged edges of the memory, “was the first time I felt whole. You made me a real person, and in that moment, all of me melded into all of you. I became yours.”
Thay searched for a lie, a crack, or anything he could hold on to, but found nothing.
“So is that a yes?” His jaw twitched when a heated breath hit his lungs. “Are you saying yes to me, Daphne?”
A heartbeat.
A rush of blood.
A slow exhale, leaping from a dying cliff.
“Yes,” I whispered, and before I could pull his mouth to mine, Thay turned, stalking to the door where two black backpacks rested against the wall. Wolfe must have dropped them there, and I hadn’t noticed.
Thay grabbed the one on the left, slinging it over his shoulder before making his way back to me.
“What is that?” I asked, but he did not answer when he took me into his arms and veered toward the bed.
When we entered, Wolfe was where Thay had put him, watching me in reverence as the other half of my soul laid me carefully against the pillows, fluffing them behind my neck just the way I liked them.
“She said yes,” Thay announced, kicking off his boots and dropping his pants to the floor.
“I heard,” Wolfe reclined, leaning back into the chair with Thay’s belt draped across his lap as instructed.