Tears pricked my eyes.
“You want more than I can give you,” I whispered.
“I can’t imagine that ever being true,” he murmured. “Because I want only you, Lilith. Whatever of you I can have. I’ll take one night. One hour. One minute. Whatever you want to give me. I’ll have it.”
My breath was ragged, choppy. It burned in my chest with all the emotion I realized I could no longer smother.
I had never been enough.
I had never been able to give any of them enough—enough time, enough love. Everyone gave up so much trying to get more from me, and now I did the same for them. From the moment I was old enough to understand my eventual fate, I made every decision knowing this. Knowing that I couldn’t be enough. Knowing that I would wither too fast, like a flower in an early frost.
I didn’t realize how much I had liked that Vale didn’t see that in me until this moment, when I knew that it had to end.
“I’m dying,” I choked out.
I didn’t know why I said it. It didn’t really matter, now, when he was leaving and the gods were damning us and the whole world seemed to be ending.
“I’ve been sick my entire life. Every year I don’t know if it’s the last. I’ve been leaving this world since I was brought into it. No one wants to believe it, but it’s the truth. It always has been. I’m—I can’t stay.”
You’re asking for more than I can give.
His hands had come up to my face. He held me firmly, so I couldn’t look away from him.
I could always see the moment things changed, once they knew—the moment they started grieving me while I was still alive, the moment me standing in front of them stopped being enough.
But his gaze was firm.
“Whatever you wish to give me,” he repeated, slowly, like he wanted to make sure I understood. “I’ll have it.”
I didn’t know that I had been waiting my entire life to hear those words until now.
I wasn’t accustomed to goodbyes. I never thought I would need to be the one to say them. It’s so much easier to be the one who leaves first.
I could leave now and spare myself a goodbye I wasn’t ready for.
But instead, I put my hands on either side of Vale’s face, a mirror of how he held me.
I pulled him close, and I kissed him.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
I wasn’t sure why I had expected the kiss to be fierce and animalistic, but that first one was quiet, gentle. Sweet.
Vale’s lips were softer than I thought they’d be. His beard tickled my chin. At first, he just brushed his mouth over mine, like he wanted to start by knowing the shape of it, knowing the way I tasted.
Then, his lips parted, the kiss deepening, the touch of his tongue—shockingly shy—meeting mine. My head was cloudy and fuzzy in a way that had nothing to do with my exhaustion.
A serrated breath ghosted over my lips—and that, that one little sign of the intensity of his desire, lit something on fire inside me. Suddenly Vale’s closeness, the warmth of his bare skin, the taste of him, the smell of him, overwhelmed me.
A tiny, wordless sound escaped my throat, and I kissed him back this time. Harder. Deeper.
He met my fervor with enough enthusiasm to leave me breathless.
He held my face firmly, his tongue exploring my mouth, each kiss bleeding into the other. Gods, I had never kissed anyone like this—each movement so intuitive. I never had to stop and guess what he wanted. It was the kind of ease I thought other people must always feel.
One of his hands moved to the back of my head, tangling in my hair. The other wandered down to my waist, his thumb slipping between the buttons of my shirt, brushing my bare skin. That one touch made me gasp.
His tongue rolled against mine, then he withdrew. In my fervor, we’d both fallen back onto the bed.
Everything was hazy, distant.
“You’re injured,” I said softly.
His chuckle was low and thick. “Incredible how much better I already feel.”
But his smile faded, and he gave me a long stare—and I knew what this wordless silence meant, the question he was asking.
I parted my thighs, opening myself to the rigid press of his desire between us.
His eyes darkened, the desire in them so sharp it cut me open, and it occurred to me that maybe I should be afraid—that maybe the hunger I was seeing in Vale’s expression, feeling in the way he held me to the bed, was about more than sex.
I wasn’t, though. No, the fear came from somewhere else. Not from Vale’s roughness, but his tenderness.
He smoothed a strand of hair from my forehead.
“You’re shaking, mouse.”
I slid my fingertips beneath the waistband of his trousers, a light touch over the flesh of his abdomen—soft skin, hard muscle, trembling faintly.
“So are you.”
My voice was rough, low. Vale lowered his head a little when I spoke, like he wanted to feel the words over his lips—stopping just shy of meeting them.
Neither of us moved. Not meeting that almost kiss, not pulling away, our hands both at the buttons of each other’s clothing but not unbuttoning them.
I watched Vale’s face, the panes of his features outlined in blue-silver licks of light that reminded me of the outlines of the roses I gave him. Even with the wounds remaining, he reminded me of a statue—a work of living art, carved from stone, subject to none of the atrocities of time or nature. He was eternity while I was impermanence—a being that embraced the mysteries I spent my entire life stifled by.
How could a being look so similar to a human and yet so stunningly different?
And yet…
Yet…
The corner of his mouth tightened. It should have been a smile, but the expression was so sad it gutted me.
“I always wondered what you were thinking,” he murmured. “When you look at me like that.”
“Like what?”
“Like I’m a formula to be solved, and you’re very intrigued about the answer.”
At this, I couldn’t help but smile. “Intriguing is the word.”
A wrinkle formed between his brows. “An acceptable one?”
The question struck me hard—struck me because I wasn’t prepared for it, for him to ask it that way, shy and tentative.
Like the answer meant something to him. Like the answer meant everything to him.
“Yes,” I said. “It’s remarkable.”
I could never solve Vale and his many mysteries, but I loved them all the same. And in these complexities, I saw a mirror held up to all the things that did not make sense within myself.
For the first time, I saw beauty in all the things I did not understand. And I knew that Vale saw beauty in all those things within me, too.
I slipped my palm up his abdomen and relished the way his muscles twitched beneath my touch.
“I’d like you to kiss me again,” I said. “And I’d like these clothes off.”
“Hmm.” He hummed feigned reluctance against my mouth, but only for a moment, because it was quickly swallowed by his next kiss—and this one was brutal, hard, demanding. He kissed me like we didn’t have any time. Like he was mortal.
His hand slid up my shirt, large palm flattening over my stomach, as if not sure whether he wanted to go up or down—gods, I wasn’t sure where I wanted him to be, either. I wanted both, and quickly.