Iris didn’t move, spell cast as Roman’s gaze aligned with hers.
“If you had touched me today, Kitt,” she whispered. “I don’t think I could’ve hidden it anymore. Who you are to me. Who I am to you.”
“Like this?” He brushed her knee with his thumb, just beneath her skirt. His touch was soft but possessive, and Iris closed her eyes. “Or this, Iris?” She could feel his fingers caress up her arm and across her shoulder, stopping at the buttons of her blouse.
“Yes.” She tilted her head back when she felt his mouth on her throat.
“Did you think I would let him tell me when and how to touch you?” Roman’s voice was hoarse as he traced her jaw with his lips. “Did you think that I would let him steal this last moment from me? When I would surrender only to you, take you in my hands, and burn with you before the end comes?”
“This is not our last moment,” she said, holding his stare. But she felt the weight of his statement as if it were fate.
She wrapped her legs around his waist, her skirt pooling on the desk. Over the papers and the books, the typewriter glinting as the table shuddered beneath them.
“Write me a story, Kitt,” she whispered, kissing his brow, the hollow of his cheeks. His lips and his throat, until she felt like love was an axe that had cleaved her chest open. Her very heart beating in the air. “Write me a story where you keep me up late every night with your typing, and I hide messages in your pockets for you to find when you’re at work. Write me a story where we first met on a street corner, and I spilled coffee on your expensive trench coat, or when we crossed paths at our favorite bookshop, and I recommended poetry, and you recommended myths. Or that time when the deli got our sandwich orders wrong, or when we ended up sitting next to each other at the ball game, or I dared to take the train west just to see how far I could go, and you just so happened to be there too.”
She swallowed the ache in her throat, leaning back to meet his gaze. Gently, as if he were a dream, she touched his hair. She smoothed the dark tendrils from his brow.
“Write me a story where there is no ending, Kitt. Write to me and fill my empty spaces.”
Roman held her gaze, desperation gleaming in his eyes. An expression flickered over his face, one she had never seen before. It looked like both pleasure and pain, like he was drowning in her and her words. They were iron and salt, a blade and a remedy, and he was taking a final gasp of air.
Please, Iris prayed, drawing him closer. Don’t let this be the end.
But it made their joining all the sweeter, all the sharper, with skin glistening like dew, with breaths ebbing and flowing, their names turned into ragged whispers.
To write the story they both wanted that night.
To think it could be their last.
{45}
A Hundredfold, a Thousandfold
Roman knew he had stayed out too late. He tried not to dwell on the consequences as he walked Iris home, one hand woven with hers, the other holding her jacket-wrapped sword. The streets were emptier than he had anticipated—even the Graveyard kept to their dens that night, as if they sensed the end was near. A slight rumble in the ground coaxed people to draw the curtains, lock the door, and curl up close to the ones they loved.
Iris’s flat came into view just as it began to mist. The lights glimmered like fallen stars, and Roman stopped between streetlamps, in a velvet patch of shadow. But he could still see Iris, faintly. The way the mist gathered, iridescent in her hair. How her eyes shined, and her lips parted as she gazed up at him.
“Do you want to come inside?” she asked. “Forest is there. I’m sure he’d like to say hello.”
Roman shifted, uncomfortable. He had conflicted feelings about Forest, but he didn’t want Iris to know that. The main issue being how he had watched Forest drag her along unknowingly during the bluff attack. How Forest had intentionally run from Roman, separating him from Iris.
And yet after living among Dacre’s forces, disoriented and lonely, carrying wounds that still ached … Roman understood things better. He felt like he had only been looking at life through a periscope before. And now he saw how vast the horizon was. There was also the fact that Roman, in a strange way, felt like he knew Forest, from all of Iris’s letters in the beginning.
“I’m afraid I need to get back,” he said, which was the truth. “But I’d like to see Forest soon. Perhaps we can go to the Riverside Park together?”
The park, which might be demolished by tomorrow evening.
Iris nodded, but Roman could see her swallow. He couldn’t tell if there were tears in her eyes, but he could feel his own sting in warning.