Elooo @eloeloeheheh - Tumblr Blog

Aug 13

The Theory of Blooming

Azriel x Elain - Fanfiction | ACOTAR | University AU AO3 | Masterlist Moodboard by @recklessromantic for Chapter: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12

Chapter thirteen - Her Kindness

The ceiling of the guest room was not interesting, yet Elain couldn’t stop looking at it.

It was almost midnight. They had gotten back to the city hours ago, and since then she had done everything a functioning person did. Bag carried in. Goodnight said to Feyre in the hallway. Teeth brushed. Mister Fern watered out of pure muscle memory. And then her body had simply stopped, and she had been lying on her bed since.

Elain Archeron to Wed Lucien Vanserra.

The headline was there when she closed her eyes and still there when she opened them, printed faintly across the perfect white ceiling. Her own name, set inside a stranger's sentence, published to the world while she had been sitting in a mountain lodge holding hands in secret with somebody else entirely.

Her phone lay face down on the nightstand where she had exiled it. Even silenced, she could feel it in the room. Nuala and Cerridwen first, their messages stacking into careful little towers. Then the group chat for her year, where forty people who had never spoken to her had opinions about her wedding. Then, unbelievably, the dorm group chat, where someone had asked whether there would be a bachelorette party.

Her father had not answered. Feyre had called him three times from the lodge. Elain had tried later, alone, rehearsing what she would say and abandoning every version, and it had rung through to voicemail anyway, and she had hung up without a word. On the drive back Cassian had offered to turn the van around and go ask her father to his face, and Nesta had ended the discussion in one flat word. Later.

It made no sense. She had agreed to nothing, I'll think about meeting them, and her father had driven a wedding through the gap. There was nothing real between her and a man she had never met.

On paper, in print, to everyone who had read it, she belonged to Lucien Vanserra, and so every time she thought about Azriel, about his hands, about the low certain voice saying you are everything I want and more than I knew to want, something in her flinched like a girl caught doing something illicit.

Which was how she had ended up doing the thing that sat heaviest on her chest, heavier than the article, heavier than her father's silence.

She had shut Azriel out.

It had happened at the cabin, an hour after the room finally emptied of noise. She had gone up to her room and sat on the edge of the bed, and then the knock had come, soft, two knuckles, twice.

He had been standing in the dim hallway with his hands loose at his sides and his face completely open.

"Can I come in?" he had asked. Nothing else. Four words, and the whole of him behind them.

And she had looked away. Her eyes had simply refused him, sliding off his face to the doorframe beside his shoulder, and she had heard herself say, in a small even voice she hated on arrival, "I think it's probably better if I'm alone for now."

She had felt the wall going up while she said it. That was the part she could not forgive. Brick by brick, built by her own hands, and she had watched herself lay every one and had not been able to stop, because standing close to him with her name in every paper had felt suddenly, obscenely wrong, like laughing at a funeral.

Azriel had not argued. He had stood there one moment longer, and she had seen, from the corner of her downturned eyes, his hands curl slightly at his sides and release, a reach that never happened.

"Okay," he had said, gently. "I'm next door if you need anything. Any hour."

——

The phone rang.

Elain was moving before her brain caught up, because there was only one person who would call at midnight.

It's Dad.

She lunged, snatched the phone up, and froze with her thumb over the screen.

Azriel.

His name sat there glowing in the dark, patient and impossible. She stared at it through two full rings while her stomach dropped straight through the mattress. Three minutes past midnight. Did something happen?

Her heart forgot the shape of its own rhythm.

"Hello?"

"Take your jacket and come down."

No greeting. His voice was low and awake, and behind it, faintly, air was moving. He was outside.

She pulled the phone from her ear, checked the time as though it might have changed, put it back. "Azriel. It's midnight."

"I know what time it is."

"It's midnight."

"So?" A pause, and she heard his mouth change shape around the next words, heard the smile arrive before it landed. "Are you not allowed out after dark? Does Rhysand set a curfew for you? Should I have submitted a written request?"

The laugh got out of her before she could stop it, small and cracked from disuse, the first one in what felt like ages. She pressed her fingers over her mouth as if to catch it and put it back.

"Is everything okay?"

"Just come down. Wear something warm."

"Azriel."

"Elain." Her name in his mouth was gentle and completely immovable, and then his voice dropped into the register that had been undoing her since December. "I respect it when a woman says no. Always. You know that about me. But tonight I'm not accepting one from you."

Silence went down the line while she lay in her bed with her heart going like a bird against glass, and she realized she was smiling. Actually smiling, alone in the dark, in the middle of the worst day of her life. A lot of worst days lately.

"Fine," she said.

"Five minutes."

He was gone. Elain lay still for exactly one second, and then she was up, and the next four minutes were a blur of graceless whispered chaos. Her warmest jeans dragged on under the sleep shirt, the shirt swapped for a thermal and the cream sweater, one sock on while hopping, hair raked back and then forward and then back again. Coat. She caught herself in the mirror for half a breath, wild-eyed and flushed and treacherously alive, and decided not to examine that at all.

The hallway was dark. At the far end, no light under Feyre and Rhysand's door. The front door closed millimeter by millimeter, the lock catching with a click that sounded like a gunshot to her and like nothing at all to the sleeping apartment, and she rode floors down grinning nervously at her own reflection in the brushed steel.

The glass doors slid apart, and the cold hit her like a clean slap, and Elain stopped walking.

Because there, at the curb, under the pooled gold of the streetlamp, was Azriel.

On a motorcycle.

Her body ended mid-stride. She stood on the frozen pavement and looked, because there was nothing else a person could reasonably be expected to do.

The bike was black. Deeply, seriously black, matte in the shadows and liquid where the lamplight ran along the tank, low and sculpted and mean in a way that suggested it cost more than her entire education. It sat under him like something obedient. And Azriel sat on it the way he leaned on doorframes, the way he did everything, with that unhurried ease, black leather across his shoulders, a helmet on his head and a second one balanced against his hip.

He reached up with two fingers and flicked his visor open.

Hazel eyes found her across the pavement, catching the light, and even with the rest of his face hidden she could see the smile living in them, warm and pleased and utterly shameless.

"Do you want to ride?"

Her heart was beating in her ears and her wrists and the soles of her feet. She crossed the pavement slowly.

"Are you for real?"

"Yes."

"You told me you don't ride in winter." She stopped an arm's length away, hugging her elbows.

"I did say that." His eyes crinkled at the corners and her stomach went over a hill. "The roads are dry, they salted the whole boulevard, and I checked the forecast. And tonight a ride is the best thing we can do. I thought about it for a long time and it beat every other option."

"What were the other options?"

"Standing under your window."

Her laugh came out again, unguarded, fogging silver in the freezing air, and something in his eyes deepened at the sound of it, as though he had crossed a city at midnight for exactly that.

Elain looked at the bike. The bike looked back, gleaming and patient and terrifying.

"I've never been on one," she admitted.

"I know." He said it simply, as though he had already thought of it, because of course he had. Then his voice curved, low and warm through the open visor. "There are going to be a lot of firsts you experience with me, Elain. Get used to it."

Heat flooded her face so fast the winter lost the fight entirely. She was blushing at midnight, in the dark, in the cold, and by the glint in his eyes he could see every degree of it, and worse, he was enjoying it.

He held out his hand.

She put hers into it. His gloved fingers closed around her cold ones and drew her in, unhurried and sure, until she was standing close enough to feel the faint heat of the engine and the much better heat of him, and then he lifted the second helmet and settled it down over her head. The world went close and padded. Through the open rectangle of the visor she blinked up at him, and she was aware, in excruciating detail, of exactly what he was seeing. Nothing of her at all except her eyes, brown and enormous and startled, staring out of a helmet slightly too big.

Azriel went quiet, looking down at her.

"There they are," he said softly. "The prettiest eyes in this whole city."

And then, before she could produce a single sound in response, he reached out and flicked her visor gently shut, closing her in with her own scarlet face, and turned to swing his leg over the bike.

He settled and looked back over his shoulder. "Get on. Left foot on the peg, hand on my shoulder, swing over. I've got the bike. It won't move."

Somehow her body did all of it, and then she was sitting behind him on a motorcycle with her thighs bracketing his hips and the seat tipping her forward. Azriel reached back with both hands, found her wrists where they hovered uncertainly at his sides, and drew her arms around his waist, folding her hands together over the hard flat plane of his stomach and pressing them there with his own.

"Hold on tight," he said. "Tighter than you think you need to. I want to feel you the whole time. If you want me to slow down or stop, squeeze twice."

"Okay," she whispered, muffled and about an octave too high.

"Good."

She had exactly zero seconds to survive that, because then the engine woke.

It did not start so much as detonate, a deep growl rolling up through the frame and the seat and directly into her bones, and Elain made a sound inside her helmet that no one would ever hear and pressed herself flat against his back, and she felt him laugh, the vibration of it arriving through his spine into her chest.

And then they moved.

The first pull of acceleration took the breath clean out of her. The world slid, then poured. The streetlamp gone, the curb unspooling into a river of black asphalt, her arms clamping around him with everything they had, her heart going off like a flock of birds, and somewhere in the very center of the terror, small at first and then not small at all, something else lit up.

Joy.

The cold poured over her and she should have been freezing, and instead she was burning, pressed along the whole length of his back with the heat of him soaking through leather and coat and arriving somewhere beneath her ribs.

He rode the way he did everything else. She noticed it within three streets and then could not stop noticing it. No showing off, no lurching, nothing designed to frighten her. The bike leaned into corners in long smooth arcs and flowed through the empty intersections, and under her hands his body shifted with the machine in small constant adjustments, calm and precise and completely in control, and it was the most attractive thing she had ever watched a human being do.

She was glad, savagely glad, for the helmet. Some things a face should be allowed to do in private.

They caught a red light on the empty boulevard and the bike purred down to an idle, and Elain, drunk on the wind and entirely out of her mind, did something with her hands.

She pinched him. Not hard. A small deliberate pinch where her fingers were folded against his stomach, right at the flat muscle below his ribs, purely to find out what would happen.

Azriel's whole body went taut. His head turned a fraction, incredulous, and then one glove came off the handlebar and closed over her hands, trapping them, and squeezed once. Firmly. A warning delivered without a single word. She felt him shaking, and only when she leaned to see his mirror did she catch the crease at the corner of his eye behind the visor, and realized he was laughing.

He kept her hands there. His thumb ran once over her knuckles. The light went green and he had to let go to ride, and she felt the loss of it in her chest.

The cold sang past her. He took a long curve along the river with the lights of the far bank smeared across the black water like spilled gold, and she pressed her cheek between his shoulder blades and thought, with the whole of herself, that she had never been anywhere this beautiful in her life.

——

The bike slowed at last along a quiet stretch of embankment and stopped in front of a convenience store that glowed against the dark.

Azriel cut the engine. The silence afterward was enormous. Elain sat with her arms still around him and her whole body humming with leftover velocity, and she did not want to be the one to let go, and so she didn't, until he patted her joined hands once and she had to.

She climbed down on legs that had apparently been replaced during the ride. He steadied her at the elbow without being asked, easy and automatic, and swung off after her, and they pulled their helmets off at the same time.

The cold poured over her scalp. Her hair came loose around her face in a state she chose not to think about. And Azriel raked one hand back through his own flattened hair, which promptly rearranged itself into something better, because of course it did, and Elain stood there in the dark holding a helmet in both arms and looked at him for slightly too long.

He was, she thought helplessly, the most beautiful male she had ever seen in her life.

It was not even a matter of opinion at this point. It was a fact she had been quietly collecting evidence for since a birthday party in December and before, and here in the wash of the store light the evidence was overwhelming. The dark hair falling into his eyes. The severe line of his jaw and the shadow along it. The mouth that gave away nothing and did all its work at the corners. The leather across his shoulders and the width of him and the graceful way he moved, unhurried, taking up space. And his eyes above all of it, hazel gone almost gold at the edges under the light, watching her with an attention nobody had ever paid her before.

She wanted, with an urgency that alarmed her, to put both hands into that hair. To just reach up and do it, to feel it slip between her fingers, to hold the back of his head and pull his face down to hers on a freezing pavement outside a convenience store at one in the morning.

She was still holding her helmet against her chest like a shield when she realized he was looking back.

And Azriel, who had spent months being the most composed person in every room he entered, dropped his eyes from hers, and looked away toward the river.

Elain's stomach performed a full inversion.

Something enormous and giddy went off in her chest.

"What," he said, catching her staring.

"Nothing." She hugged the helmet. "Nothing at all."

"Hm," said Azriel, and hung both helmets on the bars, and held the store door open for her, and she walked past him close enough to feel the warmth come off his chest and had to remind herself, actively, that walking was a thing she knew how to do.

Inside, the light was flat and white and smelled of coffee and instant noodles. A bored teenager glanced up from behind the counter, took in two people at one in the morning, and returned to his phone, profoundly indifferent. Azriel moved through the aisles, and came to the counter with two drinks and a small armful of snacks, among which Elain spotted, a packet of honey-roasted almonds.

"Let's sit by the river," he said, and handed her her drink. Banana milk.

A single bench faced the water with its back to the sleeping city. The river moved past below them, wide and black and quilted with light, the far bank's reflections trembling in long columns of gold and red. There was nobody else in the world.

"I've never been at the river this late," she said, settling beside him, close enough that their arms touched through two coats and she could feel every millimeter of the contact like a live wire.

"I told you." He tore the almonds open and held the packet out. "There are going to be a lot of firsts with me. You keep collecting them."

She took one almond and smiled at him, soft and helpless, and he held her eyes for a second and looked at the water, and Elain thought, dizzily, again, and had to drink her banana milk to hide her face.

"Are you cold?" he asked.

She considered the question honestly, which was her first mistake. "It's strange," she said. "I should be. It's freezing, it's the middle of the night. And I'm not. With you I feel really warm. Like the cold can't quite reach me."

"Wrong answer."

Elain turned her head. He was looking out at the river, entirely serious, drinking his cold brew.

"Why is that the wrong answer?"

"You're supposed to say you're cold," he said, with a small sigh, weary and professorial, as though a promising student had just failed an easy exam. "That's how this works. You say you're cold. It's basic."

A giggle escaped her. "And what happens if I say I'm cold?"

"Nothing. Now the spark is gone. You ruined it with your sincerity."

"I'm so sorry. Can I try again? I'm cold, Azriel. I'm so terribly cold."

"It's too late."

"I'm shivering. Look at me. I've never been colder in my life."

"The moment has passed."

And then his arm came up anyway and settled around her shoulders, heavy and warm and certain, gathering her into his side. "For the record, you were supposed to say you were cold, and then I would have warmed you up, and then you would have fallen in love with me. That was the plan. It was a good plan."

Elain fit herself against him, her cheek finding the cold leather at his shoulder, and did not trust herself to answer, because what she wanted to say was I already did, I did it weeks ago, I've been doing it since December, and there were limits to how much of herself she was willing to hand over in one night.

"You're really talkative tonight," she said instead.

"Am I?"

"Yes. I like it."

He was silent a moment, and she felt his thumb move absently against her shoulder. "I like talking with you," he said. "It's easy. It's never been easy for me with almost anyone. With you it just is."

Elain felt her heart start beating faster again. Whatever he said or did made her feel this way.

"I'll be honest," Azriel said into it. "I'm experiencing a first with you too."

She tipped her head back to look at him. "What?"

"This whole situation. The Vanserras." He said the name evenly, watching the water. "I've never been anywhere near anything like it. It's a first."

The warmth in her chest cooled a degree.

"I know," she said. "And it's going to get louder and messier, and I completely understand if you don't want to be involved in something like that. Nobody sane would. I wouldn't blame you for a second if you—"

"Elain." He set his drink down on the bench, and something in the movement stopped her. "I don't give a shit about the articles."

She blinked.

"I don't care what they say, I don't care what your father is doing, and I don't care about the entire Vanserra family, individually or as a group." Each clause went down flat and calm, cut stone on cut stone. "None of it changes anything about what I want. The only thing in this whole situation that could actually hurt me is you deciding to cut me off because of it. That's it."

Elain breathed out, and it shook on the way.

"It isn't about you," she said quietly. "That's what I keep trying to explain to myself. It just feels so wrong. I'm engaged, Azriel. On paper, since yesterday. And I'm sitting at a river at one in the morning with another man's arm around me, and if one person with a phone walked past, it would become a thing. The Archeron girl, promised to one man and sneaking around with another. I don't care about people, I stopped being able to afford that a long time ago. But everyone would talk about me. Everyone already is. And it would get uglier for you, and I keep feeling like the wrongness of it is mine to manage."

He listened to all of it without once loosening his arm.

"I thought we'd agreed to keep this secret," he said when she finished. "In a bathroom, if I remember correctly, before any Vanserra was in the picture. The plan doesn't change. It just got more important."

"You still want that? Even now? With all of this?"

"Elain." He turned to face her fully, and the light off the water found his eyes, and there was nothing guarded in them at all. "I've never wanted anything more than I want this. Right now. Exactly as it is."

Her heart did something acrobatic and unlicensed.

"Since we're being honest," he went on, quieter, "you should have the rest of it. I never planned for any of this to happen between us. I tried to stay away from you." He looked down at his own hands, at the scars crossing them, silver in the low light. "You look at me and I think you see somebody better than what's actually there. My life is in a worse state than you can imagine. There are parts of it I keep away from everyone, and I promised myself I wasn't going to pull you into any of it. You were the one thing I looked at that had nothing to do with the rest of my life. I wanted to keep it that way." His jaw worked once. "And then you happened anyway. You have me completely. I couldn't let go of you now if I tried, and I'm not going to try."

Elain sat very still inside the enormous thing he had just handed her.

"Pull me into what, exactly?"

"I can't talk about it right now." It came without hesitation and without coldness, a door closed gently rather than slammed. "Maybe not for a long time. Honestly, I hope there's never a situation where I have to explain all of it. I hope you get the version of me that never needs explaining." One corner of his mouth moved without much humor in it. "My life sucks, Elain. It isn't clean and it isn't pretty and it never has been. That's the confession. I wanted you to hear it from me before you got any deeper."

Quiet settled on the bench.

She thought about what Mor had told her, and how carefully she had carried those sentences ever since, and here he was giving her himself, in his own scarce words, and she understood exactly what it was costing him.

"Well," she said. "My life sucks too."

A short surprised exhale came out of him, almost a laugh.

"I'm serious. My mother is dead, my father sold my name to a technology company, my childhood home has a for-sale sign on it, my garden is leverage, I found out about my own engagement from a push notification, and strangers are planning my bachelorette party." She lifted her chin. "Don't come to me with your amateur suffering."

He laughed then, properly, low and warm through his whole side, and something that had been wound tight in him all evening loosened visibly.

"I'm afraid I'll destroy you," he said when the laugh had gone. He said it to the river, plainly, the way he said his largest things. "That's the actual fear underneath all of it. You're the gentlest thing that has ever walked into my life, and everything I come from is the opposite of gentle, and I'm afraid that if I hold on to you the way I want to, some of it gets on you."

Elain looked at him a long moment, and then out at the water.

"You know what I study," she said. "Growing things. So let me tell you something you apparently don't know, as somebody with a formal education in the matter." She turned back. "Flowers grow out of mud, Azriel. That's where they grow. It's the only place they grow. Nothing has ever bloomed out of clean marble in the history of the world. So you can stop apologizing."

He stared at her.

For three full seconds he simply stared, and she watched the sentence go in behind his eyes and keep going down, and then he looked away at the river and blinked more than the wind strictly required, and Elain pretended, kindly, not to see it, and drank her banana milk, and let him have the moment.

"So," she said, when enough time had passed, because the question had been sitting in her throat for an hour, "what is this called? This. Between us. Does it have a name?"

"What do you want to call it?"

"I asked you first."

"And I'm asking you back."

She looked at the river. Her pulse was in her fingertips and the roots of her hair, and she was old enough and it should not have been this terrifying to say one small word to a man who had crossed a city at midnight for her, and it was exactly this terrifying.

"Am I," she began, and had to start again. "Am I your girlfriend?"

The smile arrived slowly, spreading through his face like warmth through water, and reached his eyes and kept going.

"My secret girlfriend," Azriel said. "We're Mister Fern's parents, after all. It was time we made it official. For the child."

The laugh burst out of her and the blush came with it and she surrendered to both. Rising up, she pressed a kiss to his cheek, warm against cold-roughened skin, and stayed close and said it against his jaw.

"My secret boyfriend."

His hand came up, tucking a strand of escaped hair behind her ear, and then his fingers stayed at the side of her face, and he looked at her from very close with the whole dark river reflected somewhere in his eyes.

"Whatever these articles say," he whispered. "Whatever people say. I will always protect you and I will always stand by your side. Always."

Elain softened from the center outward, every wall she had built in the last hours coming down at once, quietly, like snow sliding off a warm roof.

And the he leaned in and kissed the tip of her nose.

The giggle got out before she had any say in it, and she gave up the last of her dignity and tucked herself into his chest, and his arm folded her in, and they sat wrapped together on a freezing bench as though it were the only furniture on earth.

"I can't believe I was on a motorcycle," she said into his jacket. "Me. At midnight. It felt so good, actually. Nobody warned me it feels like that."

"I always ride when I have too much on my mind." She felt the words in his chest before they reached her ears. "It empties everything out. The sound of the wind is like medicine."

"The sound of the wind is like medicine." She pulled back to squint at him. "Listen to you. So poetic. Who are you and what have you done with the quiet one."

"I contain multitudes."

"Apparently."

They lapsed back into quiet, and she watched the bridge lights wobble on the water, and the confession climbed her throat all by itself.

"The bike makes you very attractive, by the way," she said. "You should know that."

Azriel laughed, head tipping back, the sound rolling out over the dark water. "What is it with women and motorcycles? Someone explain it to me. It's an engine with two wheels attached."

She pouted, which she was aware solved nothing and proved his point. "It's just. Very nice. The whole picture of it. And hot. It's hot."

"Hot."

"There's literature."

"There's literature." He was grinning now, insufferable and beautiful. "Would this be the same body of literature as the romantasy novels?"

"I regret every single thing I have ever told you."

He shifted toward her on the bench, and his arm slid from her shoulders to the curve of her waist, and he leaned in until his mouth was at the level of her ear, and the night went very small. "I made you a promise once. Months ago, in a bar. Do you remember it?"

Her heart stopped pretending to behave. She remembered every syllable of that conversation, and had been remembering it, against her will, ever since, in lecture halls and shower stalls and one extremely compromised Monday morning in Room 402.

"You said," and her voice came out lower than she planned, "that when the weather got better you'd take me for a ride."

"Mm. And it's the middle of winter and I took you anyway, because apparently I can't wait for anything where you're concerned." His breath was warm against her ear and the cold made it warmer. "But that wasn't the whole promise. Do you remember the rest, or do I need to remind you?"

She remembered the rest. The first time I'd go slow. If you enjoyed it, the second time we could go faster. Her face was burning so thoroughly she was surprised the river wasn't steaming.

"I remember."

"So." His nose brushed the shell of her ear, deliberate and unhurried, and her fingers curled into his jacket entirely on their own. "First ride. Slow the whole way here." A pause, engineered and merciless. "Did you enjoy it?"

"Azriel."

"It's a simple question."

"You know I enjoyed it. You felt me enjoying it. I was wrapped around you like ivy for half an hour."

"Then you know what that means," he murmured, dark and warm and entirely too pleased with himself, "about the second ride."

Elain made a small doomed sound against his shoulder, and felt his quiet laugh move through both of them, and thought dizzily of a grey Monday morning and a dream she was taking to her grave. If this man ever discovered that her subconscious had beaten him to the motorcycle, she would simply never hear the end of it.

"There's so much I want to tell you," he said after a while, into her hair. "You should know that. It isn't that I don't want to. There's a lot of it and it comes out of me slowly and I need you to be patient. But it's coming. All of it. With time."

"I can be patient." She sat up to look at him. "Like what, though? Give me an example."

"For example." A pause, and the corner of his mouth moved. "The first time I saw you."

Elain blinked.

"Wait." She turned fully on the bench. "There's a story? I thought the first time you saw me was Feyre's birthday. Or the library?“

"Mm," Azriel said, which was neither confirmation nor denial and was somehow worse than both.

"Azriel."

"Later."

"You can't do that. You can't start and then say later."

"Later, Elain."

She pouted, fully, with her whole face, in a manner she had not deployed since she was approximately nine years old, and she watched it land and watched him suffer it, his eyes going soft and helpless at the edges while his mouth held its line, and she understood with a small thrill of power that he found her adorable and was losing some internal argument about it in real time.

"That doesn't work on me," he said.

"It's working right now. I can see it working."

"It isn’t."

"Fine. Keep your story." She folded her arms and lifted her chin, gathering the shredded remains of her dignity around her like a shawl. "In that case I'll have you know there's a great deal I could tell you and won't. Enormous amounts. Volumes. You're not the only one."

"Is that so."

"It is extremely so."

"Then I want a teaser." He stretched one arm along the backrest behind her, settling in, and the light off the water moved over him and did unfair things. "I gave you something, and now you owe a topic."

She had walked directly into that, and they both knew it. Elain looked at him, and looked at the black river, and felt the reckless leftover courage of the whole night still fizzing in her blood, the motorcycle courage, the secret-girlfriend courage, and she decided to spend a little of it.

"Sex," she said. Very bravely. To a point slightly left of his shoulder.

His brows rose. Both of them, unhurried, all the way up.

"Now I'm curious," Azriel said.

"That's the teaser. That's all you get."

"Hm."

It was a specific hm. She was beginning to learn his catalogue of them, and this one was low and thoughtful and entirely too patient, as though something had just been filed in a cabinet he fully intended to revisit, and it did something to the backs of her knees that she elected to ignore.

He watched her a moment longer, and then, "Do you have a weird kink?"

"What?" The word came out at a pitch that startled something in the reeds below them. "No!! Azriel. No. That's not. It's nothing like. No."

"That was a lot of denials."

"Because it deserved a lot of denials. I don't have a. It's not a kink thing, it's a completely different, it's a normal thing, it's barely even a thing."

"So there's a thing."

Elain opened her mouth to produce a devastating retort, and in the fatal second before it arrived, her eyes dropped.

To his hands. When did he remove his gloves?

One rested on his knee and the other lay along the back of the bench behind her, bare and scarred in the low light, the silvery lines running over the knuckles and down the backs of them. Those hands. The hands she had been stealing looks at since December, that had braced beside her head in a dream she was taking to her grave, that had folded hers against his stomach on a moving motorcycle an hour ago and pressed them there. Her gaze stayed on them exactly one half-second too long before she wrenched it away and fixed it on the far bank with enormous, unconvincing interest.

Please, she thought. Please let him not have seen that.

"Hm," Azriel said again.

He had seen it. The hm was warmer this time and slower and unbearably satisfied, as though a witness had just incriminated herself in open court, and Elain stared at the lights on the water and felt her ears catch fire and knew with total certainty that this half-second would be coming back for her someday, at a time and place of his choosing.

"Fine," she blurted, because the silence was worse. "Fine. Since we're doing honesty tonight. Here's the actual thing, and then we're done." She made herself look at him. "I'm very inexperienced. That's the story. There was only ever one person, only Graysen, and he was not." The sentence ran out of road. She tried another. "Or maybe I was not. I don't actually know which of us." That one ran out too, and she sat there in the wreckage of both, and finally waved a hand through the cold air as if clearing smoke. "Whatever. It doesn't matter. Let's just take time for everything, okay? That's all I'm asking. Time."

The teasing had gone out of his face somewhere in the middle of it.

He was looking at her seriously now, motionless, his eyes moving over her face with a focus she could feel on her skin, and she recognized what he was doing. He was reading the spaces between her words. He was not. Or maybe I was not. Two broken sentences, and something passed behind his eyes that was quiet and cold and had nothing to do with her at all and everything to do with a man he had never met.

For a moment she thought he would ask.

He didn't ask. Whatever he had assembled, he folded it away out of sight, and when he spoke there was nothing left in his voice but warmth.

"Okay," he said. "We take time. For everything. We go at whatever speed is yours."

Her chest did something complicated and grateful. And Elain had to do something with her hands immediately or she was going to say something unsurvivable.

So she stood up. It was the only exit available on a bench, gathering both empty bottles and the crumpled packet, and walked to the bin eleven steps. She came back to stand in front of him with her empty hands.

Azriel was still sitting.

She stopped in front of him, close but not close enough, wondering whether to sit down again or say something clever.

Then his hand came up, and one finger hooked into the belt loop at her hip.

Just the one. A single finger through a strip of denim, and he pulled.

Not hard. She came forward a half-step, and then another, and her knee bumped the edge of the bench, and then she was standing between his open thighs with his knees against the outsides of hers and the entire world reduced.

Elain forgot every word she had ever learned.

He kept the finger in her belt loop. That was somehow the worst of it, or the best, or both, that he did not let go, that he stayed hooked into her jeans. His other hand settled at the back of her thigh, warm even through the denim, holding her in place, and he looked up at her.

Up at her.

From here she could see everything. The strong line of his throat as he tipped his head back. The disorder the helmet had left in his hair, which she now had a clear and unobstructed opportunity to put her hands into. And his eyes, half-lidded and dark and heavy under the low light, traveling up the front of her without any hurry at all, from his own hand at her thigh, to her waist, to the hands she had frozen uselessly in the air beside her, all the way up to her mouth, where they stopped and stayed.

Nobody had ever looked at her like that. Not once. Not for one second of her whole tidy, managed, chaperoned life.

Her heart was going so hard she was certain he could feel it through her leg, through the belt loop, through the air. Her breath had abandoned all pretense of rhythm. And her hands finally solved themselves the only way they could, rising to the sides of his neck, and then higher, sliding up into that dark hair at last, exactly as she had wanted to for an hour, and it was even better than she had imagined, thick and cool from the wind and soft between her fingers, and the sound Azriel made low in his throat when she scratched lightly at his scalp was one she intended to think about for the rest of her natural life.

"Hi," she whispered. It was the only word left in the building.

"Hi," he said.

"You're staring," she managed.

"I am."

"Why?"

"Because you're standing between my legs at two in the morning by a river," he said, "and I want to remember it exactly like this."

Her whole body went hot from the inside out.

"Elain." His hand slid on her back, gathering her in, and she came without a single objection, tipping down toward him as his other hand finally left her belt loop and found her jaw, guiding her. "Come here."

She bent to him, and he lifted his face, and they met in the middle.

The kiss was soft. That was what undid her, that after all of it, after the throttle and the wind and the belt loop and that look, he kissed her gently, his mouth warm and unhurried against hers while the cold moved around them and the river went on doing whatever rivers did at two in the morning.

Soft, and then not only soft. His hand slid into her hair, and the angle changed, and the kiss went deeper by degrees, patient and thorough and without one gram of hurry in it, and heat unfurled through her chest and down through her stomach and all the way to her knees, and she bent further into him with both hands still buried in his hair, and forgot her own name, and the country she lived in.

When he finally drew back, he did not let her go. He kept her there, standing between his knees with his forehead resting against her sternum and his arms around the backs of her thighs, breathing.

Elain looked down at the top of his head and combed her fingers slowly through his hair and thought that she would very happily die exactly here.

"We should go," Azriel said into her coat, without moving an inch. "It's two in the morning."

"I know."

"I'm going to take you home."

"I know."

Neither of them moved for a considerable while.

——

Mor's apartment smelled like coffee and expensive candles, and its owner opened the door the next afternoon in an oversized sweater and fuzzy socks.

"Well," she said, leaning against the frame instead of stepping aside. "Look who it is."

"Are you going to let me in?"

"I'm deciding. You never come here. Once a year, when something is either broken or important, and nothing looks broken." She swung the door wide. "Come in."

Azriel stepped into the warm chaos of throw blankets and art books, and sat down at the end of the sofa while Mor went to the kitchen and came back with two mugs, handing him one without asking, black, the way she had known he took it.

She folded into the armchair opposite, tucked her feet under her, and watched him over the rim of her mug like a cat.

"So," she said. "I assume you and Elain are a thing now."

"That's a secret."

Mor rolled her eyes with her entire upper body. "Azriel. Telling me it's a secret doesn't make it a secret."

He drank his coffee and said nothing, and the corner of his mouth betrayed him, and Mor's grin arrived like a sunrise.

"She's my secret girlfriend," he said.

"Your secret girlfriend." Mor barked a laugh into her mug. "Listen to you. What are you, a forbidden love story? Two households, both alike in dignity? Should I be checking the balcony for a ladder?"

"It's better to keep it low for now." He set the mug down on a coaster, because some habits survived everything. "Don't tell the others. Not until this Vanserra shit is solved. When it's handled, they'll know."

The teasing dimmed. Mor nodded slowly, and for a moment her jaw did the thing it did when she was filing somebody under enemies.

"The fucking Vanserras," she said, with feeling.

"The fucking Vanserras," he agreed.

Beyond the window the afternoon was white and low.

"So why are you here?" Mor asked eventually. "Not that I object. But you didn't ride across town to declare a girlfriend at me."

He turned the mug a quarter-turn on its coaster. Then he looked up.

"Did Elain tell you something? About intimacy."

Mor went carefully neutral, which from Mor was as loud as a siren. She set her own mug down.

"I promised her not to tell anyone."

"I know." He nodded once. "I'm not asking you to break it. I don't need details. I don't want them. Last night she started to tell me something and it broke off in the middle, and then she asked me for time, and I gave it to her, and she can have all of it." His thumb traced the handle. "The problem is I'm walking around something in the dark. I don't want to put my weight down in the wrong place. So. Not the details. Just tell me what it's about."

Mor looked at him for a long moment.

"Her ex was shit," she said finally. "That's all you're getting. He expected performance from her. And at the same time, from everything I can gather, the man himself was bad, selfish and lazy and bad, and instead of ever once looking at himself he told her that she sucks." She pulled her sleeve down over her hand. "I think she's extremely insecure about all of it. I think she believes she has to be perfect or she's nothing."

Azriel sat with it.

He kept his face where he kept it, and his hands stayed loose around the mug, and inside his chest something turned over slowly, cold and old and precise. His mind had gone back to a girl on a bench at midnight waving her hand through the air as if clearing smoke. He was not. Or maybe I was not. He had traced the outline of that thing in the dark and hoped he was wrong, and he had not been wrong.

What a bastard, he thought, with a flat clarity that in another decade of his life would have been the beginning of a very bad evening for somebody.

"Thank you," he said.

"Don't make me regret it."

"You won't."

Mor picked her mug back up and studied him over it, and slowly, degree by degree, the wickedness returned to her face.

"You really like her, huh."

He didn't answer.

"Look at you. You rode across the city to ask me how to hold something without breaking it." She pointed a finger at him around the mug. "Are you in love, Mr. Brightside?"

Was he in love?

The question landed somewhere it had apparently been waiting to land. Azriel looked past her at the white window and wondered, actually wondered, walking around the inside of the word to see whether it held him. Jasmine and honey. A fern with a name. His own stupid heart lifting at three grey dots on a screen at two in the morning. A girl hissing hide, hide and shoving him into a bathroom with both hands. A girl standing between his knees on a riverbank with her fingers in his hair, and before that, saying flowers grow out of mud, and the way that sentence had gone into him like a key into a lock he hadn't known was there.

"I mean, I get it," Mor went on, merciless, enjoying his silence. "She's incredibly beautiful. Objectively. It's almost rude how beautiful she is. So I underst—"

"Her beauty was the last thing I noticed about her."

It came out of him plainly, interrupting her, without any decision on his part, and Mor stopped mid-word.

Her eyebrows climbed. "The last thing." She set the mug down and leaned forward. "Okay. Then what was the first?"

Azriel looked at his coffee.

He was somewhere else for a moment. A cold campus evening a year ago, a courtyard everybody else had crossed with their heads down, and a girl he didn't know crouched motionless on the wet pavement with one hand out, patient as winter itself, coaxing a scrap of black fur from under a bench. She had never seen him. She still didn't know. That story was his, saved, waiting for the right hour the way he saved everything, and someday he would give it to her and watch her face do the thing it did when a feeling got too big for it.

"Her kindness," he said.

Silence, for exactly one second.

Then Mor made a sound like a kettle achieving its purpose.

"Ohhhh." She pressed both hands over her heart and fell back into the armchair as though shot. "Oh, you are so in love. Catastrophically in love. Her kindness. He noticed her kindness first." An arm flung over her eyes. "I never thought I would see this day. I have known you since forever and I have never once seen this day coming. Somebody alert the authorities. And where is the fourth Archeron sister for me, that's what I want to know. Where is my gentle gardener with excellent hair. The universe has terrible distribution."

Yeah, he thought, and let the smile arrive, small and soft and past all hope of concealment.

He was embarrassingly in love with her.

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