Spells for Forgetting(84)

I reached over, finding his hand with mine, and slipped my fingers between his. August stared at it for the length of a breath before his thumb brushed over my palm.

It was the same feeling I’d had when I held his hand in the cemetery as we watched Zachariah bury Eloise’s ashes. Like the moment I touched him, the roaring wind inside me just stopped. And the moment he let me go, it would return.

August brought my hand up, pressing his mouth to my wrist and he just sat there, breathing. That single moment made the first of the tears streak down my cheek, and when I couldn’t stand what was left of the space between us anymore, I climbed over to him, folding myself in his arms.

I closed my eyes, letting his scent wrap around me. I breathed it in, like it was the first breath I could remember taking.

“I’m sorry,” he said, quietly. “I’m sorry I left.”

I reached up, touching his face, like I was re-memorizing him. Every angle and shape. Before I could think twice, I let my mouth drift toward his. I waited for him to stop me, but he didn’t. He sat there, so still, his hands tightening on me as I came closer.

My lips touched his and I closed my eyes, kissing him slowly. Carefully. Like I’d been waiting a lifetime to do it.

His mouth opened and I let him taste me as his hands dragged up my back. They found their way beneath my shirt, and his fingertips sent the heat flooding under my skin. We were already moving together the way we used to, like it was the most natural thing in the world. But I wanted to be closer to him. To feel him against me.

I pulled back, peering down into his face, and August’s jaw was tight, his eyes strained as they jumped back and forth on mine. I pushed the wild hair away from his face, letting my knuckles trail down the back of his neck.

He looked more like the August I knew—my August—than he had since he arrived.

“I want you,” he said, his arms tightening around me.

The words were so soft, so broken, that I almost couldn’t make them out. His chest rose and fell beneath his shirt, his eyes still on my mouth.

I nodded in answer, my heart hammering painfully behind my ribs. Any minute, it would stop altogether. I reached up to unbutton my shirt and he pulled his over his head, dropping it to the ground. He slipped the straps of my bra down my shoulders and I unhooked it before letting my mouth find his again. His arms came around me as he stood, walking us across the hallway to the bedroom.

I’d dreamed it so many times, but this wasn’t the half-empty ache that found me when I slept. This was really happening. He was really touching me. Kissing me.

He laid me down on the bed beneath him and his lips broke from mine as I pushed out of my jeans. Between us, his fingertips ran down my breasts, tracing the line of me, until they were trailing over my stomach. My hips.

The look in his eye was one I could remember so clearly. I remembered it the way I remembered the feel of his skin pressed to mine. The heat of his mouth. The smell of him that clung to me afterward.

He was moving too slowly. Too gently.

I tried pulling him closer, but he didn’t move, his gaze still studying me.

“What?” I said between breaths.

His eyes made their way back up to meet mine. “Nothing.”

“I’m different?” I said, guessing.

I was. My body wasn’t the same one he’d last touched, but I couldn’t find it in me to feel embarrassed about it.

“You’re beautiful.”

I held my breath as his touch moved over my thighs, between my legs, and when his fingers slipped into my underwear, a long, heavy exhale escaped his lips. I drank it in until I was filled with it. He watched me as my back arched and I bit down hard on my bottom lip, a small sound escaping my throat.

For a moment, everything that had happened since the last time I’d been with him like this was gone, wiped from time itself. And the whole world that broke into pieces when he left came back together. The smell of him filled my head and with it, every memory swirled. The first time he’d kissed me. Touched me. The night in the fishing cabin when I’d given myself to him, body and soul, bound by the blood moon.

This wasn’t the distracted, hurried pleasure I’d found with Dutch. The desperate need to forget. This was the breath and flesh of what I’d known before. The thing I sometimes couldn’t believe had ever been real, like August said. But it was. My whole body was singing with the memory of it.

This was why I hadn’t been able to do it—cut the bind before my grandmother’s fire. It would have been like opening my veins.

The words found my lips, as if some strangled force within me was clawing to get out and anchor itself to him. I pressed my hands to his face, my voice a whisper between us. “I missed you.” The sound of it fractured. “I missed you so much.”

His eyes traveled over my face before his fingers hooked into the band of my underwear, sliding it over my hips. I pulled at the buttons of his jeans, pushing them down until I could feel his warm skin against my hands. I still knew this body. I knew it like I knew my own.

He came low to kiss my collar bone, his lips finding the peak of my breast. His mouth moved over me, leaving a trail of cold on my skin in the sharp, winter air. But I didn’t want to wait anymore. I didn’t want to wait for another second. I wrapped my arms around his neck and his hands caught my legs, pulling them up around him. His forehead pressed to mine and when he pushed inside me, I wanted to cry, the relief of it like a wave I was drowning in.