Back in a Spell (The Witches of Thistle Grove, #3)(45)
“Nina,” he breathed, reaching out to take my hand like I’d wanted to do only moments before. “Hold up, just wait a minute here. You’re hurting.”
“So what if I am?” I said roughly, though tears were already prickling in my nose. “Nina’s hurting, must be Tuesday! It doesn’t matter what I feel. We’re here for your lesson. Not for me.”
“Of course it matters,” he insisted, gently but indomitably, as if the importance of my feelings were a fact as incontrovertible as the direction of the rising sun. He reached for my other hand, then pulled me in until I faced him, our joined hands clasped between our chests. “Let me feel it, Nina. Let me help.”
I ducked my head, my lips trembling. “You don’t want to feel this,” I said, in a quavery near-whisper. “I promise you don’t.”
He tilted his forehead against mine, his breath steaming like a small, contained fog between our faces. “Yeah, I do. And believe me, I can handle it. Whatever’s going on with you, I assure you I’ve walked through the Valley of the Shadow of Steaming Piles of Shit this past year, too. So I’m about as prepped as you can get.”
That startled a fractured little laugh out of me. Feeble and unsteady, but genuine just the same.
“Okay, then,” I said softly, closing my eyes, tears pressing against my lashes. “If you’re sure. I’m going to drop the shield now, so, be ready.”
Biting my lip, I lowered the defensive barrier I’d erected between us—and let everything pour out in a miserable cascade.
A torrent that didn’t just break down the dam I’d constructed between myself and the world, but wrecked it to ruin, thoroughly demolished it. First came a rush of the pure, raw pain of how my mother treated me—and not just me, but Gareth and Gawain, too, and all the ways I’d failed to protect them from being trampled by her and Igraine over the years, even though I’d always been the strongest—followed by the duller but no less powerful ache of the way loving Sydney had undone me. The way she’d cast me off and abandoned me the moment I no longer suited her.
The way I’d started to feel like joy, or even simple contentment, had never been meant for someone rigid and bitter and broken like me.
“My god, Nina,” Morty whispered, his voice breaking, staggering in place. When I opened my eyes, the dazzling blue of his was glossed with tears, unabashed sympathy etched onto every line of his face. “Oh, lady, come here.”
I all but flung myself into his embrace, arms locking around his neck as his wound tight around my waist, folding me perfectly against him. Then I turned my face into his woolen collar and cried without reservation, the way I rarely let myself. Not my usual pathetic dribble of tears, but open and ugly and hard, in wrenching, heaving sobs that felt like they might crack my ribs open and let spill some crucial marrow. I could feel Morty’s chest hitch against mine as he wept quietly for my own feelings, sieved my pain readily through himself.
And somehow that feedback loop between us, me feeling my own pain mirrored and felt and affirmed by someone else, helped instead of making it worse.
We stood there for so long and so unmoving that a flock of hopeful birds landed around us; the ones that didn’t head south for winter, and were clearly accustomed to bread crumb feasts courtesy of cemetery regulars. Amid the ruffle of their wings and the soft chorus of their cooing, I clung to Morty until the flood of agony abated, withdrawing like a slow tide.
Leaving behind something closer to peace than I’d felt in a very long time. Longer than I could remember.
“All that,” Morty marveled against me, making no move to let me go, the wealth of his free-flowing empathy surging inside me like a balm. A tincture for the soul, like something the Thorns might know how to brew. “So much pain, and you just keep it locked up inside like a fucking soldier, marching on. And shit, I thought I’d had it tough.”
“You know what they say,” I managed thickly, through the residual tears. “Sometimes you have to roll the hard six.”
This time his amusement bubbled up inside me, too, fizzing like a swallow of Mo?t. “Oh, of course you’d randomly be a Battlestar nerd, too. How could you not be?”
“Blame Kara Thrace slash Katee Sackhoff,” I admitted with a little shrug. “My first and most beloved TV wife.”
“Fair enough.” I could feel him smile. “I was more Team Lee Adama myself, but yeah, I could definitely see that Starbuck appeal.”
“Apollo was too much of a bro for me,” I murmured against his neck, feeling both slightly ridiculous and ridiculously happy that we’d somehow meandered into this conversation. “Like that super-stiff lantern jaw all the time, no thanks. Can we compromise on Athena, though? Because if memory serves, she was so completely fine.”
“Oh, entirely.” Another soft laugh into my hair, before he reached up to run a hand over it, then cup my cheek. Unlike me, he wasn’t wearing gloves, but his palm was still warm and the slightest bit scratchy against my skin; calluses, probably, from the silks. “Do you want to sit down with me for a minute, talk a little? Or will you be too cold?”
It suddenly occurred to me that I hadn’t really been cold—not the way I normally got in winter, the relentless, bone-deep chill I could never shake—since my underwater foray. I wondered what that might mean, if it had any bearing on or connection to the spell. The bizarre hunger had continued, too. I was putting away more than twice my normal amount of food per day without gaining weight, and I still felt peckish most of the time, like there could never really be enough snacks to tide me over to the next meal.