The Winner's Kiss (The Winner's Trilogy, #3)(63)

And now? he wanted to ask. Do you love me now? He felt her uncertainty. He felt—as if it had already happened, and he’d already asked—the damage of forcing the question.

She spoke as if she’d heard it anyway. “You are important to me,” she said, and touched his face.

Important. The word swelled and deflated. More than he’d thought. Less than he wanted.

But this: her touching him. How his blood jumped. He stayed very still.

No more mistakes. He couldn’t afford any. He would do nothing.

Something.

No.

She found the curves of his closed eyelids, the shape of his nose, the divot above his mouth, the rasp along his jaw where he hadn’t shaved. His skin began to dream. Then his pulse. His flesh. Right down to the bones.

She shifted on the grass. Green and orange perfumed the air. It was on her skin. She tasted like it, too, when her mouth brushed his, and their noses bumped awkwardly, and he wished he could see her as she breathed a laugh and his hands went into her hair despite himself, despite what he’d told her the night before he’d left his home about what was enough and what wasn’t. The tang of citrus on her tongue. He forgot himself. He moved her beneath him and felt their bodies mark the grass.

A fluffy breeze stirred the heavy air, floating over the arch of his back. She tugged up his shirt and he went down onto his elbows. The hilt of her dagger dug into his belly. He stayed where he was, her palms warm water flowing over his skin. He didn’t want to make a sound. Even his blood seemed loud as he kissed her.

Then a campfire lit the near dark. Startled, he pulled away.

He could see her face better now. Slow eyes, a blurry mouth, and a question stealing across her expression. He’d imagined this before, or something close to it.

Close enough, he decided, but then had the sudden worry that if before she had come to him in his suite because she had wanted to remember, maybe this time, knowing what she knew now, he was just a way for her to forget.

He pushed himself up.

He heard a rustle as she sat up, too, and wrapped her arms around her trousered knees. He kept his eyes off her. He straightened his shirt, but it felt odd, like it didn’t fit him anymore. The sticky air cooled between them. He pushed damp hair off his brow. His limbs—so certain of themselves only moments ago—became an awkward jumble.

Kestrel said, “Will you tell me about the day we met?”

This was unexpected. “It wasn’t a nice day.”

“I want to know every thing from then until now.”

Still unsure, Arin said, “But you haven’t before.”

“I trust you. You won’t lie to me.”

So he began to tell her, with a hesitancy that eventually steadied as the nearby campfire died down and the night surrendered fully to its creatures: the singing insects, the almost soundless flap of bat wings, a breeze that flowed with the mellow scent of cooling earth. As he spoke, it seemed to him that this was really the only story he wanted to tell.

He kept nothing from her.

Somehow they ended up lying down again, side by side, the grass dense beneath them as they talked. The moon above was large yet intimate. Questions and answers were lifted out into the dark. Sometimes Kestrel recalled a moment Arin described, and then it felt to Arin as if he’d looked into a mirror and saw her instead of his own reflection.

They talked long and late.





Chapter 22

As they neared the first village on the outskirts of Errilith, Kestrel considered it: why didn’t she know what she felt for him?

It shouldn’t be hard to figure out. She knew enough—remembered enough—of her past to guess the strength of the emotions she had hidden. Yet the tether between her and the past felt like it could snap with a mere twist.

One memory ruled her mind: how her father had pushed her away from him as her heels skidded the floor and she begged.

Arin’s horse, galled by something unseen, tossed its head. He muttered at the creature—crooned, practically; even at its roughest, there always was a musical quality to his voice—then glanced slantways through the sun at Kestrel. His brown hair fell over his scarred brow.

They’d slept little the night before. But she didn’t feel sleepy, not now, as he regarded her.

A thought etched itself in unreadable patterns across his face. There was a delay, and she grew nervous as she wondered whether what changed his expression was regret, and if it was regret, what did he regret? What they hadn’t done last night, or the secrets they had shared?

Some of what he’d said still made her hesitate, like his role in the eastern fire that killed her friend Ronan. Even if Arin hadn’t intended her friend’s death, even if when he had learned of it, she had felt Arin’s regret, she knew that the regret was for her sake, not for Ronan.

It was disorienting to be reminded of things she hadn’t known she’d forgotten. To have a friend, a whole person, Ronan, rise up inside her only to vanish. She remembered how she’d mourned him. She mourned him again.

Kestrel held Arin’s gaze. She didn’t break it as he held himself loose in his saddle. His body rocked slightly in rhythm with the stride of his horse. She wasn’t sure she wanted him to speak now. His voice had the power to call whole memories into being. Even when he was silent, she was awake to the supple quality of his voice: grave, slow, graveled, graceful. Clear, sometimes so transparent with feeling that she wondered how he had ever deceived her in those first months in her house hold. With a voice like that. It shouldn’t have been possible.