Written in the Stars(63)

Reaching around her, Darcy grabbed a box of pancake mix. The corner was dented and there was a fifty-percent-off sticker slapped across the first half of the brand name. “I found this in the back of your pantry. The best-by date was last month, but I figured it’s probably safe.”

“I’m not concerned.” Bracing her hands on the edge of the counter, Elle heaved herself onto the tile surface, narrowly avoiding putting her butt in the batter bowl. Once settled, she hooked a foot around the back of Darcy’s knee, drawing her close. “You met Margot.”

Darcy’s fingers crept up the inside of Elle’s thigh. When she reached the hem of Elle’s robe, she walked her fingers backward, down toward Elle’s knee. Elle blew out the breath she’d been holding. Such a tease. “I met Margot.”

“And?”

Darcy tossed her hair over her shoulder and laughed. “And what? She’s nice. A little scary.” Darcy retrieved the spatula and flipped the pancake bubbling away in the pan with an expert flick of her wrist. The underside was the perfect shade of golden brown. “She made me pinky promise not to break your heart.”

Elle shut her eyes. Damn it, Margot. Way to be the opposite of chill. “She was kidding.”

Darcy turned, glancing over her shoulder. There was a hickey on her neck, a bruise in the shape of Elle’s mouth, the sight of which made Elle flush from head to toe. “She sounded serious to me.”

“Did she say what she’d do if you did?” Elle tore a piece off her pancake and popped it in her mouth. “Break my heart, I mean.”

Darcy laughed, the sound light and bright. “I didn’t ask.”

The simple way Darcy said that, as if that outcome were unlikely, not worth worrying over, put a stupid smile on Elle’s face. Leaning back against the cabinets behind her, Elle swished her feet, limbs weightless, gravity nothing in the face of the buoyant force swelling inside her chest.

“Anything else I should be aware of? You know, any torrid secrets Margot might’ve let slip?”

“Do you have any torrid secrets?”

“Depends on what you consider torrid, I guess,” Elle joked. For the most part, she was an open book. But even the parts of herself she didn’t broadcast she’d revealed to Darcy.

Darcy reached for the bowl and spooned a perfect pancake’s worth of batter into the pan. Bubbles appeared around its edges. “We had a good conversation, actually. Margot’s funny when she’s not threatening me.”

“A good conversation about what?” Elle didn’t want to come out and ask if they’d talked about her, but she was dying to know what she’d missed. She could always ask Margot later, but she wanted to hear it from Darcy.

Facing the stove, her back toward Elle, Darcy shrugged. Her hair reached the top of her waist and Elle wanted to bury her fingers in it. “She was reading when I came in here, so I asked what. We talked about fanfiction.”

“Fanfiction?” Had she heard that right? “Really?”

Darcy’s shoulders stiffened. “What’s wrong with that?”

Elle frowned at Darcy’s defensive tone and brushed the crumbs off her leg. “Nothing. Margot writes it. She’s a huge Potterhead. She even admins a couple Facebook groups.”

“She told me.” With another flick of her wrist, Darcy added a pancake to the stack, replacing the one Elle had snagged. “Margot made it sound more mainstream than when I—”

Record scratch. “When you?”

Darcy glanced over her shoulder, not meeting Elle’s eyes, but peeking in her general direction. “Nothing.”

Like that would work on her. “When you what? When you—” No fucking way. “Darcy Lowell. Do you read fanfiction? Oh my god, what fandom? Do you write it? Is it smutty? Please tell me it’s smutty. What’s your—”

Darcy held up a hand. Her entire face was neon, her freckles blending into her flush. “I’m not telling you the name of anything I wrote. Margot already tried that.”

This was too good to be true. Darcy. Wrote. Fanfiction. Mind blown.

“Come on. Don’t I get”—girlfriend hovered on the tip of her tongue—“‘I’ve seen you naked’ privileges?”

Darcy arched a copper brow. “Seeing me naked is a privilege.”

Elle slipped off the counter and sidled up behind Darcy. Gently, Elle brushed the hair off Darcy’s neck and around her shoulder before leaning in to brush her lips against the knob at the top of Darcy’s spine. When Darcy shivered, Elle grinned. “Lucky me.”

Darcy reached out and flipped off the heat to the front burner. “Promise not to laugh?”

Hands drifting and delighting in the way her touch seemed to drive Darcy to distraction, Elle let her fingers dip beneath the hem of Darcy’s borrowed shirt, teasing the skin over her hip bones. “Cross my heart.”

“I mean it. No laughing or I’ll leave.”

Elle forced her face into the most earnest expression of sincerity she could muster and waited.

Darcy nibbled on her lip. “When I was in college, I wrote Days of Our Lives fanfiction.”

Soap opera fanfiction. Elle beamed. “Darcy.”

“Ugh.” Darcy scrunched up her nose. “I told you not to laugh!”