Page 65 of Big Little Spells

What I mean is, it isn’t only magic. It’s his mouth crashing to mine.

Nicholas Frost is kissing me.

But something in me rejects that. Not the fact of his mouth on mine, the fire hotter and brighter than the one I walked through. Never that—but the term itself. Kissing. I’ve engaged in kissing before. I practiced right here in St. Cyprian before I headed out into the world to perfect the craft. I’ve long prided myself on my artisanal flair.

Yet this feels like a first kiss.

His hands are on me. Not on my dress, maintaining that last barrier, but on me. His palms on my cheeks, his fingers in my hair.

And his mouth is the center of everything, taking me over, drawing me deeper, until longing and lust, heat and need, feel like the same thing.

This is not regret. This is the blooming of a part of myself I’ve never encountered before. Maybe it’s always been there, hidden away, this part of me that’s his. As if I have been, always and ever, only his.

This is heat, but not burning. This is magic, intertwining and turning into something so bright and bold, my knees threaten to buckle.

And while he angles his head, taking the kiss deeper, pulling me closer, there are all those visions of him again. Snatches of his past. It isn’t just seeing, it’s feeling. Experiencing it all with him.

Even when he wrenches his mouth away, I don’t think he realizes all I see. If he knows this is happening. I’m not ready to let him in on it either, because the man is immortal and I am me, and I don’t need anyone to tell me that we’ve just started a very different battle here.

I intend to win it.

Or at least keep my weapons to myself.

“Nicholas.” My voice is as unsteady as my knees. It isn’t just the kiss or the desperation for more that works in me, tying me in knots. It’s all the rest of it too. The flashes of pain and longing, fear and shame, and so many other things I recognize.

We’re the same, I think, and it doesn’t feel like a stray thought. It feels like stone.

Coronis caws somewhere, and it echoes within me.

Something moves over Nicholas’s beautiful face, and I wonder if it echoes like that in him too.

I can’t tell if the kiss was something he meant to do or if it was a heat of the moment thing, but he doesn’t release me. I feel certain he must want to. I can feel that part of him too.

But there is another part that holds my head between his hands, and he doesn’t step away.

I think his blue gaze looks particularly tortured, like he’s fighting the fact that he’s the one who stepped over that line that’s been between us as long as I’ve known him.

And I wouldn’t call myself particularly gentle. I always like to slam my head into a wall instead of finding my way around or through it. It’s been a long process to learn how to be gentle on myself out there, and I’m not very good at it. I would have told you a man who’s been alive for centuries should have dealt with these things already, but he hasn’t.

I don’t question how I know that.

Just like I don’t question that he needs gentleness from me. That he needs it, and more, I need to give it. I lift up on my toes and press my mouth to his, softly.

As though we have all the time in the world.

You do not.

His voice feels different inside me, now that I know how he tastes.

As if we are both brand-new here.

We have now, I tell him. Tonight. Beltane. We don’t need more than that.

No matter how much I might want it.

No matter how much I want him.

This man who is myth and legend and has always felt like mine.

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