Page 73 of Truly Madly Magically

I could stay here, right here, wrapped up in Zander and never think or worry again. Just this. Just us.

But, “Let me in, El,” he whispers at my ear.

“Pretty sure you’re in.” I settle myself, gripping him with my thighs to accentuate the point and bring him deeper. So deep it makes me shiver.

He smiles, his fingers tangling in my hair. “You know what I mean,” he says before pressing his mouth between my breasts. Where my heart thuds hard.

Because I do know.

He wants me to open that internal channel I blocked a long time ago. He wants me to let him into my head as well as my body, the ultimate intimacy that witches have. That humans can’t imagine. I don’t have to open it up for the sex to be world-shattering, if the past ten years are anything to go by, and usually this sort of thing is a no-brainer.

I refuse whatever he asks. Then we take it out on each other in every inventive way we can.

Things are different tonight.

We’re going to be parents to a baby girl. I cried in front of him, when I pride myself on never crying, and certainly not with witnesses. What Elizabeth said to me last night seems to echo in my head. Sometimes a woman gets tired of being angry.

Anger has protected me for a long, long time, but tonight I find I’m tired. Tired of wanting what I can’t have. Tired of fighting anything and everything. Tired of too much truth and nowhere to hide.

I let out a shuddering breath. His gaze is hot on mine, his body on top of me, the way I like it best. The way I have always liked him, too much.

He could break through the blocks I put up. I’m sure we’re both very aware that he could have from the start, but didn’t. Part of me wonders, suddenly, if I blocked him in the first place so he would break through...

Tonight he wants me to let him in of my own volition.

“It’ll be okay, I promise,” he tells me, echoing the kind of vows we made each other long ago. “I’ll always protect you, Ellowyn. Always have. Always will.”

I tell myself to be careful of promises, that they too often turn out to be curses.

Tonight I don’t care.

Or I care too much about other things.

Either way, I let them go. The protections I’ve held tight around me for years. The walls I built to keep him out of the one place he could always hurt me. Because I knew perfectly well that keeping him out like that, treating him like a human, hurt him too.

And when the walls crumble all around us, I can feel his sigh inside of me.

There we are.

I want to cry. Again.

Because his voice inside me, with no one else in this link between us, is the scratch to an itch I’ve been pretending I don’t feel for a decade. For every moment of my adult life.

The tears don’t fall though, because we move together. Slow and hot and infinitely, gloriously patient.

The past ten years, on every Beltane night, it has been rushed and hot and needy. Edgy, angry, desperate. So much so it’s become habit. I tell myself it’s unhealthy and mean. Toxic. That’s the only thing I let myself remember when an inevitable thought about sex with Zander slips through the barricades.

I tell myself that’s how it’s always been.

I don’t say it out loud, because I know better.

Because there used to be this.

My body. His. This careening feeling in my chest that used to feel like drowning is more grounded, but I still spin until I fly. This time I’m not so lost, so desperate to find an anchor to drown me and sure it’s going to be him.

I’m not that girl any longer. He’s not that boy.

We can anchor each other, and we do.

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