Page 61 of Sunder

She turned her head to look at him. His eyes were closed, and for a moment she thought he’d actually fallen asleep. She reached out with her pointer finger and poked him in the arm, and his eyes flew open. “I was appreciating,” he protested, rubbing at his arm as if she’d actually damaged him.

“Did you sleep at all last night?” she asked, thinking again of all hischecks.

“Enough,” he groused, but it hardly stuck because there was a smile at the edges of his mouth. “I was preoccupied,” he allowed when she gave him a pointed look. “With a worthwhile endeavour.”

“To keep me breathing.” As if he had control over such matters. “I’m not sick,” she reminded him.

He reached for her hand and took it in his. Didn’t bring it to his mouth to kiss it. Just... held it. While they laid in her girlhood bed and she waited for it to feel wrong.

But it didn’t.

“You aren’t?” Athan asked, a hint of teasing in his voice. “What are you, then?”

Which wasn’t fair, because she was hardly going to give him a list of her troubles. So she sighed, and nestled into the familiar pillows behind her head, the way her wings met a mattress perfectly indented for their comfort. “I’m tired,” she decided, because that was easiest. And most true.

“Then you shall rest. While I get to flit through all your things and make all sorts of assumptions about what is important and what isn’t.” His thumb had no business skimming across her hand like that, nor for it to send tiny pulses of sensations as he blindly followed a thread he could not see.

But she could.

Could see it swell and glimmer at his attentions. Could feel the answering pull of a cord much stronger than a single thread.

She swallowed.

Did not pull away, although she was tempted.

It frightened her how easily he could stir such feelings. But that was the point, wasn’t it?

“I must admit,” Athan continued, before she’d quite made up her mind what she would allow. “For all I’d pictured, cuddlingwith my mate in her parents’ home had not entered the realm of possibilities.”

She stiffened—or might have, except that she really was tired, and it was as if the strain of too many happenings in far too short a time was catching up to her. “This isn’t cuddling,” she protested.

“It isn’t?” His thumb had the audacity to brush down her wrist, where her pulse fluttered beneath his attention and the thread curled. “What would you call it?”

Orma fought down the urge to rub at the bond in her chest. “Well, what we did in your bed was cuddling,” she supposed. If one had to qualify such a thing. “This is just... being on the same bed. At the same time.”

Athan hummed, and there were distinct notes of humour and disagreement all at once. “So my arm must be around you,” he clarified. “For it to count.”

Orma shifted, just a little. She didn’t know why he was pressing the matter, and it made her eyes narrow.

“I only ask, because I’m certain you would be quite uncomfortable if your mother entered, and we werecuddling.But since we are simply on the bed at the same time, it should be fine.”

Her eyes flew to the door, certain she would find her mother there, either flustered at what she saw, or fluttering and smiling because she was so determined all would be well now.

But she wasn’t.

Just the solid door stained in the same dark fashion as the rest of them—the only part that had withstood her mother’s declaration of healing colours.

Orma allowed her elbow to poke at his side just a little, and he made far too great a show of reacting to it. “If I asked your parents to let us take your bed, would they allow it?”

Orma stared up at the ceiling. Moonstones hung on strands of twine, dull and quiet with the suns out. “So sure, are you? That I will come back with you?”

Her heart beat a little faster when he brought her hand to his lips. When she felt the gentlest brush against her knuckles—whisper soft and not nearly enough.

If he mentioned the records her father was sending off with him, she was going to lurch out of the bed.

If he reminded her of duty and obligation, she was going to poke him with her elbow again.

He increased the pressure just a bit, allowing her to tuck it away as a proper kiss. Not to her hair, but to her skin. The very first.

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