Page 93 of Threadbound

“I have to stay here?”

“No!”

“Then…?”

Bran ran his free hand through his hair. “You can come or go as you please,” he said. “Or, rather, I’ll take you back whenever you want to go. Or not.”

He looked away from that penetrating blue gaze again.

“What do you want me to do?” Jamie asked him.

I can’t tell him that.

“I canna make that decision for you,” Bran whispered.Please stay. Or please ask me to come with you.Bran could be content with either.

“I didn’t ask you to decide for me,” Jamie replied, his thumb stroking over the skin of Bran’s knuckles. “I asked what you wanted.”

Bran looked up again, wondering if he’d successfully managed to keep the suddenly raw desperation from his face. “Jamie, I canna?—”

Jamie sighed, the sound interrupting Bran’s miserable excuse.

“Just… answer one question for me?”

Bran nodded, wondering if he was a fool for agreeing.

“Did you ever want…” Jamie’s throat worked, and Bran could feel a matching ball in the back of his own, like a stone or an egg swallowed whole. “Hell,” Jamie breathed. “I don’t even know how to ask the question.”

Bran waited, his whole chest tight with it.

“You came to find me because of the threadbond,” Jamie said, his voice tense and his eyes fixed on Bran’s face. “To fix your magic.”

Bran nodded.

“Was there ever anything more to it?” Jamie asked, his cheeks flushing.

“Aye,” Bran whispered. Because there had been. And there still was. Because if it had all been about his magic, he wouldn’t be nauseous at the thought that Jamie might ask to go back to Edinburgh and be left there. Alone.

Jamie sighed again. “Then why do I feel… I don’t know. Lonely?”

That hit Bran like a punch to the solar plexus. “Jamie, I?—”

But Jamie was shaking his head. “I don’t know what I’m doing. Everyone—” He gestured around them with the hand that wasn’t holding Bran’s. “—is celebrating, and as far as I can tell, it’s all about you stabilizing your magic, which is great,” he hurried on to say. “I’m glad. Really. I just… I don’t know.”

“Wanted more than that?” Bran asked, half swallowing the words.

“Maybe.” Jamie frowned. “I don’t know.”

Jamie dropped his head, staring down at their joined hands, the pale pink of his fingers against the black ridges and knobbed knuckles of Bran’s. So utterly inhuman, and yet Jamie couldn’thelp the feeling that Bran’s handbelongedin his. He certainly didn’t want to let go of it, since at that precise moment Jamie felt like the only thing that made any sense at all was the warmth of Bran’s fingers and the solid feel of the skin and muscle and bones of his hand in Jamie’s.

“I don’t belong here,” Jamie blurted. “I’m just a stupid human, and all this is…” He didn’t know what it was. Didn’t have the words to explain how he strangely felt both closer and farther away from Bran, even though the fae was standing right in front of him, a frown on his eerily beautiful features.

“Do you want to go?” Bran asked him.

“Go? I mean—aren’t we expected to be here?”

Jamie couldn’t read the expression that twitched across Bran’s face. “Ah—I believe they wouldna be surprised if we disappeared,” he replied, then inclined his head toward a small arched alcove in which—with some horror—Jamie spied three individuals wrapped around one another without so much as a stitch of clothing.

He felt his whole face catch on fire. “Um. Are—do we—Eadar said we wouldn’t be expected?—”

---