Page 15 of Second Chance with the Half-Elf
But as I gather my bag to leave, her words stick.
And damn it, so does Aeron’s gaze.
That night, I toss and turn beneath the faded quilt in my mother’s old bed.
The house creaks with the shifting tide. The scent of cedar and salt clings to every surface.
Sleep comes slow. Restless.
And when it does, I dream of him.
Of sea-damp skin and rough hands, of breathless kisses pressed against sun-warmed wood. Fingers tangled in silver hair, of mouths moving slow and deep and desperate. Beingheld—not like something fragile, but like something claimed.
I wake with a gasp, sheets twisted tight around my legs, heart racing like I’ve run the coastline twice over.
“Shit,” I whisper into the dark.
Just nostalgia, I tell myself. Just the mind playing tricks.
But as dawn seeps pale through the salt-streaked window, I know it’s a lie.
And my body, traitorous thing, knows it too.
CHAPTER 6
AERON
Ilike fixing things.
Wood, rope, iron—when something’s broken, there’s a rhythm to putting it right again. A sequence, logic. You set your hands to the task, and the rest of the world slips quiet for a while.
Would that people were as simple.
“Damn weather’s got the shutters near falling off,” Old Man Cass grumbles beside me, gnarled fingers pointing to the crooked frame above his shack window.
The old dryad smells of seaweed and pipe smoke, skin rough as driftwood, eyes sharp as ever.
“It’ll hold,” I tell him. “I’ll reinforce it after I fix the hinge.”
Cass grunts. “Wasn’t asking, boy. You’re doin’ it.”
I huff a laugh and crouch beside the bin of tools. The morning air is thick with the promise of another storm—not that Cass minds. He’s been here longer than half the council combined, and no amount of weather scares him.
As I pull the rusted hinge free and fit a new one, he watches me from his rickety stool, pipe clamped between his teeth.
“You see her yet?” he asks after a beat.
I don’t need to ask who. Everyone is prying at me about her.
“I ran into her,” I say evenly.
Cass hums, eyes crinkling. “Bet that was a sight.”
I don’t answer.
He chuckles. “Storm comin’ in more ways than one.”
The hinge clicks into place with a satisfying snap. I straighten and test the shutter—it swings smoothly now.
