The Rejected Beast Bride's New Mate novel · Chapter 21 of 24

Chapter 21: The Night Before

Orrin didn't answer on the roof.

He looked at me for so long inside his wings that I started to feel stupid.

"You can say no," I said.

"I'm not saying no."

"You're not saying anything."

"I'm saying it tomorrow," he said. "In daylight. With both of us sitting down. You should hear yourself say it when it isn't midnight on a roof."

"That's the least romantic thing anyone's ever said to me."

"It's a log entry," he said, and I laughed into his shirt.

So we talked it through on Saturday, at noon, at the bench in the empty stoneyard.

The carvers had gone home.

The gargoyles stood in their row in the sun, and two of them had a bucket of water beside them where somebody had been washing the stone.

He bought sandwiches.

He sat across from me with his elbows on the bench.

"Tell me again," he said.

"Saturday," I said. "The night before it starts. I want it to be mine."

"And then?"

"Then I take my pill in the morning, and it's a bad week, and you stay."

"You don't want me to..." He made a careful gesture that took in my whole Heat. "Help."

"No." I picked at my sandwich. "Every Heat I've ever had was something that happened to me. I want to find out what one's like when I'm just a person with a cramp. And I want to know that what we do the night before was mine."

He nodded slowly.

"And during?"

"Films. Ice. Your terrible jokes."

"I don't have jokes."

"You'll get some."

"Soup?"

"Not with a whole lemon in it."

"The lemon was medically advised," he said, perfectly straight.

Then he reached across the bench and turned my hand over and held it.

"Yes," he said. "To all of it. In daylight."

The next nine days were the longest of my life.

I baked.

He carved.

We didn't so much as kiss for longer than a minute, because every time we did, we both started laughing at how hard we were trying not to.

Wilda put a calendar on the wall of things that tried to kill me and crossed the days off with a red marker.

"Stop that," I said.

"I'm counting down to my day off," she said. "Pure coincidence."

On the last Sunday in July, the evening was warm and still.

I put on a green cotton sundress I'd bought in the window of the shop by the ferry, and sandals, and left my hair down.

I walked up the hill by myself.

He was waiting at the bottom of the outside stair.

He'd showered.

He was barefoot.

He had flowers in his hand, a fistful of the weeds that grow out of the cathedral wall, and he looked like he'd been arguing with himself about them for an hour.

"I picked them off the north tower," he said. "Don't tell the board."

"They're perfect."

"They're weeds."

"So they're perfect," I said, and took them.

Upstairs, he'd propped the skylight open.

Summer air came down through it with the sound of the harbor, and a gull somewhere, and the bells striking nine.

My stone fox was on the windowsill.

The armchair he'd slept in for two weeks in May was still by the bed, with his pillow on it.

I put the weeds in his one mug.

Then I turned around.

He was standing in the middle of the long room, wings folded, hands loose at his sides, waiting.

"Ask me," he said.

"I want you," I said. "Tonight. Not because I'm burning. Because it's you, Orrin. Take your time with me."

His wings came open, slowly, all the way to the beams.

"I've got all night," he said.

He crossed the room in three steps.

I could count them.

I could hear the floorboards take his weight, the old timber answering him, the soft thunder of it.

Then his hands were on my face, his thumbs under my jaw, tipping my head up.

He was warm from the walk up the hill.

He smelled like stone dust and the dry weeds and the summer.

He looked down at me for a long time.

"Tell me what you want first," he said.

"I want you to take your time with me."

"I heard that part."

"Then I want you to stop asking."

His mouth twitched.

"Is that a threat?"

"It's a log entry," I said.

He kissed me.

It was slow, and certain, and it went on long enough that my tail found his leg on its own and wrapped around his calf.

I felt his wings come up behind me, not closing yet, just wide and dark and making a room of the two of us.

His hands went to the strap of my dress.

He pushed it down off my shoulder, one finger at a time, and kissed the bare skin there.

Then the other strap.

The green cotton slid down my arms and caught at my elbows, and he took his time with that too.

He peeled it off me like he was unwrapping something he'd waited months to open.

It pooled at my feet.

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