Page 85 of The Golden Hour

Perhaps my mother, had she escaped Vivian’s ambition, could have changed the Avellino foundation. Gentle, a dreamer and artist, from my father’s rare stories and those old albums, she was in all ways the antithesis of Vivian. Would she have altered the family’s dark fate? Would her gentleness have softened my father in time? Or would she have shattered her own foundation and replaced it with theirs?

I’ll never have the answers I want, the questions themselves intangible. I’ll never know my mother or her family. She was an only child, her parents dead before I was born. Perhaps someday I can learn more. Find more stories from her life before the Avellinos.

The full moon buzzes in my blood, whisking me from one thought to another, one unknown to the next. I can’t change the past, nor who I was in it. Life will never be what it might have been, only what is.

But that knowledge doesn’t make the present any more bearable.

Only he does.

Rolling to face him, I read his features with my fingertips. Absorb his breath with mine. Revel in the tragic twists of fate that brought us together.

“Stay with me,” I whisper.

His eyes open, the depths too clear for someone who was supposedly asleep. “Always, princess.”

Shifting forward, I fit my nose beside his, my mouth to his mouth. “You’re awake.”

His lips curve. “Guilty. You’ve been flopping around for hours. How’s a man supposed to sleep through that?”

But there’s worry beneath the words, and I know he was afraid I’d leave while he slept. All of us broken. Will we ever rebuild? Or is this our fate—to see the world through a veil of fear and uncertainty put in place when we were too young to defend ourselves against it?

“What’s on your mind, princess?”

I blink, focusing on his voice. “Will this heaviness ever go away?”

His arms come around me, rolling us until I’m settled on his chest. “It will. I promise.” The words are punctuated with soft kisses, and end with a deeper one.

I love the taste of him, the effortless way we kiss, like our bodies aren’t learning but remembering each other. The strength and dependability of his arms. The pleasure his touch gives me.

But it’s not enough.

Finn breaks our kiss. “What’s wrong?”

I shake my head. “I don’t know.”

The truth is, what I want I can’t speak. And what I need I can’t name.

“Does this feel wrong?” he asks carefully.

“No,” I say quickly. “It’s nothing to do with you. I think I’m what’s wrong. I’m wrong.”

He tenses beneath me, brow furrowing. “That’s bullshit. You’re everything that’s right.”

He can’t see it. Feel it. This shifting inside me. The broken pieces of my foundation fighting to find new alignment.

I move off him, swinging my feet to the floor and cradling my head in my hands. “I’m sure it’s just everything catching up with me. My head won’t shut up. Maybe I just need a drink. Something to take the edge off.”

The sheets move as he does. “Do you trust me?”

I lift my head, glancing back. He’s sitting up, moonlight dancing on his bare torso, shadows nesting happily in cuts of muscle. Awed, as I am nearly every time I look at him, I offer a distracted, “Yes, of course.”

He flings the sheet and pillows from the bed, leaving the mattress bare of everything but our naked bodies. Lowering onto his back, he tucks his arms behind his head.

“Use me.”

Despite everything we’ve done together, I blush and laugh nervously. “What?”

“As much as I’d like it to be true,” he muses with a wicked glint in his eye, “sex with me won’t be the answer to all your problems. But I think, maybe, if you can be in control here, it will make you feel less out of control in here.” He taps his temple, then resumes his supine position. “You’re a pressure cooker ready to blow. What you’ve been through… it’s a fucking miracle you haven’t lost your shit yet. I want you to let go safely, right now, with me. I’m not in charge, you are.”

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