Page 114 of Touch

For his part, her beloved had responded to Iris’s temper by grabbing the only surviving plate off the table and nonchalantly tossing it over his shoulder, cracking the dish in half. Afterward, they’d doubled over, laughing hysterically. For all their mutual cravings and passions, their bond is also sportive and snarky.

Iris’s other scars are mysteries. One is a slash across the inside of her palm, though she doesn’t know where she got it. A vague image flashes in Iris’s mind of another female with scarred hands, the marks resembling wildflowers. However, the picture vanishes a second later. Something had happened in the past to wipe her mind clean, like a snowplow pushing through slush. She’d lost her memory from some traumatic event but had met her beloved shortly after, when she’d beat him in a round of archery, in the abandoned training range at the edge of the village.

Since then, they’ve been restoring that building with the help of their friend, Griffin, who is courting another friend, Holly. Iris plans on giving lessons once the renovations are complete. Already, she has an extensive waitlist for clients.

As for the rest—where she comes from and who her family had once been—none of those details have returned. The past is a murky pit, equally distressing and reassuring.

Iris snuggles into the black scarf Georgie had gifted her. When her beloved had introduced them, the woman had been flabbergasted.

“You’re Iris?” Georgie had asked.

Nevertheless, the matriarch had recovered quickly, accepting some private assumption she must have gotten wrong. “Well, my guy has good taste,” she’d said, linking arms with Iris in a motherly fashion.

While planning her forthcoming archery business, Iris works on the details from home. Her office is down the hall from Andrew’s, located on the first floor of his house.

Theirhouse, he insists.

In the beginning, Iris had avoided the people in Evershire, overwhelmed by their attention, inexplicably afraid of couples who seemed familiar but couldn’t be. Her behaviorhad been awkward back then. However, she no longer feels apprehensive.

Every once in a while, people in the village even approach Iris for relationship advice. She has a rather staunch opinion, drawing others to her with their dilemmas, but what each person does with the advice is up to them.

Iris suspects this won’t end when she opens the archery range. Truly, she doesn’t mind. Helping people with their romantic entanglements feels right, as if she’s playing impartial matchmaker.

She recalls debating the subject with her lover sometime prior, while they’d been firing arrows at each other in the woods. It had been a heated debate, which had riled her up. To this day, Iris is uncertain why she’d taken a random subject personally. They’d talked about whether fate exists and if people control their destinies.

Her beloved had said, “A real bond is an imperfect one.”

Layers of snow glimmer through the forest. The temperature drops, and Iris closes her eyes to savor it.

Snow crunches beneath a pair of boots. Her eyelids flip open, focusing on the powdered branches. There’s a distinct scent, masculine and close.

How curious. She recognizes this moment as though reliving it, except on the ground this time instead of… Where?

A pair of toned arms slip around her waist from behind. Hot puffs of breath caress her neck. The atmosphere smells of cedarwood and eucalyptus.

“Up to trouble, are you?” he teases.

“The trees are lovely at night,” she conspires. “They don’t look as tall in the dark.”

“In other words, you’ve been thinking about climbing one.”

She never fools him. These woods, and this bridge where they stand, are special places. At least according to the journal they’d found a while back, which chronicles bits and pieces of their relationship yet remains cryptic about many other details. Certain perplexing passages seem as though they’d been deliberately hidden. Much like a code.

Her beloved spins Iris to face him. Ah, there he is.

White hair. Pewter eyes. Impish features.

Andrew combs through her tresses. He looks tired from a day of editing his upcoming release, a spin-off from a prior series about a war between outcast gods and their sovereigns.

Iris winds her arms around his shoulders. She loves his body, loves the wordlove, and loves attaching that word to him. She may be a simple woman who cannot climb trees, but she can love.

“Hello, my beloved,” she flirts.

“Hey, my selfish one,” he husks. “What are you thinking about?”

“The fact that you never stop asking questions.”

“Because I never want to stop knowing you. But if I’m wearing you out one way, let me wear you out in another.” His eyes gleam like liquid mercury. “Give me your mouth.”

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