Page 92 of The Little Shop of Grand Curiosities

He slanted his face directly over mine and pressed a kiss on the tip of my nose. “Did I wear you off, darling?”

Indeed, I was a little sore. My muscles felt liquid, and my head was blissfully muddled, yet somehow, a stream of worry managed to overtake me as I gazed up at him now.

How could I not be worried when there were so many questions and so many things left unsaid?

Should I expect him to feel things for me that he wasn’t equipped to feel? Would he only learn to imitate love for my sake, and would I grow to resent him for it? Did we even have a future beyond the cold edge of tonight?

There was nothing more frightening than uncertainty for lovers. Now all the things we hadn’t talked about beforehand crept on me like phantoms, pale and grim, wavering out of the darkest corners of my mind. But I was not sober enough to confront them. I was still drunk on him. Still dizzy from his touch and still hoping for more. I wanted to stay in this blissful torpor forever, for our lives to become an endless continuation of this night and nothing more.

I summoned some heart and shot him a mischievous smile as I slid my hands over his naked chest. “I have plenty of energy, Zayra.”

He raised a brow, curling a hand at the nape of my neck. “I’m fairly certain that’s your I-have-questions face.”

My thoughts stammered as his thumb traced my mouth with an indulgent back and forth before pressing down on the seam to nudge my lips apart. Without permission, my tongue darted out to taste him, and he groaned as I sucked him in.

“Nepheli, I’m trying to have a serious conversation here,” he grunted, withdrawing his hand.

“But there is no need,” I whined.

“I can practically see your brain overanalyzing something, Little Butterfly. Did I do something—”

“You didn’t do anything,” I blurted out, a sense of panic rising in my blood.

His head fell back on the pillow, and I watched as his eyes shadowed and the column of his throat constricted. His voice came out broken, “I want you to be happy.”

Needing the reassurance of his skin on my skin, I leaned down on him completely. My hair draped like a curtain around his face, and my pendant dangled between us, just above his own neck, a flash of silver in the semidarkness. “But what about you?” I whispered, everything floundering inside me. “Can you feel happy?”

His eyes were moonlit and surprised staring up at me. And soft. Soft, like the next words he uttered, “Nepheli, I don’t think you understand how much light and beauty and laughter you’ve brought into my life by simply existing a few days in it.” He took my hand and brought it flush with his hard, unwavering chest, his lack of pulse stark in the moving moment. “I have nothing in here but you.”

Nothing could rise to my throat in response. It was impossible to put into words the way he made me feel. So I put it into touch. I traced with my fingertips the familiar lines of his face—the arch of his brows, the slope of his nose, the irresistible shape of his mouth. Time seemed to stand still for us, but it was an imperfect stillness, all skipping breaths and stuttering heartbeats.

“Why are you looking at me like that?” he whispered.

“You’re so beautiful,” I murmured, leaning in to kiss his brow.

“In Thaloria,” he said, “we believe that if you kiss someone above the eyes, you won’t see them again. Are you telling me goodbye, Nepheli?”

“No,” I promised. “No. I meant what I said earlier.”

He lifted his chin and crashed his lips on mine, his hand slipping over the back of my head. We kissed like this for a while, deeply, indolently, until our lips grew numb and raw and we had to pull apart.

“I can come to live with you in Elora if that’s what you want,” he said.

I chuckled, thinking he was joking. “Apollo, you’re theheirto the throne. You cannot permanently move out of Thaloria.”

He pulled back and raised himself up on his elbows, the blue sheet falling to his stomach. I searched for his eyes, alarmed by the sudden shift in his demeanor. “Nepheli,” he said somberly. “I will never become king.”

I frowned, confused. “What are you talking about?”

“As long as I am without a heart, I am unfit to rule. Thaloria will not have a heartless ruler.”

The proudest people, and I humiliated them,I remembered him saying at Isa’s manor. This was what he meant. This was why he’d been searching without rest for all these years. He was trying to earn back the life he’d lost in more ways than one. And I knew he would say that he’d brought this upon himself, but it was still so unbelievably unfair—one heartbreak and one mistake to alter a life forever.

Apollo deserved a second chance. He was more than his mistakes and more than his past. No one should only be defined by the broken parts of themselves.

The more I thought about it, the more this sense of selfhood overwhelmed me. A sense of being me in a form that was new but not unfamiliar. A version of myself I had misplaced and Apollo, without meaning to, had helped me find, and now all I wanted to do was help him back.

I slipped on top of him, straddling him around the hips. “Then we’ll start looking again,” I said, determined. “Together. We won’t stop until we find your heart and you’re restored and able to claim your throne.”

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