Page 59 of Snag
“If you’re not too tired,” I say gruffly, not quite able to bounce back to pure levity so quickly. Even though I was the one to set the playful tone first, with the milkshake and the movie. I was the one who said I would exist in the now with her, utterly fucking contented.
“I’m not.” She takes my hand and tugs me toward the couch. “Coda finally collapsed, creeping up on forty-eight hours without sleep according to Gigi. If Bellamy is in the country, she’s shielding herself better than … expected.”
“Dire awry …” I murmur, setting my milkshake down on the coffee table and reaching for the blanket draped over the back of the sectional.
“Apparently,” Zaya says sourly, settling on the couch and curling her legs underneath her. She’s still clutching her milkshake. “She can’t get to Presh on the estate, though. And there’s a good chance that teleportation spell knocked her right out. She doesn’t wield her magic properly.”
I shake my head at her, sitting down next to her and drawing the blanket over both our laps.
“What? It might be important,” Zaya protests.
“Bellamy is a raging psycho.”
“Or … she’s a tool. Meant for fine crafting but being wielded like a blunt machete.”
I snort.
Zaya slaps me on the arm. “You know what I’m trying to say.”
A tiny missing section of our shared past, our soul connection — or maybe that’s what a minute shift in the universe feels like — settles on my chest. Because this is my Zaya … my Zaya … here with me.
I reach for her without checking myself, my reaction, and thankfully she sweetly snuggles against my chest, under my arm. Had she not, I don’t think I could have stoppedmyself from hauling her into my lap, kissing her until she melted into me, then fucking her hard right here and now.
“It was never like this,” I whisper to her, tucking the blanket around her legs. “Never quite as intense.”
“That’s okay, right?”
“It’s … perfect.”
In an effort to keep it easy between us, I reach for the remote, pulling up the movies I’ve already queued so Zaya can pick one.
“I was thinking …”
I glance over at Zaya, who’s holding her now-empty glass against her chest while hungrily eyeing my milkshake currently melting on the coffee table.
I laugh, grabbing my glass and offering it to her. She grins at me, not bothering to even play at protesting the exchange when I take her empty glass from her.
“You were thinking about my milkshake?”
She laughs. “No. Instead of a movie, I thought … you could tell me something I don’t know … not … not anything from the photos or how we … got separated.”
“I don’t actually know that part,” I say quietly. That conversation is the opposite of keeping it easy between us, keeping it in the now. I’ll go there with Zaya, of course, but …
“Not something that we shared previously, I mean. Not a memory of … us. Just something that …” Zaya looks at me, open but with a hint of tentativeness. “That’s … that’s something people do, right? Exchange stories from their recent past that they … think … might … help forge more intimacy?”
“I don’t know,” I say. “I’ve … never done that.”
“Me either.”
“All right.” I settle back on the couch, thinking but stilltrying to hold on to some of the playfulness that keeps sparking up between us. “Like, what level of intimacy are we talking about? Do you have a story queued up for me?”
“What do you want to know?” She bites her lip, then covers whatever is going on in her head with a sip of milkshake.
I want everything, of course. But I suspect that will take a lifetime. And even if Zaya, in this current incarnation, and I don’t know each other well yet? Even if we’re missing the threads she needs to see, to feel, to agree that we’re connected by the universe? I already know I want that lifetime.
“Tokyo,” I say. “We almost crossed paths about eighteen months ago.”
Zaya nods, slightly hesitant. “It’s not …”
