Page 60 of Snag
“A good bedtime story?”
“I die. Muta gets pissy. The edges of it all are really hazy. That happens …”
“When you die and come back?” My chest aches. Again. But this time, instead of ignoring it, I embrace it. I need all these parts of Zaya. I need to know that we would have found our way back to each other — always and forever, despite whatever fucking divine intervention tore us apart.
“Yes.”
“I want it.”
“It’s yours.”
“What can I give you?”
“The gryphon,” she says without any of her earlier hesitation.
I swallow, my stomach abruptly hollow. “It’s not …”
“A good bedtime story?”
“No. And it will … make you look at medifferently.”
She stills, just looking at me for a moment. I hold her gaze even though I want to shy away from the intensity of what she’s asking, whether she knows that or not. Then she drinks the last of the shake, sets the glass on the coffee table, and turns, legs tucked under her, body partly propped up on the back of the couch. So she can keep watching me as I tell my tale.
I shift the blanket around, keeping it mostly on Zaya and propping a few more pillows behind her so she can lean back, taking a moment to settle everything roiling around inside me. She doesn’t push or prompt me. She doesn’t even smirk knowingly.
“I’ve never told anyone the full story before,” I finally say, not certain why I need the disclaimer. “But Rath suspects some of it.”
“Then you should pick another story in exchange,” she says easily. “Because Cayley knows some of what I have to tell you about Tokyo. And Coda too.”
My chest tightens with another of those emotionally borne pains that are everything I desperately want to feel in one tight tangle, everything I lost for thirteen years. I knew I loved Zaya as a friend, absolutely adored her and relished how it felt so simple to just be with her. To be her friend. To make her laugh. Only then, years later, to realize that I loved making her pant and gasp with pleasure even more. Still later, when I knew unequivocally that I was deeply in love with her. Friends and lovers, and wanting to bind myself to her forever in the shifter way with bites despite the soul bond that already existed between us.
But none of that love ever hurt like this before I lost her.
My voice is thin, a little ragged, but I force the wordsnonetheless. I would endure more pain than this for Zaya. I have, actually. And I have no doubt that I will again.
“Our beasts all manifested late. Later than most shifters, who manifest in their mid to late teens …”
“Maybe the mythical needs more time to bake,” Zaya says, grinning at me.
A bit of tension eases from me under that grin, under her attention. Maybe her own essence has settled — she’s weary but not sleeping well. Yet.
I have plans to help her out with that — help her empty her mind enough to sleep — in any way she’ll let me.
“Maybe …” I chuckle, settling my gaze on the empty milkshake-stained glasses on the coffee table. “I can’t speak for Rath and Reck …”
“That’s okay,” she whispers. “I understand that … part of it all.”
The part about being soul bound to multiple people, I think she means. The balance in those relationships. It’s precarious right now between we three half-brothers. Rath will work his shit out, then Zaya and he will find some sort of equilibrium. But Reck … with Reck, I have to stop myself from interceding whenever he’s anywhere near Zaya. Well, from interceding any more than I already have.
Ultimately, even as overwhelmed as she currently is, Zaya can handle Reck. And how she handles him is none of my business. It never was.
“For me …” I push through all the clamoring thoughts, trying to ease into the story that Zaya has asked of me. Though I’m certain she’s just now getting an idea that what might have seemed a simple request — how I ended up with a gryphon for a beast — isn’t. “I think … because we bite-bonded that summer, and then you died … I think it might have … damaged my connection to my beast. Or somehow put it into a sort of stasis. I’d been feeling the stirrings of the beast from around my birthday that year, and specifically whenever we were intimate.”
“Hence the exchange of bites.”
I glance at her. Her expression is open, interested. Engaged. She’s leaning toward me with her right arm along the back of the couch, fingertips only inches from my shoulder. If I were to lean back …
I lean back. So she can touch me if she wants to, though I keep my head turned slightly away from her. For focus, not out of shame. At least that’s what I tell myself.
