Chapter 667 | Emotionally Illegal

Chapter 667: 667 | Emotionally Illegal

"I think I’m in love with you."

The words slipped out of her on a downstroke, her hips still grinding into mine, and her face caught up to what her mouth had done a full second too late.

The fairy lights over the headboard flared white. Gerald the water stain melted off the ceiling, and a dining room poured into the space where he’d been, gold light spilling across plaster that had stopped being plaster.

It was a long table carved from some dark wood that probably had an Italian designer’s name attached to it. Twenty chairs lined the sides, each one pushed in neat and empty, and an unlit chandelier hung over the center like a held breath. Rain streaked the tall windows at the far end, where a Seattle evening was going grey.

At the near end of the table sat a little girl in a sequined recital dress, her blonde hair pulled into two braids and her sneakers dangling a foot above the floor. A grandfather clock ticked somewhere outside the frame, loud enough that I could hear each second drop into the silence. In front of her, propped against a full glass of milk, a phone glowed with one message.

Congrats sweetie!!! So proud of u. Love, Mom & Dad ??

Eight-year-old Felicity Hardy stared at that phone without picking it up. She swung her feet once and then went still again, because apparently even that much noise felt too loud for a room that big.

Real Felicity followed my eyes upward, and her hips stopped mid-roll. The color drained from her face so fast her freckles stood out like flecks of paint on a white wall, and her nails sank into my chest hard enough to sting.

"No, no, no, that’s not, I didn’t mean to project that, turn it off."

She squeezed her eyes shut, and the dining room flickered without going out. Her hand shot up toward the ceiling to scrub the image away, and it only sharpened, the milk glass catching the reflection of that dead chandelier in perfect detail.

"Lukas, don’t look at it. Please don’t look at that, it’s so embarrassing, oh my god, I’m literally going to throw up on you."

I had about forty jokes loaded in the chamber, and every one of them would have landed, because Felicity treats a laugh as an emergency exit and runs for it on reflex. I could have said something about her parents needing a style guide for texting. I could have asked if the milk was organic. She would have laughed, and the dining room would have vanished, and we both would have spent the rest of the semester pretending I never saw an eight-year-old sitting alone at the end of a table built for twenty.

I left every joke where it was.

I reached up and took her face in both my hands, and she flinched like I was about to push her off. Her cheeks were hot under my palms and already wet.

"I saw it," I told her.

Her breath hitched. She tried to turn her face away, and I didn’t let her, because if I let her she’d vanish behind that smile and I’d never get the real version back today.

"I’m not leaving, Felicity. You can paint every empty room you ever sat in across that ceiling, and I’ll still be lying right here underneath you."

"You can’t say stuff like that while you’re inside me." Her voice cracked straight down the middle. "That’s emotionally illegal. There’s a law somewhere, I know there is."

"Percy would know the statute number."

"Don’t make me laugh right now." She laughed anyway, and it came out wet and broken, and a tear dropped off her chin onto my sternum. "I’m being so serious and you’re making it worse."

I brushed my thumb under her eye and caught the next tear before it fell. The second heartbeat beneath my ribs pressed outward against her palm, slow and warm and stubborn, and I watched her feel it.

"I’m not ready to say it back yet."

Her whole body tensed above me, a flinch running from her shoulders down to the thighs bracketing my hips. I kept my hands on her face and my voice level, because this next part needed to land exactly where I aimed it.

"When I say it, you’ll know it’s true. That’s the one word I’m never going to lie to you about, even if lying would make you feel better that night."

She stared at me for a long moment with her mouth open and her mascara starting to slide. Then she laughed again, harder this time, and it dissolved into a sob halfway through and came back out the other side as a laugh.

"That’s so annoyingly mature," she managed, pressing the heels of her hands into her eyes. "Like, genuinely, who raised you, I’m so mad right now. You were supposed to panic. Boys are supposed to panic and say something stupid so I can be mad at them and feel normal."

"I was raised by a woman who negotiates with federal agencies for fun."

"Ugh, that tracks." She sniffled and dragged her wrist across her nose, which would have horrified the version of her who walked into Halloran with a ring light in her luggage. "Okay. Okay, I’m good, I’m fine, I’m so normal about this."

Above us the dining room thinned out into gold dust. The little girl and the table dissolved together, and Gerald drifted back into place, lopsided rabbit shape and pink heart sticker and all. The fairy lights settled back to their soft amber glow.

Felicity looked up at Gerald and let out a long, shaky breath.

"Can you hold me?" Her voice came out small and stripped bare, nothing like the voice she uses in hallways. "Just for the rest of it. I don’t want to be up here by myself."

I sat up and wrapped my arms around her waist, and she folded into me like her spine had given up the fight. Her legs locked behind my back. Her breasts pressed flat against my chest, warm and damp with sweat, and I could feel her heartbeat hammering against mine through the skin.

She started moving again, and this time she went slow.

It was a long, deep roll of her hips that took me all the way inside her before she lifted back up, and then she sank down again just as slow. Her forehead dropped against my shoulder. Each time she bottomed out, a soft broken sound escaped her, ahh, hnn, ohh, muffled into my neck where nobody but me would ever hear it.

I slid one hand up into her hair and held the back of her head. My other hand spread across the small of her back, where her skin was slick and burning, and I guided her down a little harder on the next stroke. Her whole body shivered against me.

"Like that," she whispered into my throat. "Lukas, like that, please, don’t stop."