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Nepheli

Darling

Little Butterfly

Nepheli, my darling,

I seem to have developed the most inexplicable habit of not being able to breathe whenever you are not near. I believe the only option left is for you to stay by my side forever to save me from this miserable fate.

I need you.

Desperately so.

Don’t leave.

That was it. That was all I’d written. And then I’d spent an hour or two staring at the page, unmoving and unblinking, when someone finally knocked on my door to remind me of the time.

I sucked in a quick breath. The air was sweet; magic, cypresses, and honeysuckles. Home.

Father was examining me closely, the way he would an opponent, with a furl in his brow and a ticking muscle in his jaw.

“What?” was all I said, bending to rest my elbows on the balustrade.

“You seem different,” he said.

“Different how?”

He returned his attention to the horizon, and his wordless answer burned and bubbled inside me like a witch’s spell. Then he sighed in calm dignity and subtle accusation. “Does Nepheli know about your curse?”

“Of course she knows,” I bristled, whirling on him. “What kind of question is that?”

Dad raised his hands between us. “I don’t wish to fight. There’s just a lot of speculation going around—”

“Nepheli isn’t going to break my curse. Let’s start with that,” I cut him off, wondering how many more times I would have to explain this before they finally got it into their heads and I lost mine. “She is a brilliant young woman who has a thousand more adventures to live, and she is going to get on that ship tomorrow morning, and she will go to live them. End of story. A happy ending.”

Dad raised his brows at me. “Whose happy ending?”

“Hers.”

“And what about you?”

“I don’t deserve a happy ending. Not after all I’ve done—”

“No one is blaming you for anything, Apollo,” Dad interjected, his gruff tone and soft words a wild contradiction. “I am blaming that witch who found a twenty-year-old drunk, heartbroken boy at her doorstep and didn’t send him home.”

“I was a grown man, Dad,” I said. “I knew what I was doing. I’m the sole perpetrator of my misery. I deserve this. You’ve taught me to always take responsibility for my mistakes. Well, I’m taking it. But Nepheli cannot and will not be one of them.”

His eyes widened on me. “You care about her,” he whispered in half-shock, half-hope. “Yougenuinelycare about her.”

“She’s easy to care about.”

Gods, Nepheli was so easy to care about. So easy to need. So easy to long for. I tried not to think about last night. I tried to be a decent man. I tried to pretend that it was possible to unlearn the pathways of her body. But I could not, for her body had told me things, and I had listened, learned, memorized faithfully. Because how do you unlearn the taste of one’s mouth? How do you forget the face they make when they surrender to you? How do you erase the feel of someone’s warmth from your fingertips, the sight of their skin from your eyes, the sound of their pleasure from your ears? How far back in time would I have to travel to forget what it felt like to want her? Last night? The night at Walder’s? The night she slept curled in my arms at the inn? The minute I walked inside her Shop?

I could not—I did not want to unlearn. I wanted tobecome. I wanted to transform myself into the man she deserved. Someone reliable, someone with honor, someone she needed intimately—an inseparable and irreplaceable part of her life.

Yes, there was hope, but there was not enough time for it to come to fruition. And I couldn’t be selfish with her again and demand more. I had to think of what was best for her. And it was not me. Gods, anyone would be a better option than me.

Dad clamped a hand down on my shoulder and shook me out of my thoughts. “Apollo, don’t you understand what this means? You’re starting tofeelagain.”