Page 15 of Go Luck Yourself (Royals and Romance #2)

The wall-sized canvas he was working on is gone, replaced by a smaller one—well, small comparatively. It’s taller than he is, and it’s mostly blank, the outline of shapes in a rough pencil sketch, a few clusters of preliminary colors, this one looking to be greens and gold with accents of red.

He’s shirtless again, those paint-splattered sweatpants slung low on his hips. Standing in front of that canvas, one arm acting as his palette this time with globs of paint all the way up to his elbow, he dabs at the paint, wipes some on the canvas, back and forth in frantic motions so I know he’s channeling all his anxious energy into this.

I knock on the open door loud enough to cut through the music.

He suspends in the motion of reaching for the top corner. Every muscle along his bare shoulders winds so tight he looks liable to sprout wings.

Slowly, he pivots to face me.

I drag one hand across my mouth, wishing I’d thought more about coming down here, wishing I’d grabbed that notebook and looked back over things—

I’m here. Be here, damn it.

I step into the room.

Loch goes back to painting. “You’re drunk. I do na want you to do or say anything you’ll regret when you sober up. Go to bed, boyo.”

“I’m not drunk.”

“Yeah, I buy that. Out in Belfast for how long? With that girl of yours.”

“Iris? I’m pretty sure she would have entertained the idea of going home with Finn if she hadn’t been so drunk herself.”

That earns me a startled frown. “Finn?” He swallows his surprise with a grunt. “Good on Finn, then.”

But he resumes painting, focused on one particular streak of green, fingers going over it, and over it, and over it.

I take another step forward. “How did the meeting with your court go?”

He twists his hand to dig his knuckle into a smear of paint. “Fine.”

I could push him, call him on his bullshit, but he knows that answer isn’t enough. He knows in the way he drops his hand with a growl that devolves into a sigh.

“It was good,” he expands to the canvas. “They—they had no idea what I was—” He clears his throat. “They know now. What I’ve done. Most of it.”

“What about Malachy?”

He shrugs and mixes a few paint colors in a new spot on his arm. “I did na tell them how they should feel about Malachy. I… gave them the truth on my end. It’s all I can do.”

“But it’s still big. I’m proud of you.”

Loch’s shoulders go to his ears. “Shut it, boyo. Just—don’t.”

“Your sisters will be too. Well, after Finn gets over it. What you did today, opening up to your court—I’m really—”

“Go to bed,” he says abruptly, a whip-crack of command.

I recoil. “I’m trying to—”

“I know what you’re trying to do.” He wheels around, streaks of green, blue, and red across his face and torso, as much a part of him as his freckles. Does the paint on my face look that chaotic now, that smeared? “And I do na know how else to tell you that I will na do this to you. I will na be some cruel awakening for you once reason comes back in. Go to bed. ”

“You wouldn’t be an awakening.”

He snorts in disdain and spins back to his painting.

I close my eyes, trying to pretend I’m writing. That these words are coming out of my fingertips, not my lips. “It wasn’t a mistake. When we kissed. I couldn’t say that because of how much it meant to me, which is dumb, I know. I should be able to tell you. But I’m terrified of you. I’m terrified that you see the same broken shit in me that’s made other people leave because I’m a fucked-up mess and what do I have to offer you? God, Loch. Look at what you’re doing. Look at who you are. ”

I pry open my eyes. He’s still facing the canvas, his arm frozen, head cocked to the side.

“You aren’t an awakening,” I whisper. “You’re the whole dawn. And I can’t believe I ever thought I’d seen the sun before you.”

He arches into the canvas, hand coming down to scrub at his hairline, so when he turns, a polychrome paint streak bursts through the shock of his red hair. That’s what I focus on, the blur of colors all across his body as he closes the space between us in an angry, stomping rush.

Everything in me goes pliant, ready for whatever his reaction might be—please don’t throw me out, please don’t fucking throw me out—

His hand clamps around my neck.

I’m assaulted by his scent, dumbstruck by that expensive cologne and whatever paint chemicals are imbedded in his skin. Maybe that chemical twist shouldn’t smell so good, but it all combines to be him in the peak of his element, and it’s sexiness embodied.

My pliancy becomes submission, wide eyes and hands splayed as he keeps walking, walking, and I stumble backwards in his grip until my spine connects with the wall.

He presses the full length of his body against mine and uses his grip on my neck to tilt my face up to him, the paint slick and slipping between his palm and my skin.

“You’re a goddamn poet,” he snarls down at me, livid, “and I dinna stand a chance.”

He kisses me, and the world goes ultraviolet.

He kisses like he’s furious, all open-mouth attack that yanks the air from the very bottom of my lungs. I don’t match his energy for once, I don’t meet him in fury and rage; I stay malleable because the unarguable force of his storm is buffeting me like smacking hurri cane waves and I am so eager to get sucked away by that chaos. Let it take me, let all of him take me, and somewhere to my left his speaker is blaring out a song I don’t recognize, lyrics about fire, about lions, about roses.

He pulls back, lips tearing off of me. “Kris.” It’s furious still, but tinged with regret. “I need to tell you something first. I—”

I try to kiss him again, to shut him up, but his grip on my neck is relentless and runs a current of thrill from my shoulders to my groin.

“Tomorrow,” I say.

His brows twitch together.

“Not now,” I beg, and I don’t even care that I am begging. “Please. Tell me tomorrow.”

His gray eyes sift through mine, red-rimmed in his heightened emotions, or maybe he drank tonight—but he doesn’t seem drunk at all. He looks clear-headed, for good or for bad.

The clarity makes his shift from confusion to realization obvious.

His eyelids flutter in self-deprecation. I recognize that emotion so well.

“You should want someone better,” he tells me.

As good as confirmation. A red flag jabbed into dirt, ripping through roots and life.

I have one last chance to take the higher path. One last chance to do what I came to Ireland for, to stay safe in my miserable little world of order and duty and self-imposed rigidity.

“I don’t want better.” My thumbs dig circles into his hips, marking this spot, this moment. “I don’t want a fantasy. I don’t want sweetness. For once in my life, I want to be ruined.”

I see in real time the way he processes what I say.

Wide open shock.

And then.

A zeroing in. A full-system reset that fixates him on me with a singular, agonizing look so primal as to be animalistic. Hungry, and barely restrained, and in it, all my final vestiges of anxiety dissipate because he wants me.

“Yeah,” he whispers. “I can do that.”

He releases my neck to hook my shirt with his fingers, and then it’s up and off and this room isn’t at all cold but I shudder in the rush of being hit by another ruthless, thrashing wave, ribs contracting around unusable lungs.

Loch makes an absolutely shattering rumble in his chest, a growl that prickles goosebumps of anticipation up the backs of my arms. His fingers coast down one of my shoulders, following the exposed art across my pec—mountains, fang-like crests that ripple into the valley of my sternum. He jumps that valley to trail the other side’s tribal designs up to my shoulder, the barest fingertip touch that draws every bit of skin he ghosts over like iron filings to a magnet. His eyes plummet to the spreading branches of holly over my stomach, the leaves drawn to knife points as sharp as the mountains. Two of the bows frame my pelvis, extending beneath the edge of my boxers, and that’s where he stops, making another shattering rumble that sounds like anguish.

“Christ, Mary, and Joseph. These tattoos. Your muscles. It’s like you’re formed of all my weaknesses.”

“Am I?” I’m shocked I can speak at all for the lack of air in my body. “What else do you like?”

He spreads his fingers out on my stomach, and I can’t think, can’t breathe, his hand is flat on my body and I am undone.

“This,” he says, his lips against my cheek. “This. This. This—”

“I have more.” It squeezes out, some separate, hovering part of me. “Tattoos. More tattoos. You’ll have to find them, though.”

His hand stills. “ Kris, ” he beseeches, desperately messianic.

My mind goes to the huge tableau I have on my left thigh, how the art spreads down to my knee but, most importantly, up, up and up, and it hurt like a bitch to extend it where I did. But god, now, fucking now, I thank my past masochistic tendencies because I’m hit with the image of Loch licking the art on the inside crease of my thigh.

He grabs my neck again and his lips drop to my shoulder and he bites, hard. I cry out, scrambling for a hold on his arms, on his hips; my fingers brush the molded hills of his abs and I die a slow, quivering death.

Why the fuck did I wear jeans that are so fucking tight.

“Kris,” he says into the bite mark, the wash of his breath and the scratch of his beard oversensitive on the spot. I still have a bandage on my shoulder, and he lightly brushes his lips over it before sending those lips up to my ear. “What do you want me to do to you?”

I laugh. It’s wheezy and delirious. “I—I don’t know—”

He pinches my neck tight enough that I’m overly aware of my pulse throbbing, and when he drags his lips along my jaw and I twist to him, he keeps me down with a curling smirk.

“Asshole,” I grunt.

His mouth comes in next to my ear until he sucks my lobe between his teeth and stars break and reform in the bottom of my belly.

“Tell me what you thought I’d be like with you, then,” he whispers. “I know you thought about it, alone in that guestroom. Or in that shower? With my face in your head and your cock in your hand. Were we nice and slow, or did I fuck you until that filthy wee mouth of yours finally stopped talking?”

Holy shit.

I try to pull him closer, but he’s staying resolutely back now, far enough that the only points of contact are our hands on each other’s bodies.

“You did—” My supports are falling away. I’m left with an excruciating whimper. “Everything. Anything. I don’t know. I—fuck, Loch. Please. ”

I taste his grin.

“You’re so pretty when you beg, Kris.”

My hips cant towards him, but he’s too far, and I need him, I need friction, I need —

“But everything is an awful wide margin.” He nips my chin. “Tell me what you need, then.”

Another whimper. “Please, please. Fuck. I need—goddamn it, please —”

I claw at his chest, gain a grip on his shoulders, but it leads nowhere with the way he’s now studying my face, analysis that ends in a sultry chuckle.

“Ah, I think I know. You want me to decide, eh? You want me to take away the need to choose?”

My whimper this time isn’t pathetic.

It’s downright groveling.

I couldn’t be more desperately needy if I was on my knees, but I nod—fuck. Fuck. Yes. To not have to decide anything. To not have to make any choices, no mistakes, no possible regret or guilt…

“Yes.” I clutch his hand around my throat, the muscles in his forearm gone to marble. “Whatever you want, Loch. Whatever you want with me.”

A jagged gasp tears out of him. A slurred, hissing “Jesus Christ.”

He kisses me again, eating at me like he can consume me, and I hope he does. My pulse is going so fast I can feel it in places I never noticed before, my ankles, the inside of my elbows, I swear there’s sensation in the tips of my hair when Loch unwinds his fingers from my neck to grate across my scalp and pull.

The paint on his arm and hands is all down my neck, spreading across my body in the wake of his groping. The idea of being marked by him like this wrenches a groan out of my core.

He echoes it and closes his eyes to breathe in deep—one long, slow inhale, his forehead fixed to mine. “Kris,” he speaks against me, a catechism. “I need my mouth on you.”

I nod. Nod again.

His fingers trail down my arms, link around my wrists, and yank my hands above my head, pressed to the wall. I pant at the force of it, breathing rough and unsteady as I meet his gaze in question.

“Stay,” he hisses, then he’s gone, dropping to his knees at my feet.

There is no shame left, not after the noises I’ve already made, so I look down at him with unabashed desire. Those fingers are hooked in the edge of my pants like when we were in the kitchen, only this time, my belt snaps open, button and zipper next.

His eyes grasp at mine as he wrenches my pants and boxers down my legs. The air hits me like sandpaper, my hard dick bobbing in front of him, and his gaze travels from my lifted hands to my chest palpitating in rippling breaths to—

His brows pinch, the intensity in his eyes folding into something new and back again, emotional origami as he looks at the tattoo on my left thigh.

I knew he’d see it.

But it grates even more than the air on my bare skin, more than the rawness of having my hands over my head.

The light touch of his fingertips to that ink makes me jump, startled by the softness. His thumb rubs soothingly, like he knows he spooked me, knows fully well he altered the mood.

“What is this?” he asks in a matching soft voice.

I look up at the ceiling, heart a battering ram against my ribs.

Sure, I could brush it off. I could tell him I don’t want to talk about it.

But I’ve stripped so much of myself tonight. Holding this back would cheapen that.

“A scene from Bridge to Terabithia, ” I say to the industrial piping of the ceiling.

The tattoo is a forest with thick, lush trees, vines and plants and little glimmers that might be fairy dust. At the center, a rope hangs from the largest tree, the silhouette of a boy in mid-swing over a deep, endless black chasm. Halfway across, past where the arc of the boy’s swing will take him, a bridge is caught in mid-formation, grand and glistening and straight out of a fantasy.

“This is you?” Loch touches the boy on the rope.

I hesitate before nodding.

“You’re going to fall,” he states. It isn’t a question.

I glance back down at him. He still has his finger on my silhouette. Or younger-me’s silhouette.

“How do you know?” I whisper. Not trying to deny that he’s right, but honestly curious how he figured it out. Few people have guessed that. I tried to be flippant when I described what I wanted to the artist; I couldn’t bring myself to have Iris design this one.

Loch’s lips twitch in a shadow of his usual confidence. “Please, Kris. Art is what I do.”

“It was the last book my mom read to me before she left.” It’s out of me like buckshot and I gasp, biting down on that show of emotion, but it serves as a spotlight. Might as well scream this is deeply emotional for me.

Loch analyzes the image again. Traces his thumb over the boy’s silhouette.

He replaces his thumb with his mouth.

“Stand up straight.” That commanding tone brooks no room for argument.

My chest releases, another gasp, this one of relief. If rawness is acid, then Loch’s mouth is soothing the burn.

I drop back against the wall, hands still up, and there’s only his mouth, that tongue, tasting every divot and swell of ink on my thigh until my trembling is from anticipation, not overstimulation. He works slowly, savoringly, covering the whole span of skin before his face presses into the very spot I imagined, the swath where the tree canopy curves up the inside of my leg. He holds there and breathes, the bristle of his facial hair rough, and I didn’t know such a simple act could be so transportive.

He peers up over my body, leonine eyes and that wicked, cocky smirk.

“There ya are, Kris,” he says, and I think he means to say it louder, but it comes out crooned so Kris ceases to be my name and becomes an endearment.

My mind clears entirely as he takes my cock in his mouth.

Immediate tight suction. Wet, intense heat.

He holds for a moment, tasting, adjusting, and I whine pathetically, hips rocking in the slightest thrust. It’s a trigger; his hand starts working mercilessly at my base, pumping with his mouth in perfect, knee-weakening synchronization.

Oh, this is not going to last long, like, at all, fuck fuck fuck —

I try to control my breathing. Try to think about literally any thing else. Like the paint in his hair. That color green. Think about paint and—not what he’s doing with his throat—

My hands are fisted against each other, obediently above head, and the only things coming out of my mouth are pleading susurrations for more, for less, for everything.

He pulls back, stroking me slowly, a glow in his eyes, teasing pleasure. And I almost disintegrate right then, at that expression on his face and how it’s targeted at me, for me .

“Look at you, Kris.” His eyes drag over me again, heavier this time, pupils dark and predatory and visceral. “So sexy standing there, letting me play with you. So fucking good for me.”

His strokes increase, faster, barreling me closer and closer—

“ Loch. ” I can’t get out more than pinched, croaked noises. “If you—I’m going to—”

He shoves to his feet, keeping me in hand, and plants his other on the wall next to me. That unspoken statement of his control—that I would stay pinned to the wall like this, splayed out, while he’s almost leisurely in his stance—is everything I never knew I wanted, to have given myself over to this.

“Too—” I writhe and gasp, all liquid groans. “Too soon.”

He nudges my arm to make space next to my head, and his lips go to my ear. The barest brush of his tongue on the outer shell. “Boyo, what makes you think I’d be satisfied to only see you come once?”

I stop.

And let those words sink in.

Those voracious, beating words.

“For all you put me through,” he purrs, hand shuttling over my dick, twisting at the head, lubed by his saliva and my own precum as the edge barrels closer and closer, “you can bet that hot ass of yours that I’ll make you pay. I’m gonna turn you into a sated, sweaty heap on my studio floor.”

My brain splits in half.

Half again.

I’m shredding into pieces.

I find one last flicker of composure squirming through me. “You put me through hell too, you son of a bitch.” And then, “You think my ass is hot?”

He chuckles, deep, possessive. “You’re gonna come in my mouth, Kris.”

And he drops to his knees again.

Holy shit holy shit holyshitholy—

He sucks me down again and I manage one more labored breath before my body disintegrates, a rapid, relentless fire. He doesn’t slow his rhythm, doesn’t let up the suction so I can’t help the wail I make, painfully taut. My hands collapse down and I jam my fingers in his hair, holding him in place to drag out the reverberations. He swallows obscenely and hums, content, greedy.

Slowly, he stands, a satisfied grin on his face. I haul him into me and kiss him, needing to taste him, the proof of what he did on his tongue. He opens for me, hands clamping to my hips until he pushes me back against the wall and tips his head away with a long, vulgar lick over his bottom lip.

“One,” he says. “How many will it take to shut up that mouth after all?”

“God, you’re a cruel ass.” But I’m yanking at the strings on his sweatpants.

“You love it when I’m a cruel arse.”

“Fuck you.” I shove him back a step and topple to my knees, boxers and pants caught around my ankles, but grace was never meant to be a part of this. The wounds on my knees are barely healed, but the pain of dropping down on them is minimal—I’m a tunnel-focused creature of will and yearning, shelled out in a way I know I’ll be craving for the rest of my life.

There is only this moment.

There is only me having to kiss every one of the freckles on his hips, lips smearing through paint to leave a trail of clumsy marks across the plane of his stomach.

His smug-ass look burns down at me, drives me faster, harder, until I yank his pants to his knees and I’m there, at the root of him, sucking his long, thick cock down without pretense.

One of my hidden talents: a complete lack of gag reflex, and even with how long he is, I have him all the way down my throat on the first thrust. I swallow, hold the muscles tight, and he actually, finally, gasps.

“ Shite, Kris—”

The high of his gasp sculpts my focus to getting more of that noise out of him, which is a much-needed lighthouse. Realizing what I’m doing to him—the taste of him, the feel of him in my mouth, the warmth and the musk and the way he’s rocking subtly into me—has me on the edge again, and I’ll be damned if I give him another one from me so easily.

He grips my hair, at first gently twining it in his fingers, then wrenching it tight when I swallow on each bob of my head.

“Christ, Kris. So good, so fucking perfect on your knees for me.” His panted words are juxtaposition, coarse silk, his thumb coming to rest on the edge of my mouth. “I knew your lips would look sexy wrapped around me like this.”

I moan. Fuck do I moan, and I’m glad his studio is buried so damn deep in the castle.

My eyes water as I gaze up at him, his muscles writhing over me, his freckled skin coated in paint gone to wine-dark streaks. I understand in watching him, in memorizing the flow and twist of his body, why he paints. It’s this, that’s what he’s trying to capture, the collision of ardency and rigidity in the way a body can be both wound to strain and sparking with motion.

His breathing escalates. Redness seeps across his chest, a brilliant cherry contrast under that paint, and he cradles my jaw.

“You gonna finish me off?” The question is a breathy gasp, a warning.

I don’t stop, can barely nod, so I hum assent, take him all the way down, and hollow my cheeks.

A final shuddering gasp, his hands twisting in my hair, and he comes, the sensation of his release and watching, feeling him, shunting me into orbit.

I pull away, the back of my hand dragging over my swollen lips, and his eyes have gone glassy, half-lidded.

Emotions fight to surface, too many, too much, hitting me haphazard and making me aware of my bare skin.

“One for you,” I say instead of anything real, and I cock my head, feigning listening. “Is that… silence I hear? All it took was one for the mighty Lochlann to—”

He dives down on me, brute force pushing me flat out on the drop cloth, our bodies connecting in a wave of delicious heat.

“Are you backtalking me, boyo? See how that works out for you, go on.”

“Oh, I’m terrified.”

He kicks his sweatpants off and I work my shoes and clothes away too, then he’s back on me, the tarp cold against my spine. I kiss him and my body lights up in pyrotechnics when he splays himself over me, skin on skin that makes us both tremble. He alternates bites and kisses down across my chest, working in such a skillful rhythm of pain and pleasure that I thrust involuntarily against him, grasping, driving, and his weight bears down and digs right back.

He’s brutal and he’s sweet and he’s one talented motherfucker in absolutely everything he does, and I relent and tell him that in some sort of fever. And he tells me, too, he talks until I swear the murmur of his voice is enough to shove me over the cliff.

But I’m off the cliff already, body and soul tumbling into cloudy ether. I’ve been falling for some time, helpless and weightless, a plunge in the moments where our eyes connect. I’m falling, falling, and he glides his arm under my back and braces me and I think, maybe, the final landing won’t hurt.

Because he’s falling too, and we’re knotted up together, each a parachute, each in a terrifying free fall.

I wouldn’t say I wake up, but I come out of some kind of coma with soft yellow light pouring down on me. There’s a window high in the wall of Loch’s basement studio, fogged glass that lets enough light shine through for me to take stock of where, exactly, I am.

On the floor. There’s a pillow and a blanket—ah, yeah, he has bedding on hand for when he pulls late nights, he’d said.

Everything else slips back through me. Head to toe and up again in gradual, palpitating awareness, languid limbs and exhaustion, but the kind of exhaustion that’s relaxed on a bone-deep level.

I force my eyes open wider. There’s another pillow, but it’s empty—

A silhouette comes into focus next to me, backlit by that yellow light.

He has one knee propped up, a sketchpad balanced there, a pencil in one hand and a half-eaten apple in the other. He’s back in his sweatpants but covered in paint, and I know I am too; I can feel the chalky stiffness in my hair and all across my chest, legs, and arms.

“Hey.” I touch his ankle. The easy contact reawakens every single sensation from last night.

His eyes glide down to me. There’s a beat where we’re looking at each other. One that stretches, stretches, and my body goes from limp in relaxation to springing with tension. I can’t tell whether it’s good or bad.

Until he smiles. “Hey,” he says back. And points at a tray beside him spread with breakfast food and steaming cups. “Eat, boyo.”

My chest warms and I sit up, blanket pooling around my thighs. I don’t miss the way he makes note of it, and that tension cranks to passion. But I am hungry, so I take a scone and get one bite into it before I realize—

It’s morning.

My eyes flare. “We have an event today, right? What time is it? Shit—”

Loch puts his hand on my knee, staying me from getting up. Even through the thin blanket, electricity sizzles, stops me cold.

“There is an event, but I talked with Finn and Siobhán. They can handle it. Another festival, nothing you have na seen already.”

“But…” My mind is moving like sludge this morning. Thoughts come to me scattered and disproportionate like my brain isn’t sure how to reboot after going quiet for so long. “The press?”

Loch’s hand is still on my knee. His thumb moves over the blanket, rubs back and forth on me. “You’ve more than helped in that area. We can miss one day.”

I scrub a hand through my hair. One whole side is caked with paint, plastered down the side of my head. “But you only talked to your court a few hours ago. Shouldn’t you make an appearance at this event, reassert what you told them? We can—”

Loch leans forward and kisses me. He tastes like apples and mouthwash and it thoroughly shuts me up.

“I shoulda been clear,” he whispers into my lips. “I’m na willing to share you with anyone yet.”

“Oh.” My face heats. “Okay.”

“You should na worry about my court. About me. I have it handled now, I promise. I—” A rough, harsh swallow. “They know now most of what I’ve done is behind the scenes, anyway. I’ll be at the Dublin parade, though, and that’ll satisfy everyone.”

“You’ll confront Malachy there?”

He rests his forehead against mine. “Mm.”

It’s not exactly confirmation. But he pulls back and shoves my half-eaten scone against my mouth before I can ask more, and I don’t want to get into details of Malachy while I’m naked.

“I will na have you passing out.” His cheeks are stained pink through his own smears of paint.

“Bossy.” I eat.

“You do na seem to have a problem with it.”

I really, really don’t. “Only when you—” I catch a glimpse of the sketchpad in his lap. “Are you drawing me?”

His eyes cut down to the sketch, and that blush along his cheekbones darkens.

Loch turns the book.

It’s me, lying out on the floor, blanket around my hips, head to the side so it’s mostly the line of my jaw and a scattered tangle of my hair on the pillow. He’s drawn the paint across my body in the style of his larger canvas art so it looks even more like those are his marks on my skin.

The fire in my chest surges down to the base of my spine. I rest a fingertip where he’s drawn the side of my face. “It’s weird to see you do something more realistic.”

“I canna seem to break this way of sketching. A downside of going to school for it.”

“Downside?” I pick up one of the cups of coffee and the moment I take a sip, the rest of my mind kicks back on.

And even though I do want to have this conversation with him, the only thing I can think about is how he’s wearing pants and I hate it.

Loch sets the sketchpad to the side and finishes his apple, waving it as he talks. “The mechanics of it. They’re useful, but it gets me stuck in my own head a wee bit.”

“Ah. You mentioned something like that—knowledge versus education?”

“There’s knowing the steps, and then there’s being bound to the steps. I do na regret taking these courses, but I wonder what my skill would be like if I did na have formulas clogging my brain. Structure is grand, but it does na often allow for the free flow of creativity and joy—and that’s what it’s all about for me. Just like our Holidays. Joy.”

I lower the cup from my lips. “I know exactly what you mean.”

Loch’s eyebrow cocks encouragingly.

Discomfort presses against me and I shift under the blanket, legs stretching out only to fold back again.

“When I was in the English track, I went into those classes so eager . The things I was writing may not have been good, but they had a purity to them that I don’t think I’ll ever be able to recapture. And within the first week, I knew I’d made a mistake signing up for that track. The professors were so high on one specific way of writing, and they upheld it as gospel. We had to aspire to that style, or we were failures.”

“The classics, eh?”

It’s not surprising that he guesses. “Yeah. And I might have liked the books they upheld if they hadn’t been such jackasses about forcing them on us. The first assignment I turned in—” My chest aches at the memory, but there’s distance from that memory now, and I’m shocked that the ache twists into defensive anger, not resigned hurt. “The professor ripped it apart. In front of the class. It was a short story, barely a few thousand words long—and he decimated it, every word choice was wrong, every cadence of every sentence, the plot beats I’d chosen, it was too whimsical, it didn’t take itself seriously, and on and on. And I sat there, letting him eviscerate me in public, because he was the gatekeeper of this art form, right? If I couldn’t succeed here, I shouldn’t write at all.”

Loch’s hand is on my leg again. “That fucker. Christ. There’s no construction in public humiliation.”

“No. There isn’t.” I lock my hand in his and stare at that tangle. “So I switched to International Relations. And I hadn’t written anything for me since. Until—until, like, two days ago.”

“That’s what you were doing in the library,” Loch guesses.

I nod and look up at him.

“Colm said you asked him for a notebook. I’d—I’d hoped that was what you were up to.”

A blush creeps across my face. “Thank you. For the other notebooks. The pens, too.”

“Show me,” he whispers. “Your writing.”

“Oh, yeah, sure.” I snort. “You want to read my rambling, stream of consciousness nonsense after not having written in literal years ?”

“Yes.” His eyes sparkle and he gestures around the studio. “You’ve seen my soul, in all its unformed pieces. I wanna see yours, boyo.”

“My soul?” I laugh to cover the nervous hitch in my chest. “I don’t know. It’s rough shit. I’m not lying when I say it’s been years since I’ve done anything real and I don’t know if—”

“Kris.” He squeezes my hand. “You do na have to show me. What that professor did to your psyche was a right fucked-up thing to do. The only way to get that arsehole out of your head is to keep moving forward. There is no greater measure of value than that which you give to a piece of art. And if the stuff you’re working on is valuable to you, I wanna see it.”

There is no fantasy, no alternate dimension, no manufactured fictional world where I do not fall for this guy.

I mean, our version of post-sex talk is about the structure of art, for Christ’s sake.

“And you said I was a poet.” My voice is delicate and brittle and very far away. If I talk too loudly, it’ll break the hum of his words on the air, the net they’re weaving around me.

He smiles, a gentle upturn of his lips.

That smile goes hard, though, and his grip on my hand tightens.

“But first,” he says, “there’s something I need to show you.”

Tomorrow.

Tell me tomorrow.

Please.

The scone sits in my stomach like a rock. In too short a time, I’ve gotten used to giving in to what I want over what I need, and all I want right now is to tell him no, he doesn’t need to show or tell me anything. If he doesn’t, then I don’t have to decide what to do with the truth and I can keep pretending this is simple.

But I bob my head in agreement.

And then feel the paint all over me again, the mess that is my hair. “I, uh—we should clean up first, maybe.”

Loch’s face transforms, a quick slip back into that feral possessiveness that ribbons through my body.

“Not yet,” he says.

I pull at my paint-caked hair. “You’d make me walk around the castle looking like—well, looking very much like we had at each other in your studio?”

“It’s only Colm here now, anyway, and he will na be about. I told you, Kris; I’m na ready to share you with anyone yet. And that includes washing my marks off you.” He hesitates with a heavy breath. “I’ll understand though if you’d rather—”

“Yes. I mean, it’s fine. I can shower later.”

His eyes brighten with relief, but his energy is off, a wall erecting.

I know why. I do.

But I hate it, hate reality moving in so swiftly, hate the loss of an ease we only had for a few short hours.

He helps me to my feet and his gaze dips away respectfully and I hate that too. I hunt down my shirt, boxers, and jeans; they’re balled against the door and I pull them on—

Only to stop with a wheeze.

Loch glances over. “Hm?”

“You asshole.” I yank up my boxers and glare over my shoulder at him.

He frowns.

“There’s paint everywhere. Ev-ery-where, Loch.” I wave at my crotch. “You turned my dick into abstract impressionism.”

A pause in which the only sound is the jangle of my belt.

He breaks first with a splutter but scrambles to cover it by clearing his throat.

I laugh too, and then we’re both falling apart in a new way, clinging to laughter as a bridge through the conversation we know is coming.

I cross the room and kiss him over that bridge.