Page 156 of Knot in the Wedding Cards

His lips close warm around my fingers along with it, slow and deliberate, and he sucks the sweetness clean off each one like they're the most delicious thing he's ever been handed, like they're worth being worshipped by his tongue alone.

His eyes never once leave mine.

Not for a single second.

My heart is going absolutely feral in my chest.

I feel it everywhere — in the pulse hammering at the base of my throat, in the heat pooling low where I've got no business feeling heat at all, out here by an open fire with two other men not fifteen feet away.

His mouth is unhurried and filthy in the most patient way I've ever experienced, and the whole time his scent is winding itself up around me:cedar and smoked vanilla, black teasteeped strong, that clean mineral note of rain hitting warm stone.

It's the smell I fell asleep against when he’d hold me close, once upon a time. The smell I taught myself, brutally, to stop reaching for in the dark the moment I was left behind...

The s'mores are long gone, the marshmallow bag a crumpled ghost lying in the grass. The whisky bottle sits nearly empty on the stone beside my hip.

The fire's burned down to the good part now, all deep orange coals and lazy little flames, and everything past its circle of light has gone soft and blue and far away.

It's the kind of night that makes a person honest.

Or maybe that's just the tequila.

I've long since stopped being able to tell the two apart, and I've stopped caring to.

I stare at him, long and hard, waiting for it.

The flinch. The flicker. That hairline crack of hesitation, of uncertainty, that I've spent five years assuming was the thing that made depart before I could even walk down the aisle before the Lantern House for our union ceremony to start.

I wait for it to surface in his eyes now, the way it must have surfaced in them that morning.

I wait for the version of Beckett Shaw who runs.

I know that version of him intimately.

I built five years of armor against that version. He's the one who taught me a man can look you dead in the eye and mean every word of a promise and still be gone by sunrise — that conviction and cowardice can share the very same broad chest, and you never do learn which one's driving until the day it finally matters.

It doesn't come.

There's no crack in him.

There's only conviction — dark and steady and total, holding my gaze over the top of my own fingers.

Drunk or not, whisky-loose or not, I realize with a slow, dizzy lurch low in my belly that Beckett has made a decision.

The one thing I have always known about this man, bone-deep, is that when Beckett decides on a thing, heholdsto it.

No second-guessing. No backpedaling. No remorse.

He commits like a man setting the last stone into a wall he fully intends to have stand for a hundred years.

So I lean in.

I press my lips to his, and the kiss that opens up between us doesn't feel like a beginning at all. It feels like a reconciliation — the tired, tender end of a fight that's dragged on for five long years, both of us finally, at last, setting our weapons down in the grass.

He kisses me like a man come home from a long war.

I kiss him back like the house that waited.

There's no elegance in it, no careful choreography — it's teeth, whisky, and every unsaid thing we've hoarded, and I feel the fight go out of both of us all at once. That old bracing tension we've each been hauling around like a second spine just... releases, into the warm and the dark and the smoke.