Page 69 of Grimoire Girls Expulsion

"I know you hate it. I'd still pick you up and carry you up those steps, and I'm not going to lie here and tell you I wouldn't."

She doesn't say anything for a long time. Her heart goes hard and fast, the way it does when she's angry, but she doesn't take her feet off my shins. I can't tell which of those to believe, so I listen to both.

"I'm still mad at you," she says after a while. "And are you sure you'd do it again, or are you just saying that?"

"I'm sure." I'm not sure of much this week, but I'm sure of that, and she can hear it in my voice the same way I'd hear it in her blood.

"Then I'm going to be mad at you for a long time."

"Okay." I'd rather she was mad at me under my blanket than anywhere else in this house. She stays.

"I told Nell the truth," I say finally. "Every time she asked."

Everly just waits.

"Back in June she came and found me in the garden. She said, Promise you'll always tell me what you hear, even if it's bad. So I did. After that she came down to breakfast and looked at me first, before she even sat down, and I told her what I heard. One heartbeat. Only hers." My voice has started shaking, and I can't make it stop. "I told her she was fine."

Everly finds my hand under the blanket and holds on.

She doesn't tell me it wasn't my fault, and I'm glad. I wouldn't believe her, and then I'd have to listen to her heart while she tried.

I put my hand on her warm cheek. Under my palm I can hear her heart, through her skin and her jaw and everything. I've always been able to hear it—the first week I knew her, I heard it from across the quad. The only time I couldn't was those weeks after the gates, when my magic was stopped up inside me and I lay in the back of Brittany's car hearing nothing at all. Before that, I never thought it could go quiet.

She kisses me.

It's slow. Her mouth is soft and a little chapped from crying, and we lie there under the blanket kissing as if there's nowhere in the world either of us has to be. Her fingers come out of the sleeve to touch the side of my neck, right over my pulse, and stay there.

The bond opens between us.

It's much louder since we tied ourselves into the ley lines. All last year it came through thin, a warmth at the bottom of my chest that I had to listen for, but now it's just there, in both of us, and I don't have to listen at all. Her want comes into me as heat under my breastbone, low and spreading. Mine goes back into her, and I feel it land—my heart kicks, then hers kicks right after.

I've been hard since her mouth touched mine, aching against her hip through my sweatpants, and she can feel it. She presses closer with a small sound against my mouth.

"I can feel you wanting it too." My voice comes out lower than I expect. "I could feel it before you got to my door. Your blood was already coming up warm."

"I came here to sleep."

"I know. Your blood didn't."

She huffs out a breath against my mouth. "Remind me never to play poker with you."

I take the sweater off her slowly, pushing it up her stomach and kissing each new place as I uncover it. When I get it over her head and drop it on the floor, she's naked underneath. She shivers, so I pull the blanket back up over both of us and put myself between her and the window.

I kiss her shoulder, then the inside of her elbow, where the skin is thin and her pulse comes right up to meet my mouth. I kiss down her ribs to the place under her left breast where her heart is loudest, and I stay there with my lips against her skin, feeling it beat into my mouth.

Every time I touch her, I feel what it does to her. It comes up the bond as a pulse of heat and lands in my chest a beat behind my mouth. When I take her nipple into my mouth and suck, gently, the heat that comes back is strong enough to make my cock jerk against the mattress.

I've really missed this.

"Talk to me." Her fingers are in my hair. "Tell me what you feel."

So I tell her.

"Your heart's going fast," I murmur against her skin. "Faster every time I touch you. It jumps when I use my teeth." I use my teeth, lightly, and it jumps, and she gasps. "Your blood's all coming up to your skin. Here." I put my palm flat on her chest. "And here." Her stomach. "And lower."

"Ren," she moans.

"You want my hand lower." I can feel it in her blood, a pull towards my hand so clear it might as well be words. "You want it, and you haven't even asked yet."