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Hunter should be paying more attention to shaving. He should look at himself in the mirror, focus on the sticky, coconut-scented lather the razor leaves behind. (Coconuts smell good, whatever they are.) He’ll nick himself if he’s not careful, but Willow was right, “women’s” razors pamper his skin.
He focuses instead on rolling the same words over and over in his mind, an unwanted echo melded with his gray matter. The passage struck him as he read Grimwalker Extinction, a tattered copy stolen from the Hexside library. It had stayed highlighted in abomination coven pink ever since. The physical book might still be in the Paranoratorium, under some lightless, benthic heap, but the text is grooved into his brain. He can recite it as mouth movements and noise, the sound becoming an ignorant ship over an unexamined gyre churning beneath. He delivers it to himself as a monologue, steeled expression on his face as he recites a warning for his destiny:
“While received wisdom is that grimwalkers cannot feel love, this obscures the underlying nature of the situation. Grimwalkers can and sometimes do feel love, but it is dangerous. As their primary ingredient is palistrom wood, which is most combustible, it ought to be said instead that grimwalkers should not feel love, lest the flames of passion consume them.”
He gives the sentences the cadence of a chant, even as they carry the reverse intent of a prayer. Since he and Willow started getting closer, as measured by prolonged eye contact that graduated to tentative hand-holding, the meaning has been harder to ignore. This is a reminder of his limits, a delineation of the borders of a death sentence. He left Belos behind, but this still follows. There is no higher power to genuflect to and surrender this burden upwards. Even the Titan steeps in the Boiling Sea of another dimension.
“Focus, Hunter.” He slaps his cheeks and examines his reflection. It’s been a couple weeks since Willow touched up his hair, but her work is holding its shape as it grows out.
“Hey.” Willow knocks twice on the doorframe.
“Hi!” Hunter startles. He finds the razor still in his hand and sets it down, wondering what Willow heard.
She looks at his forehead, gauging the molasses-slow creep of hair from his widow’s peak. “Think you’re due for a trim?” Her fingers make a clipping motion.
“More like a pruning.” Hunter says things he really shouldn’t with wood and trees so often on the mind.
Willow measures hair from the top of his head against her knuckles. “Hm, it’s not that long, but I could snip off a little on the sides, neaten you up a bit.”
“Yeah, that would be really nice.”
Hunter wants to be neatened up. He could want to be mussed, messied, whatever Willow offers. He wouldn’t have asked if she hadn’t volunteered, but he enjoys the feeling of her fingers in his hair, the intimacy it takes to let someone get close to you with blades without feeling fear. He'd never thought of haircuts like that until she was snipping away the first time. The silence in his head was astounding. He had discovered a new level of connection and calm.
“Ready now, or should I wait till later?”
“Now is good!” He accepts too eagerly.
They’re always looking for reasons to touch each other without saying so.
“Please,” he adds after too long.
“This should be quick.” She drags fingers through his hair to suggest she could make it take longer if asked.
He wants to ask but doesn’t dare.
A towel goes down over Hunter's shoulders. Willow's comb and scissors work their way around his head, scattering a halo of hair on the floor.
It’s over too soon. Willow puffs at the stray pieces of hair on his neck. They smile at each other, admiring but measured enough to have plausible deniability. The chatter is limited to tunnel-visioned topics: look up, that tickles, tilt your head, I need to sneeze. Nothing about the apple-blood shades their faces turn or the burn in his ears.
Hunter helps sweep up. It’s his hair, after all.
“Why do you do this for me when there's a barber in town I could go to?” His forehead wrinkles. “And doesn’t barber feel like a misnomer since human hair has no barbs or thorns?” He looks at the ground, where his hair doesn’t either. “I sound like I'm complaining, when that’s the opposite of what I want to do. What I mean is, thanks for doing this when you don’t have to. I appreciate it.”
“Have you ever thought that maybe—” Willow lifts his chin with a finger and meets his gaze. “Love makes you want to do more for people?”
“Oh. Yeah! That's neat.” Hunter’s gut goes cold. He knows that’s not what you say when people say they love you, when they frame your face with soft touch. He knows how normal people are supposed to respond, but what’s he supposed to do? Say it back, when it could be the magic word that turns him into a firework and sets the fuse? No chance. He settles for asking, “what’s that like?”
“What’s it like to love you?” Willow bites her lip. She's prepared for this moment, dreamt about it, but the words evaporate when she reaches for them. They’ll be back in time, precipitating into speech. For now she smiles like her brain has caught fire.
Hunter tries to explain. “Yeah, like, for me, what I feel for you is something I've never felt about anyone. It's like anger but— good? I want to protect you. Which is silly because you’re stronger than I am. You’ve literally bench pressed me, done a push-up with me on your back, and done a pull-up with me hugging you. Did I miss anything?”
Willow shakes her head the smallest amount, trying not to smile so obviously at his rambling.
“I forgot one! Those sprints while carrying me like a princess!” Hunter offers an obvious smile of his own. “Point is, you have multiple muscle systems that can take me.”
“I can protect myself, usually.” Willow flexes and winks. “But I don’t think your feelings are silly. I think they’re sweet, and maybe you should listen to them.”
“Oh,” Hunter squeaks, almost chirps.
“And for what it’s worth, I feel like this.” She hugs him from behind, puts her chin on his back. “You said this is what wolves do when they like each other.”
Hunter blushes, pink as the milkweed blossoms along the fence at the edge of Willow’s garden. She might not be able to see his face, but she won’t miss his skin getting hot. “Oh my titan. I was just going on about things. You listened to me?”
“Of course I did. They’re important to you, so they’re important to me. And also, I still think about that wolf in the documentary we watched together.” She wipes the corner of her eye. “How he walked thousands of miles to find love, only to get hit by a transit worm.”
“Right? Poor guy. I wouldn't want to end up like that, to have it all cut short.”
“I don’t think you will.” Willow presses her cheek to his back. “Hunter, do you love me?”
“Do I love you?” He chokes on the front end of love as the back of his tongue rises to glance the back of his throat. The question is steeped in skepticism as he echoes it. He stops breathing for a second, ribcage stuck at the apex of expansion, then gingerly pushes off her embrace. “No, that wouldn’t be good.”
Willow leaves a tear as punctuation between his shoulders. He says it so easily, with such determination, like he wills it to be so. She wants to retract everything, to be a flower closing in the dark. She starts with her arms, crossed tight enough to hurt.
Hunter panics. He turns to face her. His hands look for answers and find Willow’s fingers.
“Let me explain, okay? It’s not what you think. Remember when I thought that friendship was what the coven heads did to each other?”
One look and he knows she does. She can revisit her only stint behind bars when she learned that firsthand. He doesn’t know he made her cry back then, but he knows he’s about to now.
“Do you know who said he loved me?”
Some truths are sharp but must be shared.
Willow re-folds her arms and looks at the ground, shivering at an emotional cold.
“It was Belos, wasn’t it. Oh, Hunter.” She wants to smother him with touch and whisper that everything will be fine, but halfway there, restrains herself. She knows better to lie to him with sweet nothings, but the compulsion remains, crying out to be acted on.
He knows the conflict in her posture, the hesitation. “Don’t pity me. I’m more than what he put me through.”
Willow fortifies herself. If Hunter wants to let that part of his past lie and ferment, she’ll oblige. Her focus is elsewhere anyway. “If you don’t love me, then what do you call what you feel?”
“Oh. Huh.” Hunter’s eyes look around as he searches for words inside himself. “When I’m with you, I feel— comfortable. And safe. Warm— and a little sweaty, if I’m honest.”
“You’ve seen me work out. What’s a little sweat between us? Hug?”
“Yeah, of course.” He wraps his arms around her. He's a good hugger for someone so scrawny, for someone who learned what hugging was so recently. “There.”
“I think this feels right. Does this feel okay to you?”
“Yeah.”
“Then— would you hold me?”
“That’s just a hug without letting go.” Hunter frowns. “Wait, I’m already doing it.” He doesn’t let go.
At the bottom of a breath, so she can’t go on and on, Willow goes for it. She asks, “Would you kiss me?”
The answer in his head is automatic, yes, now, yesterday? but thoughts of fire catch in Hunter’s heart. More heat pricks his skin as he looks at her lips, glance brushing left to right. As Willow imagines his mouth, he imagines his ashes, his body as charcoal.
“I know what you’re getting at. I can't love you! I’m not allowed to be in love.” He squirms out of her arms. “It’s too dangerous.”
In his eyes Willow finds concern, regret, care, all striated in the smooth red muscle of his irises. He refutes himself. Which lie does she trust, his face or his words?
“My neck is scratchy. I need to shower and cool off.”
He hugs her again, holding on for too long and not long enough before letting go. The cold air afterward stings Willow’s skin, an itch like poison ivy.
*
Flapjack spreads his wings and ruffles his feathers. His song is a teasing warble.
Hunter’s elbow hooks on his shirt as he works it off over his head. “Of course I like Willow.” He gestures with the hand still trapped in a sleeve. Fighting his way free from the fabric, he emerges with doubled indignation on his face.
“Because we’re friends!” He throws the shirt to the ground and white-knuckles the counter, trying to persuade it by force.
Flapjack jumps, chirping, fwit fwit, teew-teew, teew-teew, mirthful and light.
“Advanced—? Huh? No, I am not redder than you!” Splotches of blush diffuse down to Hunter’s shoulders and chest in careless daubs. “But I am so, so red.” He flicks at his ears, drags his hands down his face. In their wake, the deep color clears briefly, only to rush back in. “Dang it, Flap.”
It lingers long enough that it looks like poorly faded stain. Flapjack says so.
Hunter remembers getting a cooler of brightly food-colored sugar-salt drink poured on him after his first flyer derby game. It looks like that lingered too, had he soaked in it like a marinade.
“Look, maybe this is normal and doesn’t mean I love her. Wouldn’t want me to turn into firewood, right? Who even knows what it’s like when a grimwalker falls in love?”
Feathers on Flapjack’s crest rise. He whistles with both eyes open. Hunter pays attention.
“Would I die for her? Gosh, Flap, I’m sixteen —ish. I’m not dying for anyone! We’ve come too close to that too many times already.”
Flapjack hops impatiently.
“The idea of it? Like in Ruler’s Reach, when Ruler’s retainer steps in front of a lightning beam to save him? If I had to die, dying for her would be a gallant way to go.”
“What do you mean I’m not answering the question? I totally answered the question, and I don’t see what it has to do with love.” He hooks his thumbs in his waistband. “Now don’t look.”
He takes off the rest of his clothes.
“Nothing you haven't seen before? I don’t know what you were getting up to before me but it must have been cuh-razy.”
Hunter tries to pet above Flapjack’s scar, but it’s the only part of him where touch is tenuous, just as talk of his past is tenuous. This time, Flapjack bites his finger.
“Sorry, Flap. I understand.”
Under the water, Hunter taps rhythms against his sternum, wondering what goes on behind it. He knows how hearts work in everyone else, four chambers, blood in, blood out. He wonders how much galdorstone is left inside his chest, if it also beats or thrums, fragmented into a strange geode, or if it has fully become flesh.
If he felt love in the shower, in a swimming pool, in the human realm’s rain, would that put out any fires?
*
Willow stampedes into the living room and screams into a pillow. She fee-fie-foe-fums into the kitchen, ripping the refrigerator open like a clawed carnivore on one of Camila’s animal documentaries. Once she’s downed her prey — a glassful of chocolate milk, regular — she can get to business.
This is control, this is coping. Having milk in a house full of lactose-intolerant people feels like a modicum of distinction in the world, even if it’s something as trivial as having enough of an enzyme in her gut to not get gassy.
Vee, the only other person who can drink milk without store-bought lactase, quirks a worried eyebrow.
“Willow, you have a, um.” Luz puts a finger across her upper lip.
“Oh.” Willow licks off her sweet brown milk mustache and steeples her fingers. “Thank you all for coming to this emergency meeting of the— I guess we never figured out a name for this group.”
“Willow’s support system.” Vee raises her arms like a church cantor. “Willow’s branches?”
“Redeemed blond appreciator coven?” Amity smirks.
“Golden geek-getters?” Gus tries.
“Hey, that’s my not yet legally adopted brother you’re talking about!” Luz shouts. “Bird-loving nerd-loving brigade. Yeah.”
“I meant mine affectionately,” Gus shrugs. “After all, Hunter is only the second biggest Cosmic Frontier fan in this house.”
“Look, I know I usually mount token resistance when you poke fun at him. But I don’t have room in my brain anymore.” Willow shakes her head and pulls at her braids. “I’m head over titan-tipping heels for him and I don’t even wear heels!”
“We know,” everyone says.
“It’s true! They make my ankles hurt." Willow frowns and tucks her chin as if readying to cry. “And he makes my heart hurt sometimes. Just now, I was flirting, being really obvious, and he said he didn’t love me.”
“That's griffin dung! He obviously does.” Gus pounds the table.
“I know!” Willow pounds back. “But I'm not going to force it, or impose. Which is why I called this meeting. What do I do?” She looks into her cup, the cocoa-saturated, reflectionless bottom. “Besides chug chocolate milk.”
“You’re thinking about this the wrong way.” Amity readies her fingers and lists off, starting from her thumb. “His interests are literally Cosmic Frontier, Flapjack, wolves and other canids, stuff he wasn’t allowed to do in the Emperor’s Coven, and Willow Park.” She wiggles her pinkie. “This finger is you.”
“I got that,” Willow grumbles.
“So.” Amity aligns her hands in conclusion, “It’s only a matter of time before he realizes that one of these interests is not like the others.”
“Impressive analysis.” Gus nods his head and strokes his chin. “I must say, I concur.”
“Then how do we get this to happen?” Luz taps her pinkies together. “That’s what you want, right?”
Willow nods. Speaking it feels too risky.
“Yeah.” Vee shrugs. “Sometimes you just have to let these things play out. Or, hm, does he like boba?”
“Ugh. Were we this complicated?” Amity stage whispers to Luz. “I remember it being so easy.”
Willow thunders with laughter. “That is absolutely not how it went down, but if you can remember your hot messes as smooth sailing, maybe there’s hope for us.”
Luz snorts. “We also had help from Hooty and Eda, and I guess, weirdly, Edric and Emira?”
“I volunteer to be Hooty!” Gus raises his hand. “Let’s be real, I'm already the third-wheeliest.”
“It takes two to tango,” Vee says. Addressing confusion on the others’ faces she adds, “um, that’s this human dance? The instructor in Camila's workout videos calls it a baile sensual.”
“Wait, why are we dancing now?” Amity squints.
“Why are we sensual?” Willow worries, accenting the final syllable like Vee.
“It’s an expression,” Vee says. “My point is you can’t make him do things he doesn’t want to.”
“Right.” Willow nods. “But does he want to? Does he know what he wants?”
“Wait wait wait wait.” Luz clears the conversation. “He says he doesn’t love you, but he acts like, pshh, yeah he does. So is it important to you that he uses that word, or—” Luz prompts with a swirl of her wrist.
“I— didn’t think so, but when he said he didn’t, I broke a little.” Willow gathers her thoughts in big bunches, her hair in her hands. “Okay, what happened was, I just cut his hair again, which is why he’s showering now and why we can have this meeting. He did say he feels comfortable and just good around me, but then he said that he’s not allowed to fall in love with me? Like it’s a permission thing. What the heck!”
“There we go,” Vee says. “That's a different issue.”
Gus scratches his neck and looks away. “Yeah, I wouldn’t push on that.”
“Gus, you’re his best friend,” Willow starts.
“Best human-enthusiast friend,” Gus corrects. “You know, Flapjack— I know where I stand.”
Willow knows what it looks like when Gus tries to stall. She leans towards him. “What do you know.” Her intonation descends steadily like the stairs to the basement.
“Look, sometimes in his sleep, he mumbles to himself about not being able to feel love?” Gus fumbles to contort around a secret. “And that’s on the nights when he doesn’t sleep very well. I can’t say more, so if you want to know anything else, you should ask him yourself.”
“He’s losing sleep over me?” Willow swallows.
“Oh gosh, I’ve been there.” Luz looks knowingly at Amity.
“That’s not what I said!” Gus flares.
“Whatever it is, he’s conflicted about his feelings for Willow,” Amity says. “Remember Azura’s dream about Hecate?”
“Aw, I loved that chapter. It was surprisingly sensual for a book meant for ages six to eleven. But Azura also had to figure out what her dream meant.” Luz points a scheming finger. “So maybe Hunter doesn’t want to feel it. Maybe he doesn’t know how to feel it. Maybe he needs time to work on loving himself before he can love another person.” Her mouth forms an o. “Oh my gosh, maybe growing up in the Emperor’s Coven really means he doesn’t know what love is.”
Willow holds her head in her hands. “That might be more true than you think.”
*
Willow sits cross-legged at the end of Hunter’s sleeping mat. She spies their photo from the garden, tucked almost away beneath his pillow. The corner is bent. She imagines his fingers pinching it before he sleeps.
She takes a readying breath through her nose and smells dusty wood. It is the basement, after all.
“Can we talk?”
Hunter bookmarks his place in his Cosmic Frontier re-read and regards her with intrigue-widened eyes. “We can always talk. Talk about what?”
“I’m still trying to make sense of what you said earlier.”
“I am too,” Hunter mumbles into his cheek, too much of a murmur for Willow to hear.
“You said you feel comfortable, safe, and warm around me, right? What if I told you that that was love?”
“Don’t forget, I also said sweaty.”
“Love can be sweaty too.” Willow grabs his hand, already clammy as advertised. He plays with her fingers.
Hunter’s other hand rubs a circle at his temple. “This is going to sound silly, but I realized— Flapjack helped me realize— everything I think I know about love, real love, comes from books.”
Willow glances down. “Cosmic Frontier?”
“When they talk about love in Cosmic Frontier, it’s about principles. Lofty stuff like duty, honor, loyalty. Things like that, and how they surface in different situations. That’s part of it.”
“What’s the other part?”
“Cosmic Frontier is the kind of book with scenes where they also make love.” Hunter’s face blazes. “We’re not ready for that conversation. Or I’m not, anyway. Gus teased me for a week for skipping those parts.”
Willow shrugs. “Don’t like? Don’t read. Luz said that when she tried to get me into the Azura books and I thought they weren’t gritty enough. I did still watch the analysis videos on MewTube though.”
“Yeah, but what if the planetary ambassadress extracts military secrets from the enemy general by seducing her and I miss it?”
Willow blinks. “I don’t know, that’s a tough one. Get Gus to summarize it for you? Or, oh, I’ll read them for you.”
“That’s love, isn’t it.”
“In its own way, I think.” Willow adjusts her glasses. “What about Ruler’s Reach? I thought it was more of an epic fantasy-action thriller, but maybe—?”
Hunter bows his head solemnly. “We respect Ruler’s Reach: Enter the Bad Boy by saying its full title.” At Willow’s mild consternation he clarifies, “It’s a fandom joke. Not important. But a little, yeah, it had some ‘heartbreak and shimmer tears?’ That doesn’t seem very King-like, from what little I knew of him. But all in all, it’s not very serious stuff.”
“It’s so serious. I learned so much from Planetary Love and My Boyfriend from Tartarus.”
Hunter traces lines on Willow’s palm to avoid looking into her eyes. “What did you learn?”
“Well, okay.” Willow hedges, “there’s a chance it only applies to broody boys who are reincarnated versions of an old lover or cryogenically preserved prisoners on a meteor hurtling through space—”
Hunter leans into her shoulder. “Okay, strangely specific, but maybe still useful?”
“Yeah, maybe still useful. So at the start, there’s a lot of thinking about each other. Then you hold hands, you spend time together, get interested in the same things, save each other’s hides in near-death situations—”
Hunter nods along. Check, check, check and check. A mission like this would have felt titan-sent. This is easier than easy. They’re already doing it. Why does that feel like relief?
“At some point you meet each other’s parents? But not always. And also, you kiss each other in the end, but it’s always drawn out until it’s almost painful.” She crushes an invisible fruit in her hand, shakes it as invisible juice streams down. Painful. Voice a conniving whisper, she says, “sometimes there’s a secret reason that keeps them apart.”
Hunter bites his lip. Immolation is what happens if he feels love, but Willow’s recipe is all action.
Willow rolls her wrist. “Not everything has to follow the books. It’s just fiction. We can take it with a grain of salt.”
“Salt? Like, a ramen packet in my pocket? I don’t have any on me.” He checks anyway. “Are you supposed to season your books? I’ve been missing out.”
Willow enjoys watching him move through confusion, bubbly with trifling concerns. His face has its own light. “It’s this human thing Luz says. Right now it means we shouldn’t think everything that happens in books will apply to us.”
“I’ll kiss you. Let’s do it.” Hunter’s fist pounds the blanket and leaves an impression that starts to disappear as soon as it’s made.
“You’re sure?”
“I want this, Willow. I don’t know about love, or salt, but I know I want to kiss you.”
Whatever’s in his chest lurches into overdrive. If he survives this, he’ll write Grimwalker Resurrection, or maybe it will be called Grimwalker Revival, as a finger in the eye of Extinction. Will he survive? It’s a gamble, but books have been good to him so far. They were right about wild magic. They were right about titan’s blood. They were right about mindscapes. If grimwalkers weren’t supposed to kiss people, it would have been spelled out on the page. It wasn’t.
“You good there? You’re looking a little Cosmic Frontier there, head in the stars.”
“I’m just. Uh—” He looks at her lips as they part to smile at him, move to speak to him. “Do you know any fireproof plants?”
Her eyebrows ask why but she goes ahead. “For starters, the ones that are always on fire, but you won’t find those in the human realm. Here, there are plants that need fire to bloom, and some trees with thick bark. It’s like they have walls up, that’s what we said in the plant homeroom.”
Hunter feels better with the seeds of a contingency plan sown in Willow’s mind. If all else fails, she can wrap him in tree bark. She’s a quick caster, so the burns should be manageable.
“Okay, no walls, let’s go.”
Willow’s face is a cubit of courage away. They’ve been within kissing distance before, when she told scary stories. He had to feign fright when he’d been too busy counting her eyelashes to pay attention. She always squeezed his hand at the end, after frightening him into quivering. Her hand is reassurance that there is an end after the end.
Hunter leans in before she’s ready. Willow catches him.
“Hey, you!” She pulls his ear, her knuckle matching the nick in his lobe, light enough to only tickle. Now they’re even.
“Hey, me?” Hunter can’t stop a foolish smile from wrenching all seriousness from his face. He was so close. His lips sting. He enjoys this, even as it scares him, even as it makes him feel fearless.
Willow spreads her fingers through his freshly cut hair, reaping the just-damp feeling. “Let’s try that again.”
She leans in. He closes his eyes expectantly. She executes a close-up version of a flyer derby feint, laughing breath against his lip. He takes the bait, inclining further forward until their mouths meet.
For someone who might not love her, he kisses well. He kisses slowly. He kisses curiously. She wants more.
“Oh titan,” Hunter panics, first to pull away, mind and heart aloft, lurching on a trapeze, “Am I on fire?”
“Feels like it right?” Willow laughs, giddy, drawn to something magnetic in him. She craves more, wasn’t prepared for him to finish so suddenly. “My face is burning. I'm so glad we did that.”
“No no, am I burning like crackle and spark?” Hunter calms down by degrees even as he clarifies what being on fire would look like.
“Huh?” Willow looks at his forehead, his eyes, his ears, his nose, his lips, her glance tossed around like a pinball. Nothing swells with smoke. Nothing flickers with flame. “Um. No?”
Hunter hasn’t spontaneously combusted. His hands still look like hands. His fingers aren’t ten sprigs of caught kindling. “My book was wrong.”
“The book that said you weren’t allowed to love me?”
Hunter nods. “It went like this,” He clears his throat. “It should instead be said, I should not feel love, lest the flames of passion consume me.” He delivers it well, if redacted, leaning into the commas.
“Is there any chance that wasn’t meant to be taken literally? That maybe, flames of passion are when you love someone a lot?”
“Titan’s tarsals.” Hunter’s bottled worry escapes as a laugh, lightning running into the ground. “It was just a figure of speech. I thought I wasn't supposed to even think about it or I would hwoosh.” He mimes a conflagration, fireworks of fingers, embers in the air. He laughs until he cries.
Willow holds him close. “Can I ask you, how often do you think of me?”
“Oh, yeesh. About that.” He looks up, looks down, reddening like he knows the smallest, most inconsequential secret that turned out to matter most. “Since we’ve been here, when am I not? Kind of pathetic, isn’t it.”
Willow draws in a breath. “Never. Forbidden love is the best. Breaking the rules for a feeling? Finding connection against all odds? Augh, swoon.” She winks at him and fans herself.
“Then, against all odds,” he swallows, “I do love you, Willow. I have for a long time.”
Willow’s face takes until now to crease with relief.
“We’re going to have a talk later about how you thought you were going to spontaneously combust if you kissed me and did it anyway.” She could be furious, but her attention is elsewhere. “But you’re awfully cute right now and I am not spoiling this mood for anything.”
She holds his face, fingers behind his ears, behind his jaw. Her touch raises his shoulders, coaxes a grin out of ticklishness with just a tinge of guilt.
“Now that we’re sure you’re not going to turn both of us into a tinderbox, want to kiss me again?”
Hunter nods as much as Willow’s hands allow. “As many times as you’ll let me. As many times as you want.”
“Oh, so you want to push yourself?” Willow’s voice revs with hunger, stretching, unfurling. “We better get started.”
Hunter gulps air, not nervous but infatuated, woozy. He kisses her again and again and again, quickly losing count of the times. Someday he will pour every truth out for her. For now, they are closer than words. Fire blooms in his chest, a gasp of seeds in serotinous cones, and he blooms with it.