“What are you doing out here?” I ask, eyeing him carefully.
“I couldn’t sleep either,” he admits.
There isn’t much light in here, only the outskirts of what’s left from the fire’s glow in the other room, but I can feel his eyes on mine, feel the warmth of his breath against my cheek.
I lean back on my heels and put some distance between us. The cold settles into me like I’ve just landed in snow, but it’s the crisp kind of reawakening I need to realize where we are, where Dimitri has seemingly been all night.
“Were you…guarding the door?”
He doesn’t respond, and in the darkness, his silence only serves to confirm my suspicions.
Eventually, he clears his throat, the short laugh that follows doing its best to conceal it. “Someone had to. We all know just how abysmal you are at fighting—”
“Hey!” I snap.
He continues. “And that’s when you’re sober. You were piss drunk last night.”
I swing at him, hoping to slam my fist into his shoulder and reveling in the thought that if I hit his jaw by accident instead, I can just blame the pitch darkness. But Dimitri’s fingers grasp my wrist with the swiftness of a hawk diving from the sky. He uses the momentum to shove my arm aside, and I fall forward, stumbling and twisting, my shoulder slamming into his chest.
If I had any plans of insisting I was actually coordinated or could ever hold my own ground in a fight, I’d just lost it. And perhaps it’s the alcohol, the lack of sleep, or just the sheer exhaustion of training relentlessly for the past month and finally catching a moment’s reprieve, but the both of us explode with laughter.
We spend the next few moments shushing each other so that we don’t disturb any of the other recruits from their slumber, and then laughing all the harder at how unbelievable it is that any of them are still sleeping.
It’s only when I realize, with sobering clarity, that I’m resting my head back on Dimitri’s shoulder, that his arm has slid its way around my waist to wrap me protectively against him, that my laughter turns into something else.
Quick breaths.
A fluttering of wings in my stomach.
Dimitri’s laughter fades at the same moment mine does. His fingers stiffen against my hip like he’s unsure if he should release me or pull me closer, and I’m not sure either. We’ve been friends for so long now; he means more to me than anyone else alive, but I know neither of us are headed anywhere. The only future that lies ahead for the both of us is death.
And perhaps it’s for this reason that I twist around in his arms, careful not to break away from his comforting embrace. Over my shoulder, I search for his eyes in the dark and only recognize them by the glint of the firelight reflected there.
My heart quickens. We’ve experienced so much together, but this is unchartered territory.
He swallows, his voice shaky and hoarse. “I can still smell the wine on your breath.”
“Shut up,” I say, a small laugh trickling through my words, but my voice sounds just as weak as his, my words soft and frightful as I continue to inch closer and closer until his lips are so close to mine that they almost brush against each other. “Just, shut up.”
Dimitri stops speaking, stops moving. Even where I’m pressed against his chest, I can’t even feel his lungs moving. Time itself seems to have joined in the winter’s freezing, as if all of Arcathain is holding its breath just for this moment.
For us.
With a shaky inhale, I close the last sliver of space between us and press my lips against his. His kiss is sweet and soft at first, a cautious toe dipped into the pool of uncertainty. A first kiss, dainty and unsure, awkward and frightening.
Though the moment feels suspended, my lips pressed against his, my mind is anything but still. Doubt and fear and confusion rage inside me. I worry about what he’s thinking, what I’m feeling; I worry that this might’ve been a mistake and that I’ve just changed things between us forever. I can’t live without him; he’s all I have from home.
Suddenly, I’m overcome by an even greater dread. What if Dimitri discovers what I am? What if he finds out that I have…something far too similar to magic? I’d lose him forever then. If anyone was convicted in their hate of the mages, it’s Dimitri.
My lips break apart from his at the flash of possibility. With my eyes still shut, I can see the disdainful way he’d look at me. It cracks my heart in two.
But when I open my eyes, it’s not hatred I find staring back at me through his firelit eyes, but untethered longing.
“I’ve wanted to do that for so long,” he admits, cautiously bringing his hand up to hook around the back of my neck. “Please tell me that won’t be the last time.”
Just like that, the fear that had me frozen melts away as a flare of fire lights in my core.
I shake my head, too breathless to speak, and Dimitri drags me to him again.
A surge of heat ignites my skin as our lips find each other again. This time he’s less cautious, less careful. Like a bear awakened, Dimitri’s hand flexes where it’s been stationed on my hip, becoming more explorative and dangerous. The hand crooked around my neck, desperate and greedy, draws me deeper into him still, pressing me so close that I gasp.
But he’s not ready for air yet, and truthfully, neither am I.
The two of us crash into each other again, and a wave of euphoria, charged and urgent, rolls over me. I sigh against his mouth as he opens it to mine. Time loses all meaning here. I can’t tell if I’ve been kissing him for seconds or days, but however long, it’s still not enough. I’m afraid for it to stop, afraid we’ll break away and he’ll see me as he used to: a bratty child uninterested in following the rules.
But he keeps kissing me, his lips warm and silken against my own. His hands don’t seem to know what to do—neither do mine—but I savor their clumsy hold. They clutch onto each other so tightly, as if we’re both afraid of what will happen when we let go. But the longer we stay here, the more I submerge my tongue into his delicious taste, the less worried I become. Something about him feels so comfortable, so natural, that in no time at all I convince myself that we’ve done this before. This isn’t our first kiss, but one of many that we were inevitably bound to share.
And I revel in every one of them.
The small brushes of our lips as we break for air.
The hungry, deep drinks we take of each other.
The playful nips and licks and pecks.
The kisses he plants on my forehead and cheeks; the ones I leave trailing along his jaw.
For the life of me, I can’t figure out why it’s never come to this before. Though, the longer it goes on, the more I realize that it’s probably best it hadn’t; now that I know what it feels like to be pressed up against him, now that I know what he tastes like, what he sounds like when I kiss just the right spot on his neck, I don’t ever want to stop.
But after hours of clinging to each other like our lives depend on it, as the sunlight slowly begins to shine through the skylight above and when we hear our fellow recruits waking and readying for the day, we finally, begrudgingly, pull ourselves apart.
Which is just as well, because not a moment sooner, the bell strikes twice. The bedroom doors swing wide, and recruits start shuffling out of their quarters with tossed hair and drool still crusted on their chins.