But I didn’t want to break the spell. Of our murmured words, of the warm bath and the lingering oxytocin in our bloodstreams.
Instead, I cuddled closer and said, “It was the best day of my life too.”
Chapter Nine
I woke up to my face wedged against a warm, naked hip. Crisp leg hair tickled my chin and I smelled the lingering sweetness of Mr. Bubble. Heaven.
“Good morning, starshine. What’s a five letter word with A, O, and E?” Angel asked.
I rolled my head away from Angel’s hip to blink up at him. The light seeping in from around my hand-sewn curtains was still gentle and soft, and I was pretty sure I hadn’t played the “hit snooze fifteen times on four different alarms” game, so it must have still been early in the morning. Angel was propped against my headboard, his legs half-wreathed in a sheet, his phone in his hands.
Ah. Wordle.
I stretched and then wrapped my arms around his thigh and hugged myself to it, nuzzling my face against him. “Omega,” I said sleepily. “As in omegaverse.”
“Omegaverse?” There was doubt in Angel’s voice, like I’d just made this up.
“You know,” I told him. “Alphas. Omegas. Knotting.”
“Knotting.”
“It’s when a penis has this part that swells up and locks inside a partner’s body until it ejaculates. Sometimes it’s for male pregnancy, and it’s also a wolf thing. Not that all the fics with knotting have wolf stuff, you know. I read a Yellowstone knotting fic the other day.”
I looked up to see Angel looking down at me like I was speaking in tongues. “Someday I’ll let you log into my AO3 account,” I told him. After I’d gone through and cleaned up my bookmarked fics, of course. Some AO3 reading you just had to take to the grave.
Angel tapped on his screen. “It’s canoe, by the way.”
“Did you just spoil Wordle for me?”
“Like the same way you spoiled my innocence with all this knotting talk?”
“It’s better to be corrupted,” I said, pressing my face back into his thigh. “Are you sure we have to go to work today?”
“Only if you want to afford your rock and roll lifestyle of Mr. Bubble and wolf fanfics.”
I pouted into Angel’s leg. Why was the world so cruel?
“Also your rock and roll lifestyle of owning every bridal magazine ever printed,” he said. I didn’t have to look at him to know he was looking at the towers of magazines I had stacked around the apartment. “Are you making Bee some kind of epic decoupage bridal gift that I don’t know about?”
“Firstly, I would never donate my decoupage talents to something as ill-advised as Bee marrying someone who unironically wears a beanie. Secondly, they’re not even engaged yet! Don’t hasten that curse onto us!” And then I stopped. I wasn’t sure I was ready to get to thirdly.
Angel set down his phone and wove his fingers through my hair, gently pulling my face away from his thigh. My dick stiffened both at the pleasurable sting and the bossiness of the gesture, but if he noticed, he didn’t let it distract him.
“Luca,” he said. “What are the magazines for?”
I hesitated. Only Bee and Sunny knew about this, and I’d sworn them both to secrecy because . . . well, because I didn’t know why. It shouldn’t feel so personal, and it didn’t used to feel so personal, but somehow this piece of me had become very private over the years.
But the morning sun was a lovely gold, and Angel’s eyes were so deep and soft behind his glasses, and he smelled so nice, even if he did ruin Wordles for me.
“I want to design wedding dresses,” I blurted out, and then buried my face in his leg again.
Once more, his fingers tightened in my hair and pulled my face away from his thigh. “Why are you acting so shy about it?” he asked. “Of all the things you’re closed off about, fashion isn’t one of them.”
How could I explain it to him? When it didn’t really even make sense to myself?
“It’s kind of what I always wanted to do, ever since I saw Enchanted as a kid. Giselle’s wedding dress was everything I thought a wedding dress should be, you know? Ridiculous and over the top, and fluffy . . . but then four years later came Bella’s wedding dress in Breaking Dawn: Part 1, this streamlined, flawlessly tailored Carolina Herrera masterpiece, and I had to confront that everything I knew about wedding dresses was wrong and evil. But then I saw Mamma Mia at my aunt’s house, and I saw Amanda Seyfried’s perfectly bohemian wedding dress, and I just realized that wedding dresses can be anything. They can be anything and everything and they can be lacy or jewel-toned or sleek or ridiculous and every single option is something exciting and gorgeous. There’s nothing else like a wedding dress. And yes, I’m including jumpsuits in my definition of dress.”
Angel looked at me with wonder. “I’ve heard you talk about fashion before, and you’ve always sounded—I don’t know—passionate about it. But I’ve never heard you sound like this.”
“It feels a little foolish, honestly. My parents barely even kissed in front of us growing up, and here I was obsessing over the moment you sign on for happily ever after. It felt like make-believe. As fictional as magic. But even my cynicism is no match for the way wedding attire makes me feel swept away. I never thought I’d actually leave home, but when I did—when I actually did—I decided maybe make-believe could be real after all. So when I went to fashion school, I made a plan. I’d graduate, get a job as a patternmaker or sewer for someplace like Vera Wang or Monique Lhuillier until I could break out on my own.” I huffed out a breath, running my fingers over the hair on Angel’s thigh. “It didn’t work out.”
“Why not?” He sounded curious, not dismissive, which was nice. But the curiosity was uncomfortable too.
I abruptly sat up, gathering a blanket around myself like a fortification. “I don’t know. It just didn’t. Fashion school was too expensive and the people there were shitty about bridal wear anyway. It was too commercial, too easy, too obvious—you know, all that stuff snobby people say.”
“But it got to you,” said Angel softly.
I hugged a pillow. “I guess. And the loans.”
“You don’t need a degree to make wedding dresses, Luca. Look at the gorgeous one you made for Bee for Duke the Halls.”
“A degree helps though,” I mumbled. I was looking down at the pillow I was hugging. “Or at least being at school helps. The professors recommend you for internships, the internships get you a job, you eventually leave a fashion house to start your own. It doesn’t work without school. The system. The connections.”
“As an art school kid, I get it, but I hate the thought that you can’t do something without going back to some expensive, pretentious hellhole.”
“Angel,” I said with affection, “we live in an expensive, pretentious hellhole.”
He stroked my arm. “You know what I mean. Although—God bless my hometown—I’d say it’s more parvenu than pretentious.”
“I don’t regret leaving school,” I said and plucked at the corners of the pillow. “The only thing I wish—well, it’s stupid.” I’d made my choices. There was nothing left to do but live tragically with them, like a young, stubbled Miss Havisham.