“I don’t hate you, Neiryn.”
“Truly?” The smile on his face now was the kind that came from deep inside, from the heart. It was glorious. Like sunlight. Like magic.
She had a bad track record when it came to reading people. She still sometimes felt like this was all a lie—like he was faking it and she was falling for it like an idiot. It was hard to believe that someone like him could really be interested in someone like her.
But she wanted so badly for it to be real. Badly enough that, sometimes, she found the bravery to bare pieces of herself that she would rather have kept hidden. “It’s possible that I feel a bit inadequate sometimes, when I think about the other people you’ve been with,” she said, glancing away.
Instead of mocking her, he looked sympathetic. “You know,” he said, “the first time I slept with someone else, I was almost forty.”
She raised her eyebrows. She knew that elves did not consider themselves full adults until the age of thirty, but it still seemed late, especially for an Ysuran. “Why did you wait?”
He shrugged. “It wasn’t important enough for me to seek it out. And I had other things on my mind when I was young.”
“Your problems with Aevyr’s fire,” she recalled. She tried to picture him at that age. Had he been awkward and lonely when he was younger? From what he’d said, his magic troubles had made him, at best, an outsider, and at worst, a joke.
“You have no need to feel inadequate,” he said. “You’re more than adequate, Kadaki.”
He slowly bent to brush his lips softly against hers, teasing her with the lightness of his touch.
She broke the kiss abruptly. “I think I would like swimming,” she said.
He pulled back a little. “Swimming?”
“Yes. With you.”
“Right now?”
“Yes. I’m not a very skilled swimmer, but there is a pond in the woods near here.” She imagined what he’d look like in the water, dripping wet, all powerful flexing muscles and sun-tanned skin. Yes. She would like swimming very much.
All this time, they’d been meeting in secret, in the dark, pretending that it was mere coincidence when they ran into each other, and they’d avoided discussing it further than that. This was the first time either of them had seriously talked about spending time together—because that was a thing that couples did, not people who were just fooling around every so often. Now, Kadaki watched Neiryn carefully, wondering if he’d object to this new development in their relationship.
But he smiled. “I would like that.”
Chapter 21
The pond was hidden among the trees in near-complete darkness. Light from the moons glinted on the ripples trailing across its surface.
Kadaki saw Neiryn bend to dip his fingers into the water. He was a fuzzy blue shape in the dim midnight light.
“It’s going to be cold,” she said, crossing her arms. She shivered, though she didn’t think it was from the cold.
“No,” he said, rising, a tall shadow beside her. “It’s perfect.” She heard fabric shifting as he removed his vest. She watched as he shed articles of clothing one by one, removing his undershirt, then his pants, then underclothes. He folded each of them and placed them on a dry stone by the edge of the water.
His body was shrouded in darkness, but her eyes lingered over the parts of him that she could see, taking in the long, lean shape of him. He looked like he would be a strong swimmer. He was built for it.
“I assumed you’d be joining me,” he said after she’d been staring too long.
She averted her eyes. “I was. I am.”
“Are you going to swim in your clothes?”
She could hear the smile in his voice. She liked it when his voice sounded that way. “No, smart-ass.”
“You’d better get to it, then. We haven’t got all night.” He waded into the water, then dove in. His head popped up a few seconds later. “It’s deep. I can barely touch the bottom here. It’ll be over your head.”
She reached up to pull off her vest. “I know.”
“You said you can’t swim well.”
