Both his hands left me and went to the bed on either side of me.
This was not what made me stop speaking.
He’d shifted his hands so he could lower himself to my back.
“And this is perfect.”
I grew still.
I felt him move even if I couldn’t quite feel what he was doing. My guess was that he was running his lips along a scar.
One of many.
I closed my eyes tight.
“You feel that, Frannie?” he asked.
“Please get up,” I requested.
He did not get up.
What he did was move upwards so his mouth was at my ear.
“You don’t, do you, sweetheart?”
I opened my eyes but looked only at the pillow. “Again, I’ll ask you to get up.”
“You know how you’re perfect?” he queried.
I knew the glaring evidence of my imperfection was right in front of his eyes but I did not point that out to him for I didn’t wish to and he could bloody well see it for himself.
I remained silent.
“You don’t feel much at your back. I gotta go hard if I want you to know I’m touching you there. And the reason that’s perfect when you think it’s imperfection is that they took that from you. They crippled you here. This will never be the same,” he said, and I could feel him running his hand down my back, putting pressure into the touch so I could experience it. “They did that, Frannie. They took that. And you survived.”
“Yes, I am aware. I was there each time,” I returned cuttingly, beginning to get angry at discussing something I did not wish to discuss and he very well knew it.
“You survived.”
“I am aware.”
“They did not survive.”
I quieted.
“They’re beaten and broken and as good as dead. Their lives are over. You, though, you’re here and getting pedicures and worried about making your girl eat dinner alone, carrying these marks not as their brand, but your badge of honor because you survived. I know. I know the elves could have healed you, taken this away.” His hand soothed deep down my back. “I know Frey offered that to you. And I know you refused. That makes this perfect, that you took from them what they did to you and twisted it into something that was yours. Something that was beautiful. Something that means you’re a fighter. A warrior. Victorious. And you wear their mark as your medal of valor.”
I held my breath, no longer angry.
Now I was fighting trembling.
Noc continued talking.
“You don’t think you’re perfect but you are, Frannie. Every inch.”
My voice was frail and wavering, I hated it but for the life of me I couldn’t strengthen it, when I begged, “Please stop talking.”
He shifted and I felt his teeth sink into my skin at my shoulder blade. The sensation was there and gone before I felt him smoothing the area, pressing deep with his thumb.
“I look at this and see beauty. I touch it and love how it feels. I taste it and it tastes as gorgeous as the rest of you.”
Gods.
He was undoing me.
“Stop talking.”
He slid his knees out, straightening his legs, covering me with his big body, his weight bearing into me, his flawless chest with its perfect array of hair pressed into the mess of my back.
Putting some of his weight in one forearm in the bed, he shoved his other arm under me at my belly and held me close, his mouth back to my ear.
“You say my light shines on your soul, do you think for one second you’d be in my bed right now if your light didn’t warm mine?”
I again closed my eyes tight and it came through my lips before I even knew I had the thought.
“I want to be that for you.”
“Fuck,” he bit out. His word scoring into me like a lash, Noc lifted, turning me again to my back. Insinuating his hips between my legs so they opened to accommodate him, I felt his palm cup my cheek and heard his demand. “Open your eyes.”
I did as commanded.
“The first I knew of you, you loved a man so deeply, you put your life on the line twice, first committing treason, which I know in Lunwyn is a hanging offense, and then facing those witches. Does that come from a soul that’s midnight?”
“Noc—”
“You don’t know it, don’t see it, but even before your relationship shifted, you treated Josette with more care and respect than any of those people treated what they considered their inferiors, save Cora, Circe and Finnie, who aren’t from there and don’t know how to act the blue blood even though they now are. And don’t think she didn’t know it, Frannie. Don’t think Josette is here for whatever you pay her or for an adventure. She’s here for you. She’s here to be with you. She’s here because, to her, you’re family. Is that kind of loyalty earned by a dark soul?”
He really had to stop because I felt them brimming and I knew I wouldn’t be able to hold them back.
Especially when Noc saw them and shifted his hand at my cheek so his thumb swept below my eye. Releasing the tear into the pad of his thumb, he skimmed the wet along my temple as he dipped his face close.
“You grew up without any love,” he whispered, and gods, gods, I saw it in his eyes as well. The bright gathering there, his own wet gleaming. “I have no fuckin’ clue how you survived, baby. I’ve known love every day of my life and I cannot imagine the man I’d be if I didn’t. If my life was void of it. If I had to find my way without that as the single-most prevalent guiding force from the minute my mom died giving me life to this moment with you. I could only hope that I’d become what you’ve become against every odd. A woman starved of love her whole life and yet so fuckin’ full of it, she’d stand holding a hook with blood running down her thighs just so the brother she adored wouldn’t have to do it. You don’t have a midnight soul, Frannie. Your soul is so bright, I look too close, I’d be blinded.”