Chapter 640 | I’m Done Holding Back

She didn’t wait for permission.

Felicity leaned forward and pressed her mouth to mine. The kiss started soft, almost careful, like she was giving me one last chance to read the moment correctly and pull away if I needed to. The carefulness lasted maybe two seconds. Then she made a sound against my lips that lived somewhere between frustration and complete surrender, grabbed the front of my jacket with both fists, and yanked me toward her hard enough that I felt the seam shift across my shoulders.

The softness evaporated.

Her tongue found mine and the taste was chamomile tea layered over something warmer, something that was just her, and my hand came up to cup the back of her neck where her hair was still damp from the shower and soft enough that my fingers sank into it without resistance. She tilted her head to deepen the angle and I felt her breath hitch when I tightened my grip slightly, testing whether she wanted restraint or the opposite.

The blanket slid off our laps and pooled on the floor beside the couch.

Neither of us noticed.

Felicity broke the kiss just long enough to breathe, her forehead pressed against mine and her blue eyes open and close enough that I could see the individual gold flecks scattered through her irises that I had genuinely never noticed before because I had never been this close without a table or a training mat or three feet of deliberate social distance between us. Her pupils were blown wide. Her cheeks were flushed pink all the way down her throat. Her breathing was unsteady in a way that made it very clear she had not been expecting the kiss to feel like that either.

“I’ve been wanting to do that for three weeks,” she whispered. “The actual version. Not the theater version.”

“The theater version was pretty good.”

“The theater version was me holding back because I didn’t want to scare you.” She bit my lower lip hard enough to sting and then soothed it with her tongue, and the combination made my spine light up from the base to the skull. “I’m done holding back.”

Her hands found the zipper of my jacket and yanked it down without ceremony. The charcoal field kit that Diane had approved and the support track had tailored and Steele’s burn had necessitated came off my shoulders and hit the floor with a sound like a body hitting a mat, and Felicity’s palms spread flat across my chest through the white shirt underneath, her fingers pressing into the muscle that the Demigod trait had been building without my permission for weeks.

“God,” she breathed against my throat. “You’re so warm. You’re always warm, do you know that? Every time I sit beside you in class I can feel it through your sleeve and it makes me want to crawl inside your jacket and live there.”

“That would be a very strange look during Hero Law.”

“Worth it.” She pulled my shirt over my head and threw it somewhere behind her without looking, and the fairy lights painted my chest in gold while her eyes traveled down like she was reading something written on my skin. The fading shadow marks from the black fire traced my ribs in patterns that caught the light wrong, and Felicity’s fingers found them and followed the lines with a touch so light it should not have registered on a nervous system running at a hundred Dexterity.

It registered.

“These are from the plaza,” she said, her voice gone quiet. “From when you…”

“Yeah.”

She leaned forward and pressed her mouth to the center of my sternum, right over the second heartbeat that hummed beneath my skin, and held it there for three full seconds. The warmth of her lips soaked through muscle and bone and found something underneath that responded by pressing outward, and for a moment the room filled with a golden glow so faint that it could have been the fairy lights and nothing more.

Felicity pulled back and looked at me with wide eyes. “Was that you?”

“Honestly? I don’t know.”

“It felt like sunrise.” She pressed her palm flat against the same spot and her breath caught when the warmth answered her again, fainter this time, a pulse that matched the rhythm of her heartbeat rather than mine. “Lukas. What are you?”

“Still working on that.”

She kissed me again, and this time there was nothing tentative about it and nothing held back and nothing calculated. Her hands went into my hair and pulled hard enough that my head tipped back and she climbed into my lap with her knees bracketing my hips, the sleep shirt riding up her thighs as she settled her weight against me. The cotton shorts were thin enough that I could feel every degree of heat between us, and when she rolled her hips forward the friction made both of us inhale sharply through our noses because breathing through our mouths would have required breaking the kiss and neither of us was willing to do that.

“I want you,” she said against my mouth, and the words came out raw and unfiltered and nothing like the girl who said bestie fourteen times a day and coordinated her outfit to match her mood board. “I’ve wanted you since the exam. Since you pulled me out of rubble and smiled at me like it was the easiest decision you ever made. I’ve been playing the long game and I’m tired of playing and I want you to touch me like you mean it.”

I got my hands under the hem of her shirt and pulled it over her head in one motion. No bra. The fairy lights caught the curve of her breasts and the flat plane of her stomach and the freckles that continued down from her face across her collarbones and scattered lower in a pattern that nobody outside this room had ever mapped. Felicity’s skin was soft and warm and flushed pink across her chest and she did not cover herself or look away or perform any version of the self-consciousness that most people defaulted to in this moment.

She arched her back and pushed her chest forward and her expression dared me to stare.

So I stared.

“There,” she breathed. “That’s the look. That’s the one I wanted.”

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