Chapter 224: Under 1 (M)

BONNIE

He said it with his mouth still close to mine and his hand spread across my back, and for one treacherous moment, I almost agreed. The house stood just up the slope, its windows glowing honey-gold against the dusk, its corridors warm, our bed waiting somewhere inside with sheets I had never slept in to miss.

"No," I heard myself say.

Lysander drew back an inch. Water trickled from his jaw. "No?"

"Not upstairs." I slid my fingers into the wet hair at his nape and gave a gentle tug, keeping him where I wanted him. "Here."

"Here." His gaze travelled over the darkening lake, the black pines along its banks, and the last scraps of pink sky fading to grey. "Bonnie, I am sure you have noticed but we are already in the lake. There is nowhere to lie down."

"Then you aren’t trying very hard."

He looked at me properly then. I watched something shift in his expression, curiosity sharpening into interest as he reconsidered what I was actually suggesting.

"You want to do this in the water."

"I want to do this here." I let my voice drop into a register I had heard other women use and had never quite trusted myself to manage. "Right where we are. In the lake. Under it, if you like."

A laugh escaped him, brief and disbelieving. "Under it."

"Under it."

"You’re serious."

"Very."

He adjusted his position in the water, treading lazily, but the amusement in his face gave way to something more thoughtful.

"I’m nasty enough to like the idea," he admitted. "Ordinarily, it wouldn’t even be a question. During the heat seasons, there is no hiding anything among the pack. Half of them don’t bother with doors. But it isn’t the season, and you’re shy. I didn’t want to push you into anything."

"I’m not shy."

"You went red to the hairline when I took my pants off."

"You took them off in the open air, behind a house full of people."

"There are four people around here at present, and I assure you, not one of them was looking. And even if they were looking.. so?"

"That isn’t the point."

"It’s a little the point." His thumb traced a slow path over my hip, back and forth, with the sort of deliberate leisure that suggested he knew precisely how distracting he was being. "So. Here?"

"Here."

I held his gaze. His grin was already threatening to return, and I wanted to stop it before he could become entirely too pleased with himself.

"I happen to be feeling adventurous."

"I can hear that."

"Can you hold your breath long enough to be useful, though?"

His grin faltered. "Ah. There it is."

"There it is."

"I wish I had as much confidence in my lungs as you seem to have in yours."

"You are in the presence of a quarter god," I reminded him. "Try to keep up."

Then I caught a fistful of his hair, pressed down on his shoulder, and sank beneath the surface.

He let me.

That was the thing about Lysander. He never fought something he had already decided to enjoy. He dipped beneath my hand with his eyes open and his mouth curving into a smile, and the copper-coloured water closed over our heads.

Cold enveloped my scalp, my ears, my shoulders. My hair streamed above me, and the world thickened into green silence, broken only by the faint rush of our movements. Keeping my grip on him, I kicked us deeper, through the warmer water near the surface and into the chill below. We passed a shelf of weeds, a sunken branch furred with silt, and something silver that flashed beside us before vanishing into the gloom.

Lysander’s hand settled at my waist. His legs moved in slow, powerful strokes, and bubbles slipped from his shoulders in bright little strings, rising past our faces toward the distant surface.

I lifted my free hand.

The water answered.

It had been answering me all day, yielding in small, almost imperceptible ways whenever I reached for it. This was different. This was the first time I had asked for something immense, something that should have been beyond the reach of a thought, and the lake responded with the eager obedience of a creature finally released from its leash.

The water peeled back.

A ring opened above us and spread outward, widening as it went. The lake rose around us in a sheer, shimmering wall, and the bed beneath it emerged from the darkness: black silt, pale stones, tangled weeds, and a lost oar half swallowed by mud.

The water climbed into the air, curving overhead and around us in a vast, translucent shell. Six feet away, ten, twenty, it continued to rise until the lake itself hung suspended in a great hollow around us, hissing softly wherever its weight pressed against the invisible boundaries of my magic.

We descended the last few feet and settled onto the lakebed.

Mud yielded beneath my heels, cold and soft, and the water remained aloft.

For several seconds, Lysander didn’t move.

He stood in the middle of the hollow with his head tipped back, turning slowly as he took in the impossible world I had made for us. Wonder had stripped every trace of mischief from his face. To my considerable satisfaction, he looked utterly, magnificently astonished.

A pike hung suspended in the wall to our left, its gill plates flared, its fins spread as though it had been caught mid-flight. Reeds stood upright on the other side, their slender stems bathed in green light. A shoal of silver fish wheeled through the water above us, turning together in a slow, mindless dance. Sunlight filtered through the lifted lake in wavering bands of gold and green, spilling over Lysander’s bare chest and shoulders and scattering across the mud at our feet.

"Well," he murmured at last. "This is interesting."

I bit the inside of my cheek.

"Just interesting?"

"Extremely interesting." He crouched and pressed two fingers into the silt, watching the indentation fill slowly with water. "Look at that oar. Someone lost it a lifetime ago."

He examined it for another moment before straightening and turning back to me. Light moved across his face, catching in his eyes.

"You’re doing all this with one hand?"