Joss’s lips tightened into a hard line, and his eyes blazed. He held up one finger, and that one gesture shut her up, her eyes widening. “Did you just say I treated you like an inflatable doll?”
“No! I just meant—
merde
, Joss, you know you’re sex-starved, and that’s the only reason you fixated on me! Your personal pin-up, you said. Anybody could have done! You just happened to focus on me!”
Joss’s body did something she would have thought impossible—it got even harder. “That is the stupidest thing you’ve said yet,” he said flatly, his lips thin. “I joined the Legion for you, and I did those five years for you, and if I focused my fantasies on you it was because
you’re the person I always fantasized about, fucking hell, Célie!
Well the hell before you were even old enough for me to be doing that, and trust me, you were not my only damn option back then. And I’m pretty sure you aren’t now, either. God damn it. My inflatable doll,” he repeated bitterly, and threw himself onto his back on the bed, covering his eyes with his forearm.
Célie unfolded herself and knelt by the bed so that she could see his face again, stunned. “Don’t be mad.” She touched his chest.
He shifted his forearm just enough to glare at her. “What, you’re the only person who gets to do that?”
“You never used to get mad at me before.” Except a couple of times when he’d thought she’d done something stupidly dangerous. She felt completely disoriented by his anger, in fact.
“I was protecting you from me before, Célie. I was being your damn older brother, since your own was so crappy. I don’t want to do that anymore. I want you to take all that I am.”
“Oh,” she breathed. That made her feel … too full, overflowing, the thought of taking all that he was. But … “I want that, too. That’s exactly what I want.”
“That’s why I spent five years making myself into the best man I could, Célie. So when I asked you to do that, I wouldn’t be ashamed.”
Her eyes stung. “You … you might be too big for me, Joss. I’m … only me.”
Joss touched her chin. “Well, look at that, you’ve managed to say something even stupider.”
She frowned at him.
“Célie … only you?”
Well … she shrugged, embarrassed and annoyed. Sure, she was good with chocolate, but … had he
looked
at himself, ever? “You could have, like, Gisele Bündchen now,” she muttered hostilely. “Laetitia Casta.”
He cupped her chin, fingers curving against her jaw, into her hair. “Where’s my Célie? The girl who never puts herself down, who always has her chin up, defying the world to think less of her than who she is?”
Her eyes stung again.
“Besides, you know very well that you would punch Gisele Bündchen in the nose if she got near me.”
Well … yeah.
Joss smiled a little, tugging her gently closer. “And
think
of the lawsuit on that one. Her nose is probably insured for millions.”
“Then she should keep it away from you,” Célie muttered.
A leap of laughter in Joss’s eyes. It still made pure joy light in her own heart, to see him laugh. On one elbow, he shifted forward to kiss her, slow and warm.
Oh.
The fact that
Joss Castel
, her hopeless crush, had just given her a casual, affectionate, possessive kiss kind of blew Célie’s mind.
“You going to get up off that floor and get back in this bed and tell me why you were down there in the first place?” Joss’s voice was so warm and firm.
Quit messing around, Célie.
It was so exactly like Joss, such a familiar tone from when she was still a teenager.
He slid his hand around her back and urged her body toward the mattress.
She braced her hands against the edge to fight the pull, in a resurgence of panic. He stopped pulling and raised his eyebrows at her, waiting.
“It’s all very well for you! Your fantasy was just … just sex!” She knew better than to say the “inflatable doll” thing again. Joss got mad so rarely, she tended to respect it when he did. “But this is
my
fantasy. It’s
hard
!”
“Célie, damn it.” Joss abruptly picked her up and set her on the bed. She half sat, half knelt, awkward and stubborn, and he took her shoulders and forced her horizontal. “What’s hard?” He propped himself above her to hold her eyes, exasperated.
“
This
is.” She scowled at him, pissed off at her own ridiculousness and how he managed to make her even more ridiculous just by existing.
“Sleeping?”
“The cuddle!” she yelled.
His eyebrows went up again. “A … cuddle?”
“Yes!”
“That’s
hard
?”
“Not for you.” She glared at him. “You just have to lie there.”
He laughed, unexpectedly. It warmed her middle when he laughed, like drinking hot chocolate. “I guess you probably could have just lain there for my fantasy, too, Célie, but I appreciate it that you didn’t.” He grinned at her.
It was really not fair for him to grin. It made all her insides cozy and happy, as if she just wanted to hug him. As if this was real, as if it was going to work, as if they were
together
.
His fingers came up to sift gently through the feathered wings of her hair. “Why’s it hard for you, sweetheart?”
“Because it’s the thing I always dreamed about the most. The thing
I
fantasized every night, that you were here. It’s what got
me
through. And I’m afraid if I believe in it, it will disappear. And then I’ll never have it again.” She closed her eyes a moment, ashamed and vulnerable and wishing she could hide under the sheet.
When she opened her eyes again, Joss’s eyes were very intent. “You dreamed about me every night? Just about this? Me being here?”
“I tried not to,” she muttered. “But … it helped get me to sleep. It made me, you know … fall asleep happy.”
His eyes were somber. “I wish I had done some things differently. But I can’t fix yesterday, Célie. I can only work on today and tomorrow.” He shifted to the side and nestled her body in closer to his. “I can do this.”
Breath moved through her, shaky and wanting, as his warmth wrapped around her. “You don’t have to do anything,” she whispered. “You just have to be there. That’s all it takes for the cuddle.”
“Seems as if I might be able to improve on it, beyond lying flat on my back to enjoy it.” He nestled her more closely, turning her body so that her back was against his chest, his arm over her, his chin tucked against the top of her head, his body angling to envelope her in him without crushing her. “How about this?”
Her nose stung. “It’s perfect.”
“We have very different concepts of what is hard,” he murmured to the top of her head. “This is the sweetest, easiest thing I have ever done, in my entire life.”
“Is that bad?” Unease came back so quickly. “I know you thrive on challenge. You would never have gone off to the Legion, if you didn’t need to seek out the most difficult challenges possible.”
A little silence. “You don’t trust me,” he said suddenly, a note of realization. “It’s not just that you’re mad at me for before. You don’t trust me now, not to let you down.”
Of course she didn’t! How could she? She scowled at the sheets in front of her.
He pressed a kiss to the top of her head. “I’m not going to go off to find another challenge, Célie. You’re challenging enough just by existing.”
“Hey.”
“Shhhh.” He jostled her gently, rocking her.
“I’m not as challenging as the Foreign Legion!”
“Maybe I have high standards for you. Maybe those are the challenge.”
She frowned. That sounded far too close to the princess-on-a-glass-hill thing.
“It’s not all about the challenge, Célie. You do that—you challenge me—but you do something else, too. You … rest me.”
Really? That made her feel so whole and centered and wonderful, to be his point of rest.
“Except that … it’s not that you’re restful, exactly. Most of the time, you make me feel the opposite of rested. Full of energy. Wanting to do something, usually to you.” He fell silent again.
Joss, searching for words. She waited, his quiet seriousness sinking into her as it always had, anchoring her. He made her bounce all over the place with energy and the need for his attention. And yet he was also the man she had curled up against to be able to fall asleep, in her head, night after night, for years. Before he even left, she would do that.
He closed his hand around hers and brought it behind her back, pressing it to his flat stomach. “You make me feel alive, down here.”
Oh.
Her fingers caressed that hard shield of muscle that protected all his soft essential organs.
“Sometimes it kicks up into a fire, and sometimes it’s this low heat, but it’s always what keeps me warm.”
Her eyes prickled. She pulled his arm back around her, tucking his hand now against her belly, where it rode, firm and sure.
That warmth of him, the embrace, the sweetness, the happiness sank through her skin from his body stretching through her until it
became
her in a way that was terrifying. Because if this was her, and that happiness got taken away again, what
her
would there be left?
If so much solidity and security and warmth came from him, how precarious and vulnerable and cold would she feel when he was gone again?
“I can tell you a bedtime story,” he murmured, his voice vibrating against her back.
“Mmm?”
“There once was a very young man who stood looking at tacky fake diamond rings in some stupid, low-class jewelry store window. Because he knew he had to leave, to become better, but … there was this girl. And even though she didn’t know it, and he shouldn’t tell her, he really, really wanted her to promise to wait for him. He wanted it more than anything. But he hated how cheap those rings were so damn much, and he was so damn proud, and … he couldn’t. He just couldn’t do it. He had to be able to offer her more.”
A lone tear trembled over her lashes and snuck toward the mattress. “I would have been incandescent with joy, to wear your cheap fake diamond ring. People would have thought I was running around in sequins, so much happiness would have sparkled off me.”
“Yeah.” His arm tightened. “I know that now.”
She fell quiet. She could have said more—more regrets, more accusations, more ways their lives would have been happier, if only he had taken that step.
She let a slow, soft breath out, linked her fingers with his hand, and lifted it to her lips to kiss it.
“You’ve always sparkled to me, Célie.”
She nestled his hand close to her face as she let herself fall asleep.
Joss rode with her to work and then gazed at her moped keys in some bemusement when she tossed them to him so he could use it during the day. She grinned. “It suits you.”
“I think I need to get my own means of locomotion. Maybe a real motorcycle.”
“I don’t know. There’s something to be said for having you squooshed up behind me on a moped,” she said saucily.
His left eyebrow rose just a little, and heat washed through her, as she forgot how hilarious the vision of him on a moped was and remembered instead how tightly his hips fit against her butt.
“Didn’t you always want a real motorcycle, Célie?”
She used to imagine herself all tough and sexy on some sleek, aggressive bike, yeah. Of course, that had been during her Goth period, when she was too young to legally drive one, only old enough to ride behind Joss if he ever fulfilled that fantasy of hers. She shrugged. “I’ve never passed my regular motorcycle license. This was what I could afford, when I first moved to Paris. And it suits me.”
Except she still kind of regretted not getting it in pink. Maybe it was time for a new one. With flower decals.
He smiled. “Like your apartment,” he teased. “That’s all bed.”
“It’s a great apartment!” she declared, over her flush. “If you stand on tiptoe on the balcony railing, you can see a tip of the Eiffel Tower.”
“Don’t stand up on tiptoe on the railing unless I’m holding on to your waist.” Joss put his hands on her waist to demonstrate and pulled her in for a kiss. “Ever think about getting a bigger one?”
“Apartments aren’t cheap in Paris, Joss.”
“Plus, you have such a great neighborhood. And only a couple of blocks away from that park.”
She couldn’t quite interpret the satisfaction in his eyes, like he was patting himself on the back. Maybe he was still telling himself he’d done the right thing in leaving, since she’d clearly done so well?
“You really are impossible, you know,” she told him.
“So are you,” Joss said. “Good thing I can do the impossible.” He bent and kissed her, and her entire body lit with delight, to be kissed good-bye by him in the morning. It made the whole day turn into something marvelous, as if she’d been plodding her way through a gray morning, still yawning, and all of a sudden the sun lifted over the horizon in a burst of gold just as a bakery door opened and spilled the scent of fresh bread all over her. This golden, warm magic of his kiss.
He turned her and used both hands on her butt to push her firmly toward the glass doors. “Now go, before you’re late.”
***
Dom was late, for him, meaning Célie and Amand both arrived first. It also meant something else about Dom’s private life, and while Célie preferred not to get a
detailed
picture, she nevertheless found it adorable. The man was kind of disgustingly happy these days.
So was she.
How she’d managed to get in before Dom considering the way she had spent her morning was a mystery to her.
Too full of herself to behave, she hopped up to sit on one of the marble counters so that she could grin at Dom as he came up the stairs and entered the
laboratoire
.
Dom stopped, looked at her butt on his counters, looked at her, and put his hands on his hips and raised an eyebrow.
Célie grinned and stuck her tongue out at him.
Dom sighed and rubbed his hands through his hair. “Why me? I can guarantee Sylvain does not have to put up with this shit.”
“Aww,” Célie cooed. “Are you jealous of Sylvain?”