I didn't know how it was that fate saw fit to bless me with someone with that patience and that certainty. It made me feel stronger in a way that I never had before, reassured me that despite everything that had already happened --and no doubt those things that would eventually happen as well-- it would be ok.

And, finally, even if that binding tether between our souls was quiet now, what was the point in sitting here worrying and denying those little bits of things between us just because we couldn't feel the other in that new and special way.

"Kiss me." I wondered when it was that the shyness had bled away into something else. My demand wasn't a simpering, stammered plea. It was that quiet sure perseverance that relentlessly made progress.

It was exactly what he was; what he'd always been.

I watched his eyes flick down to look at my lips as if he were considering how he would go about it.

How would he kiss me this time?

I found myself suddenly desperate to know how he would kiss me, not just now but every day in every moment we could kiss. How would it be? Would they all be unique? When would his lips be as soft as a flower petal? When would his teeth drag along my skin? How would he choose to do it in those split-second stolen kisses? My forehead? My cheek? The side of my lips?

The second lasted too long for my taste. I rocked forward intending to catch him myself if I needed to, but Esayr dodged back with a smile. Not far, nor out of reach.

Once upon a time ago, I might have taken the action for a slight, but there was a light in his eyes that told me he was going to tease me. That, and the warm press of his hand against the outside of my thigh where it had moved from where it had gripped the chair.

So, with a flutter in my stomach, I decided for this moment I could be patient.

"Was I not fast enough for you?"

I tried to hide my laughter, "What do you mean?"

"Forgive me if I'm wrong, dear, but you asked me to kiss you." His hand spanned the width of my thigh easily enough that it surprised me. He gave a tight squeeze for the span of a heartbeat before his grip eased, "And yet here you are chasing after me." He let his thumb slide in that sweeping caress, tracing that seam where my hip met my leg and back down dangerously low between the warmth of my legs. "If I'm not moving fast enough for you then you need only let me know."

"Kiss me faster."

He did what I told him to. It was a blindingly quick peck on my right cheek, so fast I barely even felt it.

He was laughing again, that deep rumble that turned into laughter that shook his shoulders and frame.

My hand that had been resting on his chest bunched immediately, pulling the soft fabric of his shirt into a tight messy bundle. I tugged him back my way, out of that precarious lean that his laughter had sent him into. "Come back here and kiss me like you mean it, Esayr."

That got his attention in a way I didn't anticipate. His head, which had been thrown back, snapped toward me so accurately it made me half believe he could still sense that bond in a way I wasn't quite as privy to.

There was a fire in his eyes that I hadn't seen in a long time, reminding me that the softness and the warmth I always felt from him came from somewhere warmer, radiating outward. It was the same way the sun warms that godforsaken little blue planet, but when you focus just a single sunshaft onto one spot it will burn.

"That's where you're wrong, Addy." He gripped the front edge of my chair and tipped it back just enough that his other hand could snag my knee and pull it up and over until it dropped across his lap.

The chair snapped back against the floor while the hand that had effortlessly lifted it, traced that same spot on my thigh again, this time only more gentle. "I always mean it." He hefted me quickly, one hand at my right knee and the other shifting up to my hip, and I let him do it. I was in his lap just the way that I'd imagined during Mercy.

"I'm going to crush you," I could feel the dregs of old insecurities climbing up from the mud of grade school traumas. It wasn't the same as the insecurities that had plagued our relationship but I tried to smother it just like I'd done with those.

"I'd like to see you try. I want it. I want every bit of you. I want your thighs so tight around me that you'll swear you'll break me in two. I want the pressure of you on me as a heavy enough weight that my soul will have no choice but to remind itself that it belongs in my body," his hands skated along the curve of my hips and back down, dipping low enough but not too far --asking for permission. "That it belongs beneath you, between you, above you, inside you, wherever you can be in my life know this and only this, I welcome it in all of its forms. So crush me, Addy, and never forget that when I kiss you I mean it."

The warmth of Esayr's fingers found that spot on my cheek where he'd brushed his lips moments ago, "I mean it the same here, as I do here," they tapped a spot on my forehead, "in the same way that I mean it here," before they dropped to trace my bottom lip, "with the same passion as I mean here," they trailed lower along the line of my throat to flutter along my collar bone, "to the same driving need that I will mean here." It was his other hand this time. The one that lingered on my leg. The one with that had pulled my legs wide to let them straddle him. The same hand that had slid inward in a bold claim, sweeping fingers along the inside of my thigh perilously close to other parts of me, skating around those new areas that ached only out of consideration for the fact that I hadn't given him that permission, yet."

When he spoke again this time it was a whisper that stirred only the air between us, "I will always mean it."

"Then show me how you mean it, Esayr."

*****A/N*****

Everywhere else --in the United States at least-- has been dealing with bitterly cold weather.

The other day in Florida I got a sunburn on my hand where it sat on my gearshift during the 15-minute car ride home from work.