The first thing I’m aware of upon waking up is the storm.
I can hear raindrops and massive sweeps of forceful wind breaking against the windows. The air is very cold, even though I’m perfectly warm. I experience all of that in an abstract sensory way, still half in my dreams.
I’m tempted to let myself drop right back into them. Don’t want to move, anyways. I’m so cozy right now, because there are two strong, powerful arms locked around me. Warming me better than a furnace, holding me close.
I melt deeply into them, take a long breath, and - taste vetiver.
Aiden.
My eyes instantly blink open as memories from last night come pouring, crashing back. The image of Aiden falling through the open air, reaching for me - it leaps into my mind with heart-wrenching clarity. I can almost still feel the rain on my face, the wind whipping through my clothes.
But - I’m in my bedroom. My eyes have focused enough for me to see that, now.
Weird, because I know that I fell asleep in my car, held in Aiden’s arms. We were still parked at the base of the mountain where we saved Justin. I thought we had both burned up the last of our energy, but I guess Aiden must have pushed on. Drove us home, carried me through the rain and up the stairs. Took my clothes off, put me in my bed, and gathered me up to sleep in his arms.
I turn over to look at him.
He looks exhausted, his cheek smushed against the pillow. His messy hair is falling into his face, fluttering with his sleepy breaths. The heavy grey curtains of rain outside have cast my room into cold, shadowy shades - indigo, amethyst - but Aiden looks like warmth. His bronze body, his rich chestnut hair, the faint glow of his skin in the minimal light.
He lets out a quiet sigh in his sleep.
Suddenly I’m almost in tears. I let out a sharp, unsteady breath, then fling myself at Aiden, throw my arms around his neck, and press a hard kiss onto his sleeping mouth.
Aiden’s blue eyes blink open, startled and bewildered. Before he can react at all, I start raining down kisses all over his face, rolling on top of him so I can pin him down, keep him in place.
Huffing laughter breaks the quiet of my bedroom as Aiden wakes up enough to realize what’s going on.
“Jamie,” he rumbles, sliding his huge hands up my back. “What’s-?”
“Oh, god,” I groan, undone completely by the sound of his voice. I keep up the storm of kisses I’m planting all over him, savoring each fast and fleeting one of them. “I love you, Sugar Maple, I love you, I love you-”
Aiden lets out another baffled laugh, then a sharp exhale. I straddled him to hold him down, and he took off all of our clothes last night, and I’ve been moving around a lot.
Aiden’s body - as it always does - instantly responds to having mine pressed against it like this. His cheeks are slowly turning a deep shade of crimson, his flustered blue eyes blinking hard.
He shivers as my lips graze his throat, as I drag my nose against his stubble. His arms were still wrapped around me, but now his hands drop to grip me by my hips. Hard pressure - I think he’s holding me much more tightly than he realizes - but it feels good. It unlocks a deep warmth that fountains out right from my very core.
I melt even more onto Aiden, burrowing my face into his neck.
“I love you,” I say weakly. “I love you, I…”
I fade off and fall silent, overwhelmed. Just the taste of Aiden, the vetiver and rainstorm scent of his skin, the warmth of his body, his voice, his words, the way that he's holding me... no one else has ever held me the way that Aiden does...
“Hey,” he rumbles softly, stroking his fingers through my hair. “Are you alri-?”
He stops, because his other hand just touched my shoulder, and I let out a small gasp of pain.
I’d almost forgotten that I hurt myself last night after all hell broke loose at the clifftop. I didn’t feel it until now. My only thoughts were of Aiden, nothing else.
Aiden sits up, gently easing me backwards. He looks down at my hands, which have burns from the safety line, just like his. He looks at my wrist, which is bruised with prints of his fingertips, just like his is bruised with mine. Then my shoulder, which is probably bruised up, too, tender and a little swollen.
Then his eyes lift to mine, and I see him go through the same flood of memory as I just did. I think I blanked out his brain for a minute with all the love I was showering down on him. But now last night comes back to him in a lightning flash that I can see in his beautiful blue gaze.
He shudders, his eyebrows drawing up and together, his eyes staring deeply into mine. He takes my face in his trembling hands, then lets out a soft, raw, broken sound. He buries his face into my neck, locks his arms around me.
I close mine around him, too, pushing my nose into his shoulder. Our naked bodies are already pressed tightly together, but we’re holding each other like we’re trying to somehow bring ourselves even closer.
Aiden rolls us over, flattens me into the bed. He covers my body with his and puts his weight everywhere but my shoulder. He tucks his face into my neck again, taking deep breaths. The delicious warmth of him melts into me, and I slide my sore hands up his back.
We stay like that, just holding each other, for - I don’t know how long. I don’t even know what time it is. The storm is obscuring any hint of what's beyond the windows. Once again, I get that blissful feeling like there’s nothing in the world but this room, him, and me.
When Aiden draws back, he’s absolutely glaring at me.
“Fuck, Jamie!” he says heatedly. “How the fuck could you fucking do that, man? Fuckin’ - you dumb fuck, just what in the fucking fuck were you - for fuck’s sake!”
I nearly laugh, distantly thinking to myself that it’s good Ellen didn’t hear that. Aiden would have just taught her like, eight different ways to use that word.
It’s difficult for me to even speak right now, looking up at him. I love him more than I know what to do with.
Aiden opens his mouth to keep talking, sees the look on my face, and closes it again. He blinks down at me, then shakes his head, forcing himself to stay focused.
“Listen,” he forges on, “I know that you weren’t thinking, I get that, but you can’t do shit like th-”
“I wasn’t thinking?” I interrupt, confused. “When?”
Aiden makes a face that suggests the answer should be very obvious. “When you threw yourself off a fucking cliff to go after me?”
“Oh.” I reach up to skate my fingernails along his collarbone, but keep my eyes on his. “No, um. I was thinking. I actually felt really clear-headed, in that moment.”
Aiden stops, staring at me like he doesn’t understand. He opens his mouth to argue with me, then abruptly seems to remember that I can’t lie, especially not to him.
His expression goes blank. He just stares and stares at me, his blue eyes enormous.
A deep silence falls. I sense Aiden sinking into the labyrinth of his thoughts.
I wait, giving him time. With our bare bodies snuggled up like this, I could happily wait forever. The air in my room is made cold by the storm, which makes Aiden’s heat feel so damn good against my skin. I want to curl up into him, or pull his face down to mine, but I don’t want to distract him while he’s working through what I said. Instead I just keep stroking his collarbone, a small touch to keep him grounded here with me.
The only noise for a good long time is the rush of rain battering against the windows.
“Really?” Aiden says suddenly, his voice scraping. “Are you serious? You - you thought, and then you - like - decided…?”
I look up at him, letting him read the truth in my eyes. Then I gently cup his face in my hands, lean up to brush a kiss onto his mouth.
“Don’t you know how precious you are to me?” I murmur, when I draw away again.
Aiden is motionless, his expression filled with complex, intense emotion, his eyes wide and wet, his eyebrows furrowed. He swallows hard, then drops his head, pushes his face into my chest. To hide it from me, I think.
“Jamie,” he begins, in a very thin, fragile voice, “You just - I fucking can’t with you, man, how am I supposed to - like, I don’t even know how to - you always - my - my, um…”
He gets no farther than that. There’s a silence as he tries to pull his words together, followed by a helpless, agonized groan that means he can’t.
I wrap my arms around him, feeling drenched in love despite his inability to say what he was trying to say out loud. Maybe even more so, for that fact.
I understood exactly what he was trying to tell me, even if he’s mortified over how badly he got tangled up in his own words. Which he definitely is, because when I try to lift his head, he won’t let me. He buries his face deeper into my chest, and his stubble tickles me, making me laugh.
“You make me stupid,” he grumbles.
This makes me laugh again, my cheeks starting to burn. I'm so radiantly happy right now, wrapped up in Aiden's arms.
“Well, that’s only fair, because you do the exact same thing to me,” I tell him, laughing through every word. “You have no idea how much and how often you do that to me - and I don’t make you stupid, you were stupid alread-”
Aiden suddenly lifts his head, props himself up on his elbows, and looks down at me with so much love in his eyes that I shut up instantly. I blink up at him, my own expression melting into one to match his.
“You know that day at the beach, when we were kids?” he asks, his deep voice soft and quiet. “When we sat together, and - I made you laugh?”
I nod up at Aiden slowly, silently.
And he says, very seriously - “Yeah. I never recovered from that.”
I stare up at Aiden, all out of words, and he stares down at me, blushing shyly.
My mind goes flying back to a rainy night in the Ghost Office. The night when Aiden and I curled up in naked intimacy in the loft for the first time, and he brought up that day at the beach. He hadn’t expected me to remember it, but I did. I told him that I remembered how he made me laugh.
He was so happy that I remembered. Smiling with his whole face, breathless and beaming. He never said why it meant so much to him that I knew exactly what he was talking about.
I asked him why he was so different that day, when I found him alone on the beach with his head on his knees.
You caught me with my guard down, he told me.
Well, I’m so glad that I did, I had answered. If it played some kind of role in bringing you back to me.
Trust me, it did.
Aiden stole the poem from me before that day, so his feelings must go back farther than that. But - I think he just let me in on an important piece of our history that I didn’t know the significance of before.
I could probably lay here in silence and stare at Aiden and think about what he just said until I die of old age, but he keeps talking, much more urgently than before.
“That’s what I’m trying to tell you, Keane.” He's speaking in a rushed, pained voice. “You don’t understand how fucking much I love you, or how long I’ve been loving you. Even before I understood what it was - which took ages, like, someone had to tell me right to my face-”
I blink up at Aiden, confused. “That - what?”
“-or before I let myself actually accept what it was, which was ages after that - all that time, I…”
Aiden stops, takes a shaky breath.
“Watching you leap off of that cliff,” he says hoarsely, “Was the scariest fucking moment of my entire goddamn life. You can’t do shit like that to me, okay? I can’t watch anything like that happen ever again.”
I stare at him, then tilt my head to the side.
“Aiden - you realize that I have to watch you do stuff like that all the time, right? Every time there’s a situation where I can’t go with you to the end of a rescue? The fire, the cliff…? I watched you step into the swing of a fucking baseball bat. I mean, you caught it, which was ridiculous, but…”
Aiden shakes his head, frustrated. “But it’s different, I’m a Guardian, I-”
“Aiden.” I look into his eyes, once again making sure he sees the truth in them. “That doesn’t fucking matter. I love you just as much as you love me. Not for as long, but - just as much. Possibly more, if I’m being honest-”
“Okay,” Aiden scoffs.
“No, seriously, I would argue that there’s a large body of evidence to suggest-”
Aiden interrupts me with a huff of laughter that somehow sounds affectionate and anguished all at once.
“Science teacher,” he says.
“Oh, my god. Listen to me, dude!” I take Aiden by the jaw, peer intently up into his face. “I’m telling you that what you went through, seeing me fall - that’s exactly what I went through seeing you fall. That’s why I jumped after you.”
Aiden absorbs that, then slowly sits up. He turns to sit facing away from me, his arms wrapped around his knees. He stares at the rain smashing against the windows, deep in thought.
I sit up and wind myself around him, wrap my thighs around his body, my arms around his waist, my cheek against his shoulder.
The storm rages against the windows, and Aiden swims silently through his thoughts.
“You…” he finally says, without looking at me, “You mean it? You feel like that, every time I’ve gotta put myself on the line during a rescue? Every time?”
I hesitate, then nod. Aiden feels the movement of my cheek against his back. He lets out a heavy breath.
“I thought I knew what I was asking you to handle, being with me.” He runs a hand over his face. “Jesus Christ.”
I press a kiss against Aiden’s shoulder, and he suddenly takes in a shaking breath, presses his palms over his eyes.
“And you still wanna be with me, when that’s part of the deal? Over and over again?” His words are stumbling and rushed, breathless. “What are you, dumb? You got no brain cells, huh? You’re - you’re just mainly freckles, aren’t y-”
I reach around Aiden, tug his hands away from his face. I take his jaw and turn his head.
He looks into my eyes, sees my answer.
He shakes his head again, like he doesn’t understand me. “You’re really gonna go on loving me around all of that? For as long as we-?"
I tip forward, place a lingering kiss on his lips. "You have no idea how much love I've got for you, Sugar Maple."
Aiden stares at me, then blankly turns his gaze back to the window.
“Okay,” he says unsteadily. “Well, you’ll have to forgive me if it takes me a while to wrap my mind around that.”
Take as long as you need, I nearly answer. We’ve got forever.
There’s another silence, and then Aiden sharply turns around, pulls me into his lap.
“Listen, though,” he says, in a pleading voice. “I need you to be careful with yourself. I understand why you jumped, but-” He runs his hands down my body, then touches a thumb to my cheek. “You need to be careful, with something this precious and rare-”
“Archivist,” I say affectionately.
Aiden blinks, then groans so loudly that it startles a laugh out of me. He shoves me down onto my back and climbs on top of me again. I kind of expect him to start yelling in my face, based on the blazing fire that just burst into life in his blue eyes.
But he doesn't. He kisses me.
I kiss him back, relieved and grateful to be safe. To be warm. To be here with him.
To be home again, tucked safely into my Companion Plant’s arms.
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