At first she was stiff and unyielding, but he just continued to rock her, to stroke her back and whisper she’d be okay and Aeric was shocked that this didn’t feel in the slightest bit weird to him.
“Lissa knows how to live. I’ve looked through her eyes, seen her take joy from a moment, she knows how to laugh, how to love. Me, I’ve been so hidden, so wrapped up in my head that I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to learn how.”
Her words pierced his heart because he wasn’t sure what to tell her. Everything she said was true, to deny it would be a lie. And that’s not how he wanted things to go between them. Not ever again. Tipping her chin up, he held her gaze as he asked, “Why me, Chrysalis? I understand why Lissa would want this, but why you?”
Her fingers curled into the fabric of his shirt. “Because I can’t imagine anyone else ever being able to truly accept me as I am. To understand my struggle. But you witnessed it, you saw and you know and it gives me hope that maybe…” she swallowed and he heard the tears.
Brushing his fingers on her cheek he smiled. “You want to know how to live? How to embrace the magic of a moment as Lissa does?”
“With everything in me.”
“Then tell me, if you had one thing in the whole of Kingdom that you wished to do or see, what would it be?”
Blinking she turned her face to the side and he could see she was giving it much consideration. Her tiny brows furrowed into the cutest little line and he grinned when her body softened, yielded to him. When she took an infinitesimal step deeper into his arms, his space. When her scent of roses laced the very fabric of the wind.
Finally she looked at him. “I wish to see a star be born.”
He’d asked Lissa almost the exact same question and her answer had been the very opposite. Grinning, he shook his head.
“What?” She asked with a twitch of her lips, he couldn’t seem to help but trace the laugh lines around her mouth. Lines she’d probably had no hand in creating, but that he meant to see become her habit one day.
“You just remind me of someone.”
“Lissa?” her voice sounded slightly defeated, a little sad.
Moving his hands so that he framed the softness of her face he nodded. “Yes, sometimes. But I see you too, Chrysalis. I have not forgotten the sacrifices you made for her, for myself. You are a woman worth knowing.”
Blue eyes swam with tears.
“You want to know how to live,” he repeated himself, “then kiss me.”
Leaning up on tiptoe, he felt the electric charge of her strawberry laced lips slide against his own. Her kiss was soft and so very tentative, but it moved him all the same. Chrysalis was not Lissa, what she was was a good and decent woman who’d fought the battle of her life and won.
Wrapping his arms around her waist, he kissed her back.
And so began their courtship, it blossomed from beside the bank that’d been created to destroy her.
A month later he was smoothing down his jacket. The sleeves were a little short, but otherwise very comfortable. Chrysalis was taking sewing lessons from her father and insisted on creating his clothes as she found the skins he wore offensive.
He chuckled as he gazed in the mirror of the cabin that they shared. The cabin wasn’t large, only a one bedroom with a built in hearth and small kitchen. Baths were taken in the moon pool out back. Aeric had built the home when he’d determined that coming and going over fifty miles every week was asinine, getting to know her meant they needed to stay in much closer proximity than that.
She’d decorated it simply. A small multicolored yarn rug she’d woven herself, a small vase full of apple blossom twigs, as cutting chattering flowers, she said, would be much too noisy.
There were curtains, but they were so isolated they usually left them open. Chrysalis was no longer bound to the moon as she’d once been, the mark under her eye was now gone. The moment Siria’s hold had left, so had it.
And slowly but surely she was coming out of her shell. Chrysalis was much more subdued and prone to long bouts of silence, but they weren’t uncomfortable and he found he rather enjoyed it. She’d sit on his lap and knit and they’d be content to simply be together.
Walking up behind him, she smiled. It wasn’t a long one, but it sparkled nonetheless. Laying her hands on his shoulders she nodded. “Do you like it then?”
He nodded as she brushed at a stray bit of lint on his lapel. “I do.” The pants she’d made him fit perfectly. “So what do you think?” He turned, holding out his arms for her inspection. “Think your parents will approve of me?”
Chrysalis looked positively delicious today. Dressed in a gown of purest black, it spilled down around her ankles like slithering shadow. The heart shaped corset fitted to her waist, making her appear both slimmer and curvaceous at the same time. She’d gathered her hair into a fancy knot behind her head, causing her eyes that were already a deep blue, to seem like it glowed against the alabaster smoothness of her flesh.
“I think that they should.”