Sunbeams - Part Thirteen
This episode is part of a larger story, Soft Touch. If you haven’t yet, you can go back and read it from the beginning right here.
Aiden is kissing me very softly. Taking my lip between his lips, then gently nibbling me, then dipping his tongue into my mouth. Lingering over every slow movement.
My fingers are trailing in slow circles on the sleek muscle running up the sides of his ribs. His weight has me crushed deep into our bed, but there’s no place I can think of where I’d be happier than I am right now.
“Hey, Callahan,” I murmur into his mouth, as his eyelashes brush my cheekbone. “Thank you. For tonight.”
“I didn’t plan any of that, man.” Aiden lightly drags the tip of his nose up and down the bridge of mine, the soft rumble of his voice rolling through me in waves of warmth. “I actually tried to prevent it. Like you asked.”
“Yeah, but you didn’t try that hard.” I breathe out an affectionate laugh, drawing back to gaze up at him with adoring eyes. “You always know what I’m after, don’t you? Even when I don’t.”
Aiden breaks into a smirky smile as I shift to make more room for him between my thighs. “Can I guess what you’re after right now?”
I crinkle my nose at him, let out a laugh, and shove his face to the side. He laughs, too, brushing ticklish little kisses onto my palm. But he keeps his gaze locked with mine.
He’s had that look in his eyes all night. The soft, blissful, awestruck glow that they only get when he’s listening to my note. His eyes are two clear, deep blue pools, sunlit from within. Hazy with gold.
I’m not surprised. The high from our blunt rotation has gradually faded away, but now I’ve been hit with a second, elated, glowing high that comes purely from within. I know I must be singing to Aiden. Even if I can’t hear it, I know.
It seriously was the perfect birthday night with the guys.
I mean, it was slightly unhinged. It was an ambush in the dead of night, for one thing. Noah did nearly climb onto the roof for no reason whatsoever, with the intention of jumping me in the garden. My shoulder is bleeding a little as a direct result of one of my birthday gifts.
On top of that, even though everyone gave me a gift, and none of them were wrapped - somehow I have no idea what any of them are. Raj and Ripley said that I can’t look at theirs until morning. Noah told me not to look at my tattoo until the swelling has gone down. And Ralph - who claimed that supplying the smoke for tonight was his only gift - quietly left something for me in the coffee room before he took off. But I can’t go get it, because I’m not supposed to look in there. I wouldn’t have even known about it if Aiden hadn’t gone in there and come back out to tell me that he’d found a small, square envelope with my name on the front in Ralph’s handwriting.
But I have no complaints about anything that happened tonight. The opposite, really.
It doesn’t matter to me that I know nothing about any of my gifts. I’m feeling stupid with happiness about all of them. The eager, loving way they were given to me felt like a gift of its own. And a chill night of hanging out with the guys was exactly the type of lowkey birthday kickback thing I didn’t know I wanted.
But Aiden somehow knew I wanted it, or he never would have let it happen. I can’t guess how he knew. Sometimes he only needs one word from me to understand everything. Sometimes he doesn’t even need that.
I gaze up at my Companion Plant and smooth my hands over his stubbled jaw, love welling up in my heart at an almost painful intensity, flooding me with sweet warmth.
The warmth turns into pure heat as Aiden lifts himself off of me just enough to slip one hand between us, then slowly, teasingly starts dragging down my grey knit shorts. With his other hand, he takes a fistful of my hair, draws my head back, and puts his mouth to my throat. My breath catches sharply, a deep blush rushing to my cheeks.
All of a sudden I’m panting and desperately pressing myself against him, an uncontrollable answer from my body to his. Aiden shudders, then lets out a very, very soft exhale against my throat, with the tiniest hint of his voice beneath it.
His little sound of pleasure rolls through me like a thunderstrike.
God. His rich, deep, sugar-sweet voice. When that voice laughs, my whole body is full of sunlight, overflowing with it, floating on it. When that voice speaks particularly softly, my entire heart strains to hear every word he says. When that voice starts moaning, the whole world of other sounds goes up in smoke and burns.
He lifts his head and looks down at me, the haze of golden light in his dilated eyes shining even brighter.
I look up with intoxicated, adoring eyes at Aiden, the one who took me into a whole new understanding of ecstasy. Who keeps taking me there, over and over again. As always, I’m overcome with the powerful sense of being magnetized to him. He seems to be calling to me with his burning blue gaze, his soft mouth, that sweet strand of chestnut falling over one eyebrow. With everything.
The embers of the fire in the stove are casting their low red glow onto the bronze of his skin, enriching its already unrivaled warmth. Dancing with his movements, with the graceful rippling of his muscles. He’s got my wool shorts sliding down, down, down, so slowly.
He’s got them at the lowest part of the curve of my hip bones. I know he’s about to take them off. I know what will happen when he does.
So it’s one hell of an effort to make myself stop him.
“Hey, Sugar Maple,” I begin, then cut myself off with a hoarse gasp, my lip caught between my teeth.
My words are lost in a paroxysm of pleasure, an all-over bodyshock of ecstasy as Aiden takes his hand away and rolls his hips against me, pressing me deeper into the bed, sinking his mouth against my neck. Letting me feel how much he wants me.
The friction between his sweatshorts and mine sends me briefly mindless, obliterates every coherent thought I had. I seize a fistful of his hair and reciprocate the movement, rendered helpless against the instinct. Aiden lets out a short, jagged rush of breath, his grip on me tightening.
“What, Linden?” he pants, his deep voice turned husky, breathless, hungry.
It takes me a second to remember that I’d said anything, or even that I’m capable of speaking.
“I - I need to talk to you about s-something-” I’m reeling a little, stammering over every word. “Before I f-forget-”
Aiden softly nips my neck, then bites me harder. “Don’t forget ‘til later, then.”
I open my mouth to answer, then quickly close it again, the crimson blush in my cheeks deepening. I can’t lie, but I don’t exactly want to tell Aiden that it’s so good with him that sometimes I completely forget every thought I’d had in my head beforehand. Erased, just gone.
“Not - not possible, babe.” With an enormous force of effort that takes up every ounce of my willpower, I make myself spread my hands on Aiden’s chest and gently push him back. “We’ll get back to this, believe me. But we’ve gotta talk for a minute first.”
Aiden tilts his head to the side, desire and curiosity battling it out in his eyes.
He slowly sits back and looks at me, waiting with a questioning expression on his face. Trying to pull himself back out of the haze.
I sit up in front of him, then run a trembling hand through my hair. Trying to pull myself together, too. What the fuck was I going to talk to him about? Is it already gone, just from that? No, it was important, come on, I know it -
“Ralph!” I blurt out, remembering all at once. “We need to talk about Ralph. Did you notice, tonight?”
Aiden blinks in surprise, but then lapses into thoughtful, serious silence. I watch him, resisting the urge to kiss his face off, and the urge to fidget with the saniderm over my tattoo.
“Yeah.” Aiden rests his elbows on his knees, loosely clasping his own wrist, his eyes growing very serious. “I - I noticed.”
I knew I wouldn’t have to spell it out for him. He knows what I’m talking about. I may have been paying closer attention, but Aiden knows Ralph a thousand times better than I do. Both of us saw him looking Will’s way over and over again tonight. Thinking hard. At one point I saw him blow a puff of smoke in Will’s direction, almost like he was running a little experiment. Maybe looking to see if it would reveal the shape of something hidden to him.
I hesitate, then ask - “How many steps ahead of the curve would you say Ralph usually is? Like - generally?”
Aiden nibbles his lip, shrugs his muscled shoulders very slowly. “Five? Maybe ten. Depends.”
We both lapse into thoughtful, worried silence for a moment.
“You know,” Aiden murmurs, without looking at me, “It’s part of a bigger problem.”
“Yeah,” I agree, speaking just as slowly as he is. “I - I’ve been thinking about it.”
Aiden looks around at the bedroom. His eyes drift to the malachite cutting in its jar.
I know that we’re thinking about the same thing, but I say it anyways.
“We have a magic plant in our garden.” I turn the heist ring around my finger, watching Aiden’s face closely as I speak. “We have two ghosts regularly at the house, and a Ghost Office full of stuff related to our cases. We’ve already had to run off to do rescues when we were hanging out with the guys. We’ve already had to rescue three different people we personally know. Gabby, Ralph, Roger. We already needed Noah to help us, when your Tree was hurt and you went missing. I had to ask him to help me on faith, not ask any questions. Luca and Roger are already in on the secret. Now we’re talking about letting Floyd and Spencer in, too. That’s already four people-”
“Even without factoring all of that in, Jamie,” Aiden interrupts softly, “It could just come down to one of them walking into our house one day when I’m in a good mood, and everything is floating.”
Silence falls for another moment. Then Aiden takes a deep breath, and says what we’re both thinking.
“How long can we keep this up?”
“Keeping it all a secret? Yeah, I… don’t know.” I lean back on my palms, nibbling my lip. “You know what Ralph would tell us about this?”
“Yeah. He’d say that we need a long-term strategy. And he’d be right.” Aiden runs a hand through his hair, screwing up his face in frustration. “But I don’t know what that strategy should look like. There’s-”
He breaks off sharply, his eyebrows furrowing, his eyes widening.
“Jesus,” he breathes softly, the color draining from his face at an alarming rate. “When you put it like that, Jamie… Roger and Luca know, soon enough Floyd and Spencer, and we talked about telling your parents, eventually, so that’s already six people, plus I already told you, so that’s - seven-”
“What-?” I stare at Aiden with wide, troubled eyes, a storm of confusion and alarm rising up in my chest. “Hey - hey! What’s happening, why are you panicking?”
“I don’t - I’m not.” Aiden is tripping over his words, over every breath, anxiety choking up his voice. He buries his head in his hands, talking faster and faster. “Just - I wasn’t supposed to tell anyone. But after I told you, it got easier to tell other people, and I - I’ve never really thought of how many people know, or are gonna know, and if Ralph figures it out - that’s a lot of people, Jamie - my mom would be - if she knew that I - she would be so - I broke, like - like every rule-”
The sudden pain and fear in his eyes, the way he’s desperately gasping in his breaths, his body swaying slightly in dismay - it’s too much for me to bear. My outreached hands have been hovering, but now I catch his fingers and squeeze them hard, cutting off his words. His eyes snap to my face, startled and panicked and blinking fast.
“We decided a long time ago that we don’t have to do things her way, Aiden!” I look earnestly into his eyes, holding tight to his fingers. “Don’t forget that, okay? Your mom isn’t the Guardian of this town anymore. You are. We do things your way, now.”
Aiden stops, then focuses his fretful blue eyes on me, trying to catch his breath.
He turns his face towards the window, towards the cool air drifting in.
“Our way,” he says very quietly, his uneven breaths catching on his words. And then, a little more urgently, “Our way, right?”
I nod at Aiden, letting him see the sincerity in my eyes. He lets out another quiet exhale, and I lift his fingers to my mouth, press a kiss onto them.
He bites his lip, now blushing with embarrassment, then tips forward and hides his face against my neck. I let go of his hands, start gently stroking my fingers through his chestnut hair.
“I’m sorry,” he mumbles, in a ragged voice. “Leigh - I mean, my mom made it sound like every time I told someone, I’d be taking a step towards disaster. I just - I don’t want to do anything that could jeopardize you, or me, or - our life together.”
“But what are you supposed to do, babe?” I murmur, burying my nose in his hair. “Not save Ralph, because he’s your friend? Leave Roger in the fire because he saw you do magic? Ignore the ghosts whenever someone else is here? Lie to your closest people a thousand times over? How long could we possibly go on like that? Does that - does that sound like our way?”
Aiden sits back and silently looks at me for a moment, his hands shaking a little.
“I think if I kept doing things like that, eventually I wouldn’t even recognize myself,” he blurts out suddenly, all in a rush.
“Yeah, well…” I hesitate, then just say it. “Maybe that’s - part of what happened to your mom? I know a lot of her problems were caused by your dad, but that could have been part of it.”
Aiden blinks at me, then slowly drops his gaze to the bed. He falls silent for a long time, sinking deep into thought. I tenderly trail my fingertips up and down his arm, watching him think.
I give him a few minutes, then add, very quietly - “And like you said, it could come down to one of the guys walking into our house when everything is floating. It’s - been happening.”
I can’t help but smile inwardly as I think about it. The mornings when I’ve woken up to find everything in our room hovering above where it should be. The nights when I look up, still panting and reeling and shuddering with pleasure, to find the malachite cutting floating past us in its jar.
Sometimes I can’t even figure out what made Aiden happy enough to accidentally turn gravity off. It happened once when we were just sitting cuddled up together, drowsy and unwound. Aiden was watching me play Borderlands, stroking my knee. It was no different from all the other nights we’ve spent together like that, but when I groaned and tossed the controller aside after losing a boss fight, it caught in the air and stayed there.
I had looked around and realized that everything in the room was hovering gently, suspended in space. A soft flurry of golden light was hanging in the air, curling around the floating furniture, shedding its glow onto everything. And Aiden was smiling up at me from my lap, oblivious to it all. He hadn’t even noticed.
“I’m - happy,” he murmurs now, by way of explanation. His cheeks are increasingly scarlet in color, his eyes firmly on the bedspread. “I gotta let it out somehow, dude.”
I break into a smile, let out a soft, affectionate laugh, and reach out to twist my fingers into his glossy hair.
“I want you to stay that way, Sugar Maple. But where does that leave us? Half the time Noah comes in without even knocking. A lot of our friends do that, actually. And we were literally ambushed, tonight.”
Aiden lets out a heavy breath, growing serious again. My eyes briefly dart up to the fretful little crease between his eyebrows. I’m tempted to lean up and kiss it adoringly. Simultaneously wishing I could smooth it away.
“What if…” I make sure to speak very slowly, so that Aiden has the chance to dive in if he wants. “What if we chose a really small group of people to tell? An - inner circle.”
Aiden huffs out a helpless laugh, running a hand over his eyes. “An inner circle?”
“Yeah, man,” I say earnestly, squeezing his hand again. “I mean, come on. I can’t tell you what to do, but do you really want to go on trying to hide this from the people we love forever? When you could choose to trust them with it? To tell them?”
Aiden sighs softly, dropping his gaze back to his lap.
“I - I want to,” he rumbles, in a strained voice. “It’s not that I don’t want to. I’ve been wanting to tell Ralph since we were thirteen, for fuck’s sake…”
I nearly point out that Ralph was actually twelve when Aiden was thirteen, then quickly close my mouth when I remember that Aiden doesn’t know that. No one does but me, actually. Noah and Aiden don’t even know that Ralph is the youngest brother of the three. Aiden doesn’t even know that Ralph skipped a grade so that he and Aiden wouldn’t have to be apart.
I shake my head a tiny bit, dazed by how much they’ve managed to keep from each other for so long.
“I get why you didn’t tell Ralph about this, back then. He wasn’t what you’d call the most trustworthy person. But things have changed. With Noah, too. You know that.” I press a hand over Aiden’s heart, feel it beating against my fingers. “Don’t get lost in what your mom put on you. This is where the truth is. This is what you need to listen to.”
Aiden looks at me in silence, then starts picking nervously at the blankets.
“I know,” he rumbles quietly. “I’m trying to listen to myself, not to what Leigh told me. But it’s just - hard to sustain that all the time.”
“Well, you don’t have to.” I reach out and smooth his hair away from his eyes. “I can remind you.”
Aiden gives me a small, sweet, intimate smile, his eyes lingering on mine.
“Yeah, I’ve been - thinking about this more.” His already slow-spoken voice slows down even more, growing a little shy. “Because you and I had that talk about kids, and… I don’t know. I was so goddamn lonely, the way I was brought up. But I had to be alone, because no one outside of the family knew. Made me feel so, um… locked out. I really don’t fucking want that, for any kids of mine.”
Aiden pauses and glances up at me anxiously, then blinks in relief when he finds me smiling warmly at him.
“I’ve thought of that, too,” I admit, stroking his jawline with my knuckles, savoring the stubble. “If we did adopt a kid in a few years, that means they’d probably be around the same age as Nikita. If Raj, Mel, and Noah are in the inner circle, Nik is at least one friend that our kid could have.”
“One more than I had when I was a kid,” Aiden says thoughtfully. “Think that even one could have changed a lot for me. Know it would have, actually, because when Ralph and I met… it was the first time I kinda felt like I didn’t have to face everything alone, and that I wasn’t gonna be some lonely outcast forev-”
Aiden breaks off and looks sharply at me when he hears my swift, pained intake of breath.
He gives a little start when he sees my expression, his eyes widening. “Aw, Jamie-”
“Oh, god, I’m sorry!” I drop my head, trying to hide my face, trying to sound like that didn’t tear at my heart as badly as it did. “You - just - sometimes you say the saddest things - I’m sorry, I just can’t-”
“No, I’m sorry!” Aiden gathers me up close to him, lifting me onto his lap, his blue eyes enormous with alarm. “I don’t mean to, I just don’t even think about it like that! I was just talking, it wasn’t-”
“No, no, don’t be sorry!” I interrupt, all in a rush, nuzzling my face into his chest. “Just - we don’t want our kids to do the same thing, do we?”
“No,” Aiden says forcefully. “No.”
Silence falls over us for a moment. Aiden leans his arms on his knees, deep in thought. I watch him nervously from his lap, hoping that I’m not leading him the wrong way.
But I do think that the truth is going to come out, eventually. At least to the people closest to us. Ralph is too smart to not figure this out on his own. Ripley is too observant, Raj too intuitive. Noah, too - loyal, somehow. He’s the one I went to for help when I had nowhere else to go. I know that I would do it again, if I had to. And he’s smarter than people give him credit for. He might just figure it out on his own, too.
They’re all going to catch on, sooner or later. But that’s not why I think we should tell them. I trust them to know, in the deepest sense. After all, I just let Noah put a fucking tattoo on me without telling me what it was first.
The thought of him and the others knowing the truth strikes me with an immense sense of inner comfort, warm relief. Not panic. Or I never would have said any of this to Aiden.
Aiden doesn’t say a word for a long time, and I’m not sure what’s going through his head. But I think that worrying about me somehow put him on more solid ground. He’s much better at being calm for me than he is for himself.
I feel his tensed-up jaw slowly begin to relax as he cradles me protectively in his arms. I lean my head against him, and he gently presses it to his chest. He gradually begins to breathe more evenly, and after a few minutes, he kisses the top of my head. His fingertips lift to tenderly, lingeringly touch my cheek, then my ear, then my temple, then softly ruffle my hair.
“Who are we thinking?” he asks quietly. “For the inner circle?”
I draw back to look up at him with very wide eyes. He sounds like he’s actually, seriously giving it some consideration. I’m so stunned that for a few seconds I can’t find a word to say.
“If you’re used to keeping it in the family,” I finally answer, “Your brothers might be a good place to start.”
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