Quickly, because I was aware that I was about to burst into tears, I walked forward to press a kiss to his bloody cheek. When I turned away, I moved to Zeus and wrapped him in a full body hug.
“Thank you,” I whispered with my heart in my mouth.
He’d stiffened at first, but at my words, his body melted slightly and a hand came around to pat me on the back. He didn’t say anything, but he was a badass biker and he didn’t have to.
Zeus Garro had my back and now, he knew I had his.
I didn’t look back as I collected King’s hand and walked out the door, my head held high, blood on my lips and my King at my side.
“A dirty Chai latte and dark roast coffee, please,” I asked the barista at Loafe Café.
“Sure thing,” she replied with a bubbly smile.
I returned the expression, which wasn’t difficult because these days, all I did was smile. Accepting the dark roast coffee and my change, I went to the coffee station to add cream and an unhealthy amount of sugar, then picked up my dirty Chai latte from the counter and found a table outside even though it was a cold day in late October.
It was a gorgeous autumn afternoon in Vancouver, the grey sky the perfect backdrop to the riot of violent orange, red and yellow foliage clinging to treetops and littering the ground. The air was crisp and spiced with the sweet musk of decaying leaves that crunched underfoot. I took out my tattered copy of Paradise Lost and read while I waited.
It wasn’t long.
“Bone of my bone,” King murmured as his cold hands cupped my face to tilt it back for his kiss.
I accepted his mouth with a long hum of pleasure, loving the feel of his lips on mine, loving that no one cared if I kissed him or not. Now that we were free from the chains that bound us in Entrance, I found we erred on the side of too much PDA but I didn’t really care. I’d embraced my inner biker a lot over the last six months even though, technically, King and I were not a part of The Fallen. We were just two civilian students at UBC, him in the renowned Sauder Business program and me in my Master’s English program doing my dissertation on Paradise Lost, on Satan as an untraditional hero. I drew daily inspiration from my own untraditional hero, whom I tugged closed to me by his long hair so I could deepen our kiss.
When we broke apart, King grinned into my face. He’d grown a short beard in the time we’d been on campus and it made him look even sexier, like a lumberjack that had accidentally wandered onto campus. Women watched him wherever he went and I knew he got asked out a ton, both because he told me and because some women were ballsy enough to ask even when I was standing right next to him. If I wasn’t, King turned them down without blinking an eye. If I was, he let me sear them with my possessive wrath because my territorial behavior turned him on.
“Good day, babe?” he asked before gently nipping my chin with his teeth.
“Better now,” I said, shamelessly happy and unafraid to be cheesy about it.
Like Milton once wrote about good things coming from evil, the horror of King’s arrest and my abduction had grown mild over time and the light we created together had far overcome the dark. My hands still ached when it was damp, which in Vancouver was often, but the scars had been reduced to thin pink slashes that King kissed every morning when we woke up.
He’d obsessed over the scars until one morning that summer, he’d woken me up and dragged me to Street Ink Tattoo Parlor. Now, we had matching tattoos on the inside of our middle fingers, him a King of Hearts and me the Queen. They lined up perfectly when we linked out fingers together, which was often.
He may have kissed the scars every morning when we woke up but his middle finger I now kissed every time after, to remind him that we were alive, free and together.
“You ready to head out?”
I nodded, standing up and swinging my old messenger bag over my shoulder. It was still strange to me that it held my essays and not those of my students. King caught my hand as we walked towards the parking lot and I couldn’t help myself from looking around at all the students walking by us, feeling like a child holding her first trophy. I would never get used to displaying our relationship, to holding the hand of a man who was as beautiful and magnetic as a fallen angel.