I think you’re similar people to me. We Bond.
Any reason we can’t do both? If you won’t do it for me, will you do it for Gus?
“Listen to us,” she said and giggled.
“We should make sure it doesn’t become a habit, this nonverbal communication. We could make enemies.”
“I didn’t think men were very keen on getting married,” Marley said.
“Garbage. Propaganda.”
“Okay. But you get to arrange it. I wouldn’t know how.”
Gray snickered. “I think Gus will arrange it—with the help of Willow and her gang. What Willow doesn’t know, she’ll find someone who does for advice.”
They smiled, felt their smiles even though they couldn’t see them. And they fell silent.
Eventually Gray said, “You have to keep your word. You said you were going to kiss me.”
Marley bit her lip. She knelt on her seat, took his face in her hands and kissed him deeply.
When their lips finally parted, Gray said, “I love you so much.”
“Not as much as I love you.”
“A million times as much as you love me,” he said.
“Uh-uh, I love you—”
Gray kissed her again, shutting off the rest of what she was going to say.
They went into the house and upstairs to his bedroom as quietly as their breathing, kissing and muffled exclamations would allow.
“I want to undress you,” Marley said, surprising herself, but thrilling herself, too.
He held still, or he did most of the time, while she took off his clothes, lingering over each part she exposed. She found a few of the very pale, raggedly healed wounds he had suffered at the hands of strangers, kissed them and didn’t comment.
“My turn,” he told her when he was naked.
Gray had exquisite patience and stripped her so slowly her knees grew weak, and every place they touched shot an electric charge that clamped them together and eventually brought them into a tangled heap on the bed.
Under the covers, mouth to mouth, body to body, their hands roaming between gasps, they forgot about the past, didn’t think about the future, while they passed the night in sweet, hot lovemaking.
“Did you see that?” Gray asked once.
“Mmm, what?”
“Sparks,” Gray said, and they laughed while they came together again.
There were sharp bursts of color. “We make our own light show,” Marley said.
After that they didn’t talk much for a long time.