He leaned forward, pressing a faint kiss to a bruise on her shin she hadn’t cared to notice until now.
“It’s not your fault,” she said softly. If she had been paying attention, she would have been able to avoid the snake in the first place. Etta had never doubted that for an instant.
The reply was whispered against her skin. “I’ll come to see it that way eventually. For now, let me wallow a bit.”
Etta smiled sweetly, pushing up onto her knees. She crawled the distance between them, listening as his breathing grew more ragged. His gaze focused on her face. His hands curled over the top of his knees, and they were shaking as she put hers over them.
Picking up his right hand, she pressed a soft kiss to the rough, scarred knuckles, and as he shuddered she felt an answering shiver low in her stomach. She set his hand back down and rested her arms over his hands, trapping them against his knees.
“You make…” Nicholas trailed off as she leaned forward, brushing a faint kiss across his lips. When he didn’t lean back, when she breathed in his soft exhale, she did it again, applying a little more pressure. She felt him try to tug his hands out from under hers, but she held firm, watching as a look of amazement spread over his face. She worried, just for a moment, that she was trading one obsession for another—trading the high of performing for this strange sense of freedom, for the way a wild, unfamiliar part of herself was opening up around him. He made her feel brave; he let her be who she was unconditionally, without judgment, and because of it, she felt life shifting around her into something that felt much more beautiful and clear.
He said the words so quietly, she wondered if she’d imagined them. “Then it’s the same for you?”
She ran her nose down the length of his, and there wasn’t a part of her that wasn’t humming, that wasn’t rejoicing in this tiny, perfect symphony of happiness.
“Release me,” he said hoarsely. He was strong enough to pull his hands away by force; her thoughts spun in a dizzying dance of want and confusion and desperation. “Etta—”
He leaned forward and captured her lips, stealing the kiss himself until she had to come up and gasp for breath. Nicholas pulled her back under, and this time she did let go, only to take his beautiful face in her hands, to let his hands tangle in her hair, around her shoulders. If the sky had opened again just then, Etta didn’t think she’d feel the storm at all—not when she was caught so deeply in this. Time was tugging at her back, insistent and demanding, passing faster and faster, but all she wanted was to stay there, to smell the sea on his skin and press her face to that part of his neck where it seemed to fit perfectly, as if it had been made to hold her and her alone. If there was a place to go where time might forget them, she wanted to find it.
He was breathing hard enough that she felt his heart jumping against her ribs, and she knew hers was doing the same. She turned, running her lips along the curve of his ear, her fingers pressed against the solid muscles of his back.
“We can’t,” he said into her hair, half-pleading, “we can’t make this so bloody difficult.”
Too late.
What was she even doing—torturing herself with what she couldn’t have? She could fight this, whatever force it was that dragged her back to him, that knotted their yearning. Attraction. She would go home and he would go home, and whatever kept pulling them back together would be dissolved by distance and time and death.
He’s been dead for hundreds of years by the time you’re born.
They weren’t supposed to have ever met. Maybe that’s why she wanted it so badly—it was impossible, and both of them were too stubborn to let themselves be told what they could and couldn’t have.
Right now, she didn’t care.
Right now, he didn’t care.
Etta wasn’t sure who reached for the other, only that she was kissing him again until her lungs burned and her body ached for him to be closer. Her back collided with the wet stone of the gate, and she imagined she could taste the storm in him, the battering winds of desperation and frustration that met and matched her own, blow for blow.
His lips softened against hers as his hands slid from the nape of her neck to brace his weight against the wall, trapping her against it. She felt Nicholas give in to the slow exploration of her. The tenderness of his touch made her hands curl in his wet shirt. The world dissolved around her, as if she’d stepped through another passage.
Passage.
She pulled him closer, trying to will the world away. Nicholas made a small, hungry noise in his throat.
Astrolabe.
Sliding her hands around his waist, her fingers went searching for the warm bare skin beneath his shirt.
Mom.
“Etta,” he was murmuring, turning her name into a secret, “Etta…we…the passage…”
There’s no time.
“I know,” she managed to say against his lips, “I…”
Etta didn’t have the strength to push him away, to end it, the way they both knew they had to. Even now, the knowledge only filled her with more desperation, made her unbearably feverish beneath her skin. She gripped him tighter, refusing to let go.
No time for this.
This had to stop the same way it had begun. Together. She felt him slow; the lazy, drugging quality of his kisses faded to a ghost of a touch.
No time for us.
She let out a shaky breath and turned her face away. Nicholas leaned down and rested his head against one of his hands, trying to catch his breath.
After a while he said, his voice hollow, “Rather proved my earlier point, didn’t I? We need—we need to go, before Ironwood sends a traveler after us. If he hasn’t already.”
Etta kept her gaze on the wet stones, the winding rivulets of water slipping between them, and nodded. Why this? The thought seared through her. Why him? Why?
“Do you know where we’re meant to go?” he asked quietly. He lifted a hand to touch her face but let it fall away, as if thinking better of it.
“It’s…I think we’re looking for the Elephant Terrace,” she said when she’d found her voice. “That’s what my mom’s painting was of—a view of it from slightly above. I don’t know where it is inside, though.”
“That’s all right, we have a way of quickly finding it. I imagine we’re close enough for it to catch the resonance.” Nicholas reached into the bag and blew into the harmonica. The call of the passage echoed back twofold, volleying through the empty stones around them. Etta strained her ears, picking through the layers of its call, until she could orient herself in the direction it was coming from. There was something about it, though, a hum she didn’t recognize.
Her whole body tensed. “Does it sound different to you?”
“It sounds as atrocious as it always does.” Nicholas shifted the bag back onto his shoulder. “Shall we?”
She shook off her concern and followed him through the abandoned city. A part of her wondered how long it had taken the jungle to erase most of the evidence of human life—Etta wished she could remember the exact reason why both Angkor Thom and Angkor Wat had been abandoned, but she thought it had something to do with war, and the ever-shifting tide of power that eventually brought down even the greatest of civilizations. Without the resonance the passage had bounced back to them, she wasn’t sure she would have been able to find it at all. While her mom had shown her maps of the city, pointing out where she’d done her dig—if there had even been a dig in her past at all, Etta thought—the pathways were nearly so overgrown, the stone and remnants of wooden structures in such disrepair, she just barely recognized the Bayon when they passed it.