Fantasy, Heist, Romance, Found-Family - Chapter 16: Chapter 16

For the fourth time in as many rounds, Ronan dove head-first into the dirt.
He'd been mistaken to think Amir would go easy on him after two months without practice. Ronan's knife skidded across the ground until it collided with a tree trunk and Amir crashed over him like a storm, dagger aimed for his chest.
In a last-ditch effort, Ronan pitched onto one shoulder, just out of the strike's path, reaching for Amir's arm at the same time so that when Ronan tugged, Amir teetered off-balance on one-knee. A kick to his back leg was enough to break his stance. Ronan rolled, and Amir tumbled with him to the ground.
They grappled for control. Ronan gripped tight to Amir's wrist to keep the knife at bay and used his other hand to push at his shoulder, but it was a losing battle; Amir was stronger and had better leverage. He had the nerve to grin as he bore down on Ronan, knife hand creeping ever-closer to his face.
"Can't say I've seen that move before," he remarked, the blade suspended centimeters from Ronan's Adam's apple.
Ronan struck with his free leg, driving his knee into Amir's gut and using the momentary lapse as Amir recoiled to swat the knife from his hold. It landed next to Ronan's ear, and before Amir could take it again, Ronan grasped both of his hands, locking them in a stalemate. When Ronan tried to flip their positions, Amir forced his hands to the dirt and used both knees to press his legs into the ground.
Panting, Ronan let his head fall and his arms go slack. He could recognize when he'd lost.
Or, at least, when he needed to switch his strategy.
Smug lips parted when Amir noticed Ronan staring at them. A pink tongue darted out to wet them, and Ronan followed the movement with keen eyes. The tilt of his chin invited Amir closer, closer; Ronan lifted his lidded gaze, and that was all it took. Amir descended on him in a bruising kiss, releasing his wrists to squeeze his waist, and (after a moment or minute's distraction), Ronan used all his strength to overturn them. In the short second Amir lay winded, Ronan lashed out for the knife.
"Slit throat," he smirked, pressing the tip of the blade below Amir's chin. "Should've killed me."
Amir bared his neck, pressing into the blade until it indented his skin, just shy of piercing. "Your methods are deplorable."
"The dead cannot speak, Amir," Ronan taunted. "Really, you ought to have seen that coming."
"The embarrassing part is, I did."
Ronan leaned down as if to continue where they'd left off, only to pull away at the first brush of their lips. Amir tried to follow him, but the knife at his throat held him down. He slumped into the grass, defeated. Total conquest. Ronan pushed to his feet, victorious and none-too graceful about it, grinning from ear to ear as he extended a hand. "Again?"
Amir curled into a ball. "'M sleepy," he whined.
He grunted when Ronan kicked his side. "At least sleep on the blanket, then."
"The dead cannot move, Ronan."
Ronan lugged him backward by the armpits until he felt fabric under his feet, then dropped him unceremoniously onto the quilt. Amir flopped onto his back with a happy sigh while Ronan searched the basket he'd been gifted some weeks before until he found the strawberries. With sweetness on his tongue, he settled halfway on top of Amir, who gladly wrapped him in his arms and accepted the berry Ronan offered with an open mouth.
"I've been meaning to say," Ronan commented as he chewed. Amir wrinkled his nose and covered Ronan's mouth with one hand, so his next words came out muffled. "Thank you. For not telling Vito about the castle."
With the tunnels, the Merry Men could have robbed the castle five times over by now. Ronan would have seen headlines about the biggest heist of the century the week after he left.
"Why would I?" Amir braced himself on one forearm, forcing Ronan to ease up, and fixed him with hardened eyes. "Do not misunderstand me, darling. I stay because I must, but I do not harbor a single fond feeling for that man."
Ronan couldn't remember having seen anything akin to anger on him before. Amir was the farthest thing from cold, but there was no other way to describe the frost that coated his gaze at the mention of Vito. Ronan pitied any man who came under his sword.
It thawed the longer Amir looked at him. Soon enough, back was the gentle smile he knew. Amir sank into the quilt, hauling Ronan with him. "I actually got quite the lecture from him a couple of weeks ago."
"Oh?"
"It would appear I haven't been as subtle as I thought. I don't know if Vito spotted me from upstairs, or if Tony noticed my leaving and gossiped, but word has gotten around about my, ah, excursions. They think I've been seeing a girl."
Ronan snorted.
"Vito had plenty to say about the perils of allowing outsiders too close."
"He just can't help himself. How did you get out of it?"
"I told him I see a different woman each time."
"Amir, you minx!"
Laughter warmed the cool night air.
"Their guess wasn't so far-fetched," Ronan conceded.
"No?" Amir scoffed. "Considering I've never wanted for a woman in my life, I find it rather improbable."
Ronan propped himself up on Amir's chest to gape down at him. "Never?"
Amir's face went slack.
"You have?"
They stared at one another.
"Of course I have! Have you never seen a woman? They're so . . ." There was a time when this had been a complicated question, when Ronan was young and disoriented and couldn't discern attraction from envy when he looked at girls like Tony. He had hoped one day he might resolve with certainty that it was the former, but it had always been both. "Pretty."
Amir gripped Ronan's jaw and turned his face right, then left, as if conducting an inspection. "It is as I thought," he said gravely as he returned a quizzical Ronan to the center. "Boys can be pretty, too."
Ronan rolled his eyes as if he wasn't decidedly pleased and lay beside him.
It had been his idea to venture away from the house tonight. They sat along a bank enclosed by a patch of wood, just shy of the city. Though the pond was murky with pollution in daylight, at night it reflected the sky like any other. There were no stars here, but there was the half moon rippling across the surface and a stillness that never fully settled in the city. The trees blocked out any disturbance, so the only noise came from the woods themselves. Amir found the sounds of the forest at night unsettling. Ronan liked when they made him huddle closer.
Under his breath, he muttered to himself, "How did we get here?"
He straightened just enough for a full view of Amir's face and found Amir already looking at him. It seemed almost immoral to touch him, he was so lovely in the moonlight, but Ronan couldn't resist tracing his fingers along that jaw, that nose, those lips, marveling the fact that he had kissed each of these perfect places, amazed that he was allowed to do so as much as he pleased.
He noticed Amir's eyes roaming his face and realized they might be thinking along the same lines. He couldn't fathom why somebody would ever look at him that way.
Amir took Ronan's chin and kissed him slowly, and Ronan thought, oh- this man could love me.
He gave himself until the count of five to entertain that delusion, the castle in the sky where Amir was a prince and Ronan was his glamorous lover and they danced at the center of a moonlit ballroom. At six, the mirage fell away, and they were illicit lovers losing sleep to kiss in secret at the edge of a grimy lake. Ronan didn't mind.
Flustered, he turned onto his side. Amir immediately wrapped around him, entangling their legs and pressing his lips to what he could access of Ronan's shoulders, the back of his neck. This, too, Ronan struggled to accept - that someone might want so badly to touch him even when his back was turned.
"I'll tell you how we got here," Amir whispered into the nape of his neck. "The first night I saw you, I learned I just might need you, and I did everything in my power to convince you to want me in return."
"The first night," Ronan laughed, dipping his fingers beneath Amir's sleeves to run along his forearm. "Bit of an exaggeration."
"It isn't."
"I don't believe you."
"I had a name picked out." He spoke into Ronan's shoulder. "Silas Blackwell. Very daring. I practiced my first words about a hundred times the night I joined your group - had it planned down to the letter."
"And then?"
"And then, midway through my introduction I looked at you - really looked at you - for the first time. Forgot every word."
Ronan rolled over to face him, incredulous. "You did not."
"I did. First name I could think of was the hero of my favorite legend. I hesitated so long on the surname, I think you all just assumed I was being secretive."
"You're serious?"
"Unfortunately."
"And ever since, you've been-"
"Plotting, scheming, seducing."
Ronan's laugh was disbelieving, tucked beneath Amir's chin.
"And what if I didn't share your preferences?"
"I knew you did."
"How! Don't say something ridiculous, like kinship."
But Amir didn't say anything at all. Ronan looked up and found conflicted dark eyes drifting above his head. "You can tell me," he prodded. "I won't be offended."
A kiss lingered over Ronan's bangs. Amir stared past him a few moments longer before he finally lowered his chin and said, "I found myself watching you more often than I'd like to admit. And you were always watching someone else."
This time, it was Ronan who turned his eyes elsewhere, focused on the top button of Amir's shirt for lack of other places to look. "Oh."
Another kiss, this time to the top of his head.
"Does that . . . doesn't it bother you?"
"I told you," Amir murmured against his hair. "I will take you any way I can have you. I do not care if you loved him, I will not worry whether you love him. I can wait."
Ronan didn't even know himself. He wished he could confidently say he wasn't so senseless as to love somebody he had every reason to resent. But he couldn't weigh everything Vito had done to make Ronan hate him without acknowledging that it only hurt so bad because there were so many reasons to love him.
He pushed Amir onto his back, beneath him. "You shouldn't be so easily satisfied."
Amir huffed, eyes round at Ronan's outburst, then eased into a sunny laugh. "You still don't know, do you?"
"No, I don't!" Ronan curled his fingers into Amir's shirt. "I don't know! I don't understand . . ." Warm hands eclipsed his until he eased his grip. "I don't understand how you can like me so much."
Amir smiled. "Well that's an easy one, isn't it?"
Ronan dropped his head into his hands.
"Let's see . . ." he pretended to ponder. "I could tell you I never understood loveliness until I first saw you in full light. I could say that you are clever and honest and kinder than you like to let on, or that you are too passionate to feel anything halfway, and I think that's beautiful. I could admit that I envy how steadfast you are in your beliefs, and I admire your bravery for continuing to care and to trust and to give even when those things have not been returned to you."
Ronan blindly reached one hand to silence him and was swiftly caught in Amir's hold. "I could say all of this, and I would mean every last word, but really what it boils down to is that I care for you because I can do nothing else."
A kiss to Ronan's wrist, the scar on his palm. "Nobody ever asks a bird why it bothers building a nest in the spring and migrates in the autumn. Nobody questions the wolf for howling. My feelings for you are instinctual. I knew to want you just as I knew to cry the first time I felt hunger."
Ronan kissed him to shut him up, because he wouldn't survive much more. If Amir minded the interruption, he certainly didn't show it.
"How you say such things with a straight face is beyond me."
Amir chased his lips and spoke against them. "It's easy." He kissed Ronan deep; Ronan's stomach churned hot. "Everything about wanting you is wonderfully easy." Lips traced Ronan's jaw to his ear. "I'll say it as long as you refuse to believe me. I'll say it my whole life if I have to."
"Don't," Ronan whispered, caught in his throat when Amir kissed him there.
"I will," Amir defied. "Every day until-"
Fingers twisting in tousled hair, Ronan repeated, "Don't," and Amir faltered at the rigidity of his tone. Ronan didn't want to hear about the rest of their lives. He wouldn't entertain the hope that they had so much time. "We had an agreement. No promises."
The look that crossed Amir's face made Ronan want to pluck his words from the air and tuck them back between the folds of his brain. But they would only fester there. Ronan could handle secret meetups and broken sleep and untold origins, but he absolutely could not take any more wishful thinking.
Amir stared down the gap between them, carefully neutral. Ronan didn't remember creating that space, but he knew it had been him.
"Well then," Amir placed a hand on the small of his back, just the slightest pressure calling him home. Ronan scooted against him gladly, apologetically. "Can I tell you that to lose this would be to lose the truest happiness I've ever known?"
Ronan held his face low, embarrassed by his own overreaction and relieved that Amir hadn't faulted him for a second. "That can't be true."
Fingers flexed on his back. "I'd quite like to go a round with everyone who's made you believe so stubbornly that devotion is dishonest."
Ronan startled. "That isn't-" he began, but cut himself off when he realized he'd be lying. "I just mean, you lived twenty-one years before you met me."
"And I can count on my hands the number of times I knew happiness in those twenty-one years."
Ronan frowned at Amir's chest, wondering for a moment whether he'd heard that right. He looked up and found Amir wearing that honeyed smile of his like he hadn't just admitted to something heartbreaking. It only slipped when he saw the cloud over Ronan's face. "I've said something wrong," he said, tightness at the corners of his lips betraying his anxiety.
"You've said something incredibly sad," Ronan corrected.
Amir started to sit up and didn't stop when Ronan lifted a hand toward his cheek. "I'm sorry."
"Don't apologize," Ronan said, following him up to hold his face the way he'd wanted to. Amir didn't avoid it this time, but when he leaned into Ronan's hand, Ronan couldn't help but think he was hiding.
"I've upset you."
"It's alright if I'm upset."
"It isn't." Amir screwed his eyes shut, turning his head until Ronan's hand nearly covered his mouth. "Especially not when it's by my hand."
The note of panic underlining his words struck like a heavy bass chord, alongside the realization that he had been careless with the man before him. "Hey," he urged, thumbing along Amir's brow until the crease smoothed out. Ronan understood, suddenly and guiltily, that his handling up to this point had been unforgivably selfish.
"It's alright." Ronan knew how Amir had grown up, and yet he had never considered that perhaps Amir was so unsparing with touch because he couldn't recall the last time he'd been held, or that he might give and serve so readily because he'd only ever known affection as something he hadn't been worthy of. Of course Amir would take Ronan any way he could have him if Ronan was the first person in twenty-one years to beckon him closer.
Caught up in Amir's beauty and strength, Ronan had failed to see the fragility behind broad shoulders and a straight spine, as if Amir wasn't a young man just as himself, prone to recoil when he was afraid. He had been so single-minded, wary of all the ways Amir could hurt him and ignorant of his own power to do the same, to do worse. How deep did it run, that sadness underscoring his mask of charm?
"Please," Amir opened his eyes, and Ronan loathed that he was so easily compelled to plead. "I don't mean to burden you- oh, forget I've said anything."
But to forget his offense would be a disservice. If Amir's happiness was in his hands, it was weightless, not a burden on his shoulders but a light in his palms. To be entrusted with something so precious was a gift Ronan had taken for granted; he would have to fix that. He met a second of resistance when he pulled, and he wished he knew who had trained Amir to punish himself so. Still, Amir came like he always did, dragged by Ronan's tide.
"It is an honor," muttered Ronan, "to be wanted by you."
"No, the honor is all mi-"
"No." Ronan pulled Amir back with hands in his hair and forced their eyes to meet. "I am honored that you have chosen me."
A breath puffed against Ronan's chin, and Amir sagged with it, shoulders hunching beneath a load Ronan couldn't see but wanted desperately to relieve.
"Can I just . . ." There was a scratch to Amir's voice as he lowered himself onto Ronan's lap. He settled facing Ronan's navel, one arm tucking under white linen to feel his skin. His eyes drooped with Ronan's ministrations - a hand combing through his hair, the drag of a thumb along the shell of his ear, fingers rubbing his neck - then fell closed when Ronan undid the stop buttons of his shirt for access to more skin. Amir gave a sleepy hum, and Ronan doted on him, the enchanting and powerful and delicate man at his feet.