Unseen Scene - Book Three, Chapter Eight (Nat Version) (Patreon)

Sunshine plays like glittering ribbons, swirling and twirling about the garden in flowing rays. It curls its flaxen gold light around everything it touches. Birds sing sweet songs from the oak trees above. A fresh, honey-scented breeze wafts all around them.

But Nat notices none of it.

The only thing she can focus on right now is [Name]. Or more accurately, the words they’d just spoken.

“What did you just say?” Nat wonders if breathing slower might make it easier for her heart to calm, for her pulse to find a steady rhythm, but then she realizes her lungs are already tight with a caged breath.

“I, uh,” they stumble, hesitating for the briefest moment, but that second is all it takes for Nat to start doubting what she’d heard.

And she really doesn’t want to doubt it.

Does she? Maybe she should. It would certainly make things simpler if she’d merely misheard.

“I think I’m in love with you,” they finally murmur out.

Her body freezes into some kind of stasis, some kind of frozen balance between falling completely into an abyss or clinging fast to a future so bright Nat had never even dared to imagine it.

“You think, or you know?” she asks, trying to keep a handle on the stammer in her voice.

They smile, and it frees her, allowing her to breathe once again. “I’m in love with you, Nat.”

The first thing that wants to shoot out of her is, ‘Why?’, but she bites it back. Then a plethora of responses, replies, comments, questions, and all manner of thoughts crash and thunder inside of her mind, battering her skull.

For a vampire who prides herself on knowing the exact thing to say at any time…she’s been rendered completely speechless. Powerless. Exposed.

And all that’s left to her is to act.

So that’s exactly what she does.

Shoving the book from her lap as though it’s the last barrier to break between them, Nat leaps towards [Name] and captures their lips in a kiss that is filled with all the words Nat cannot say.

Entangled together both physically and now emotionally, her mind cannot linger on what happens next. If she let it, she might be able to feel the fear that their love won’t last when they know the true depths of her soul—of who she can be.

But for now, they love her. They love her. And that is enough. In fact, it is worth more than the world.