Unseen Scene - Book Three, Chapter Eight (Nate Version)

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 swing sweet songs from the oak trees above. A fresh, honey-scented breeze wafts all around them.

But Nate notices none of it.

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

“What did you just say?” Nate wonders if breathing slower might make it easier for his heart to calm, for his pulse to find a steady rhythm, but then he realizes his 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 Nate to start doubting what he’d heard.

And he really doesn’t want to doubt it.

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

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

His 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 Nate had never even dared to imagine it.

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

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

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

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

And all that’s left to him is to act.

So that’s exactly what he does.

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

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

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