Private Tales I've Caught A Monster

[Wren Kingsley]

Her gaze softened then, just the slightest bit, as she exhaled slowly. "You’ve managed to make me want something that I shouldn’t." She shook her head, a small, self-deprecating smile playing at the corners of her lips. "You're impossible, you know that?"

"I'm here. And I’m not running away just yet."

She paused, her fingers lightly tracing the edge of his hand, where it rested against her skin. "I want this too." she sighed. It was the truth. He infuriated her, but she had been drawn back to him again and again. He understood her. She wasn't easy to deal with but he did. He wanted to. But life was cruel and unfair and the more she let herself feel for him the more it terrified her.

Her eyes met his, her voice quieter now, almost vulnerable. "It might not be our life to have. But if it were? If this could be something more... Would it be worth the price?"

She let the question hang between them, her fingertips tracing over his lips, her heart pounding, unsure of the answer herself.

 

[Val]

"I would pay it every time." He said the words without even a second of thought, each of the six readied upon his tongue before he ever had any hope of catching them.

The cocky smile on his had not yet returned. His tone was still that serious steal. Val wasn't joking.

"I didn't get to choose my life." Val frowned. "I was born into what some called privilege, duty, and wealth."

Higher than almost anyone else in Oban. "But to me, It was only ever chains, obligation, and miserly corruption."

The wealth of his family had been taken off the backs of their people. Stripped from the hard work of laborers, farmers, mid-wives and hundreds of others who toiled away day in and day out to ensure Oban survived and thrived.

It wasn't his.

"I didn't choose to help them, Wren." He confessed. "I had to. Still have to. I can't...I can't not. Even when I'm here with you, now, it's this pressing...crushing weight on my shoulders. The thought that I'm not doing enough, that I should be out there, that I should be helping more."

A hint of panic touched his tone, voice cracking. "But I'm just a man, and I can't always give."

Lips pressed thin.

"Just this one time, just one time, I want to take." Val confessed again, head turning away from her in shame.

 

[Wren Kingsley]

Wren’s heart twisted at the rawness in Val’s voice. She could hear the cracks forming beneath his confidence, the vulnerability he was so desperate to hide, breaking her a little more with every word.

She knew the weight of duty, the crushing responsibility that never let go, and seeing him so utterly trapped in it—the way it gnawed at him, even now—made her chest ache.

"You don't have to carry it all, Val," she murmured, though she wasn’t sure if the words were for him or for herself. "I know it feels like you do, but you don’t."

The silence stretched between them, thick with the unsaid, and as he turned away from her, shame creeping into his expression, Wren’s chest tightened with something too fierce to ignore.

Gods, he was killing her.

Without another thought, she reached for him, her fingers brushing his jaw as she pulled his face to hers. She kissed him with a force that surprised her—crushing, desperate, full of all the emotions she’d kept buried beneath her own layers of armour. The kiss was a silent plea, a confession of everything she felt but never dared to admit.

Her heart was a tempest inside her chest, a whirlwind of longing and frustration, and the only thing that felt real in that moment was the heat of his lips against hers. She could feel his breath mingling with hers, the flicker of surprise that crossed his face before he melted into it.

"I don’t care about the price," she whispered between kisses, her hands threading into his hair, pulling him closer as though she couldn’t bear the space between them. "But if I tell you to run, you run. Promise me."

Her body was pressed against his now, their skin heated with the intensity of the kiss. She couldn’t bear the thought of pulling away anymore.

And in that moment, as their kiss deepened, as she poured everything she was into the contact, it felt as though the world outside—of duty and responsibility and guilt—ceased to exist. There was only him, and her, and the unbearable need for something more than the lives they’d been handed.