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Fifty-four steps.
Felix counts them dutifully, religiously: three steps to the ivy-dressed porch, another two from the politely stacked mailboxes to the smoky light of the hallway. There is a lift, of course, old-fashioned and charming and a little too much like a cage: tonight, they stir away from that stake, and climb the beanstalk instead.
One, two, three steps — the rustling of her dress up her thighs. Four, five, six steps until she stops and turns — a queen on her throne, Roxane on her balcony.
But…
“We don’t have to do this.” Her fingers tremble on the rail, and a question on her lips. “If you don’t…”
Felix has been stupid, dreadfully so, but he has always been quick to learn from his mistakes: he flies more than he climbs, closing the sacrilegious distance.
“You’re beautiful.” More than an apology, it is an oath, a vow. An absolute truth that pulls at his chest. “I got distracted, looking at you.”
Kagami waits, just above him, close enough for their breaths to mingle; hers is warm and tickles his chin.
His chin. She’s perched one step higher, on ruby slippers she might as well have stolen straight from the silver screen, yet she can barely reach his chin; and her skin is like porcelain, pale and cold to the touch, and he knows other hands were careless with her — assuming they even touched her at all.
“I can forgive that…” Eyelashes flutter, a veil pulled over her gaze. “You are pretty distracting, too.”
Felix seizes her hand, and brings it to his lips.
It’s not proper etiquette, not the mimicry of affection they’ve both grown to expect: not only does he kiss her skin, her wonderful porcelain skin he will never let shatter again, but he lingers there, breathing life into the veins below. Kagami gasps, a pleading little noise that squeezes his heart, and lets her eyes caress him once more.
“I want you,” he whispers, because why shouldn’t he? “I want you. I’m not going anywhere but where you guide me.”
And so, they ascend once more.
Seven, eight, nine steps with her hand secure in his.
Ten, eleven, twelve steps before she stops again, and he presses a kiss to what he learns is the soft spot on her wrist.
Felix knows what she’s doing, knows this isn’t a game; knows she believes she is something to run from. But this isn’t a myth, and Felix isn’t running — and Felix knows death far too well to let himself be dragged back.
Thirteen, fourteen, fifteen; then sixteen, seventeen, eighteen steps. Always she stops, trembling, and always he kisses a little longer, a little higher, following a trail of freckles like a ship follows constellations.
Twenty-four, the dip of her elbow. Thirty-two, the crook of her neck. Thirty-eight, an alcove behind her ear — ink-black strands tickling his nose.
Felix is patient, but he is also a thief: on step fourty-one, he claims the bright red of her lips.
He has drunk tonight, a little champagne, a little crème de cassis; but he wasn’t intoxicated, not before drinking the sigh right from her lungs. The truth is that he never understood — kisses, flowers, the point of it all — and would have never understood, had he not met her.
Now his right hand is clenched around the railing, just so his left can hold on to her waist — just so both of hers can get lost in his hair. And he wants her, wants her, wants her, the vertigo of it all, the falling and soaring and mending that no one else, he’s sure, has ever done as well as they do.
When their mouths part, the rest of them doesn’t; even so, Kagami presses a kiss to the corner of his lips, something light and shy and brave which means as much, if not more, than the heat they just shared.
“Thank you.” Her cheeks, flushed, are the most adorable thing he’s ever contemplated. “You truly are full of surprises.”
“That’s the nicest way anyone has ever put it. My entourage typically prefers the terms ‘trickster’ or ‘brat’.” To say nothing of the other niceties.
“Hmm…” Her hands, now warm and steady, explore a body that sings for her: the angles of his face, which his aunt always found too sharp, the lines of his shoulders, which his father always found too narrow. “They must not see the world like I do.”
“You’ve already seen so much of me.” Perhaps even more than Adrien, who only ever sees the things he wants to see. “How long has it been? An hour and half, two hours at most…?
“Not long enough.” She’s getting bolder, which drives him a little insane. Case in point: her hands venture lower still, flattening against his chest. “We should go upstairs, and fix it.”
There are fifty-four steps to the sky.