Lords of Mayhem #1: Lachlan and Elowyn

Chapter 24 (Elowyn): All The Time

Lachlan swooped in and gave me a huge kiss when I'd told him we'd moved to entirely possible, and then he eased back.

"There's no hurry, Wyn. We got plenty of time so we're not going to rush things. And when you're ready to move us from entirely possible to it's definitely happening, you tell me."

"I still have a lot of work to do on myself," I warned him.

"We both do," he corrected me. "I think it's something we'll always need to work on to keep ahead of ourselves. But I think now the big difference is we can talk about shit like we never did before. Maybe we have a better understanding of who we are and why certain shit triggers us, but there's still a lot of work we both can do."

That night, we started not rushing things as we sat by the river, Gypsy stretched out beside us, and just watched the lights from the sunset sink into and saturate the water rushing by. Lach was sitting with me between his legs, my back resting against his front, his arms around me. He pressed the occasional kiss to my head, and I just enjoyed the feeling of being surrounded by him.

We continued not rushing things as the weeks went by. Lachlan went back for a couple of days to the mother chapter, as he called it now, for Butcher's wedding. He'd asked me to go, but I couldn't get away with such short notice.

"Prez called me today, Wyn -- today -- says he wants me home for his wedding tomorrow. So I'm taking off this afternoon and I'll ride straight through, get there late. You want me to stay in a hotel rather than the club house, I will."

"No. You could fall into old habits at some hotel, Lachlan, as easily as you could at the club house. You can either resist or you can't. But for the record...I don't think you'd cheat on me again."

"No, I wouldn't."

The whole discussion brought up a subject I'd been thinking about.

"Lachlan...I don't know that I'll ever want to get married."

"Then we won't get married."

"That easy?"

"Didn't say it was easy, Elowyn. I'm saying I now understand why I thought getting you to say yes was important back then and why it was such a sore point with me when you kept turning me down. That said, I can fucking deal with the emotions head on if any of those old feelings surface. And fuck me, you're not going to believe this, but Butcher actually helped me with that."

He gave a half smile and shook his head.

"Butcher gave you relationship advice?" I tried to picture it, but I couldn't. 

An image popped into my head of Lachlan lying on a couch, Butcher sitting behind a desk with a notepad and then saying, fuck it, I'm not listening to this, pulling a gun and telling Lach to get over his shit or else. Butcher-style therapy.

"He didn't knowingly give me advice, and he'd probably shoot me in the face if I ever implied that he did, but when he called today to tell me the news, I said I was surprised he was getting married. He said it surprised him, too, because he'd spent his whole life thinking he'd never get married."

"I can't imagine him getting married, either," I said because that man was scary as hell and stone cold. "I'm sure that's a pretty unanimous feeling with all the brothers."

"No shit. So I asked him what changed since he strung two sentences together and we weren't even about to torture anyone. And he said Raine was the type who needed to be married, and you give your woman what she needs. That's all he said, but when he said that, it just kind of hit me as a really simple, but really obvious, truth. Give your woman what she needs. So if you need not to be married Wyn, I can give you that."