(Adelaide)
Heat.
That was the first thing she felt.
A steady, enveloping heat pressed against her back, sinking into her spine, warming her skin in a way that no blanket, no fire, no sun ever had. Something solid rested along the curve of her hips, something that radiated enough warmth to make her toes tingle. A breath—deep, slow, heavy—poured across the nape of her neck. It smelled like smoke and spice and something darkly sweet, threading through the remnants of her dream until the line between memory and reality blurred.
She drifted somewhere between sleep and waking, caught in that soft, blurry place where dreams still cling to the edges of reality.
And in that haze, in that half-conscious moment fuelled by exhaustion and memory, a single thought bloomed through her fogged mind:
