Chapter 79 Just for Tonight
Levi:
Night came softly on the island.
Not with ceremony. Not with the kind of silence that demands attention. Just a gradual thinning of noise, a dimming of edges. Fires were banked. Patrols rotated. Voices lowered without anyone asking them to.
I noticed her before she noticed me.
Aurora sat on the edge of the bed, back straight, hands folded together like she was keeping them from doing something. The twins were already asleep, sprawled in the careless way only children manage, limbs heavy with safety.
She wasn’t crying.
That worried me more.
I closed the door quietly behind me and leaned against it for a moment, watching the room settle around us. She didn’t turn. Didn’t speak. She knew I was there. She always did.
“You’re still awake,” I said.
“So are you.”
I crossed the room and sat beside her, close enough that our shoulders brushed but not close enough to trap her. She smelled like salt and smoke and the faint clean sharpness of water. Training residue. The kind that lingered longer than sweat.
“I thought I was done being this person,” she said suddenly.
I waited.
“The one everything happens to,” she continued. “The one other people explain to. Label. Prepare.”
She finally looked at me then. Her eyes were steady, but there was a tightness there I recognized too well.
“I used to watch the world,” she said. “Ask questions. Follow patterns. Write about things after they’d already happened.” She let out a short breath. “Now I feel like I’m standing in the middle of it, and everyone keeps telling me to be patient while the whole world rearranges itself around me.”
The words landed carefully. Chosen. Not reactive.
“I know this place is safe,” she went on. “I know the twins are protected here. Part of me feels… grounded. Like I can breathe.”
She shook her head once. “And another part of me feels like we’re hiding. Like we’re waiting for something we already know is coming.”
I reached for her hand, not to stop her, but to anchor her.
“A war doesn’t wait for readiness,” she said quietly. “And pretending we don’t see it doesn’t make us better people.”
I nodded. “No. It doesn’t.”
She turned her palm up in mine. “You pushed me.”
“Yes.”
No justification. No defense.
Her fingers tightened slightly. “And I don’t know if that makes you cruel… or honest.”
“It makes me responsible,” I said.
She searched my face. “Do you regret it?”
The truth came easily. “No.”
The rest followed more slowly. “I regret that you’re in this at all. I regret that the world found you before you had a chance to decide how much of it you wanted to carry.”
She swallowed.
“I didn’t choose this,” she said.
“No,” I agreed. “But you chose not to turn away once you understood it.”
She leaned back against the headboard, staring at the ceiling. “Sometimes I wonder if that makes me reckless.”
“It makes you you.”
That earned a small, tired huff of a laugh.
“I keep thinking,” she said, “that maybe if I’d stayed where I was, kept my life small, none of this would have happened.”
I shook my head. “That’s not how it works. The world doesn’t leave people alone because they behave.”
She was quiet for a moment. Then I asked her the question I knew had always been there.
“Does it make me a bad person to think that without all of this, we wouldn't be here?” I said slowly, “That all of this… led you to me?”
The room seemed to hold its breath with her. I turned fully toward her. “It would make me a liar if I said I’d undo it.”
Her eyes flickered. She didn't say anything, like she was measuring what my words meant.
“I won’t pretend the cost doesn’t matter,” I continued. “And I won’t tell you that love erases it. It doesn’t.”
I reached up and brushed my thumb along her jaw, gently. Deliberate.
“But I won’t apologize for wanting this life. For wanting you. For wanting our children safe and laughing and asleep in the next room.”
Something raw crossed her face then.
“I never imagined this,” I said quietly. “Not a mate who sees me. Not children who carry my name. Not a life that isn’t built entirely on command and consequence.”
My voice tightened despite myself. “I thought I’d die doing my job well and alone. Pretending that the power, status, and money were enough.”
She didn’t look away.
“And now?” she asked.
“Now I know what love feels like, what it feels like to have my heart living out of my chest in the tiny shapes of our kids, and I know what I stand to lose.”
Her hand slid into my hair, fingers resting there like she needed to remind herself I was real.
“I don’t know how to turn my mind off,” she said. “It keeps running ahead. Counting. Preparing.”
“I know.”
She smiled faintly. “You always do.”
I leaned in, resting my forehead against hers. “Then let me say this once, just for tonight, and you don’t have to agree with it tomorrow.”
She nodded.
“Just for tonight,” I said, “you don’t have to solve anything. You don’t have to be strong. You don’t have to carry what’s coming.”
Her breath hitched.
“The war will still be there in the morning,” I went on. “So will the fear. And you’ll face it. I know that.”
I kissed her temple. “But tonight, you get to be here. With me. With them. And let that be enough.”
Her shoulders sagged, the tension finally giving way. She leaned into me fully this time, her weight warm and real.
“Just for tonight,” she whispered.
I lay us back carefully, mindful of the sleeping shapes nearby. We moved together without hurry, without urgency. Clothes discarded, skin against skin, familiar and grounding.
There was no need to rush. No need to prove anything.
Only love. Only closeness. Only presence.
And that was more grounding and gratifying than anything I ever had in my life.
After, we lay tangled beneath the blankets, her head on my chest, my hand tracing slow, absent patterns along her arm. Her breathing evened out gradually, the sharp edge of thought dulled by warmth and exhaustion. I felt it through the bond.
I stared at the ceiling, listening to the steady rhythm of the house. The twins murmured in their sleep.
This wasn’t peace.
It wasn’t denial.
It was a choice.
To stay.
To hold what mattered without trying to outrun what was coming.
Just for tonight, that was enough.
And tomorrow....
Tomorrow we will be ready again.