Chapter 77 Completely Theirs

Chapter 77 Completely Theirs
He reached for her first.

Not urgently and not desperately but with the slow certain quality of someone who had made a decision a long time ago and was simply arriving at it now, his hand finding her face in the dark and turning it toward him and looking at her for one long moment before he kissed her.

She kissed him back the same way.

No urgency behind it and nothing driving it except the two of them and the night and the full understanding of what tomorrow carried. His hands moved over her with an attention and a warmth that had nothing performed in it, learning her the way he learned everything he considered worth knowing, completely and without hurrying.

She gave him everything back.

All of it. Every wall and every carefully managed distance and every part of herself she had been protecting since long before the alley. Gone. Just two people in the dark being as honest with each other as two people could be and finding that honesty was the warmest thing available to either of them.

He said her name once.

She pulled him closer and he came and the room held them and the night held the room and outside the fountain ran its quiet sound against the dark and none of it existed anyway.

Only this.

Both of them fully open.

Nothing withheld.

Nothing managed.

Just the truth of what they were to each other expressed in the most complete and honest way available.

He was tender in a way that undid her completely, unhurried and present and paying attention to everything, and she was the same back, and the room was warm and the night was long and neither of them was in any hurry to reach the end of it.

Afterward she lay against his chest with her fingertips at his jaw.

Not speaking. Just tracing the line of it slowly in the dark, the angle of it and the places where the years had left their marks and the places that were just him, warm and real and breathing slowly under her hand.

He watched her face.

Not sleeping. Not closing his eyes and drifting. Just watching her the way he watched things he considered worth paying attention to, completely and without any particular expression, just present with her in the dark room while her fingers moved and the night moved around them.

She traced the scar above his jaw.

He stayed still.

She found the one along his collarbone that had a story she had already heard and traced it anyway and his breathing stayed slow and his eyes stayed on her face and the room was completely quiet and outside the estate breathed and the fountain ran and tomorrow was still hours away.

She moved to his jaw again.

He caught her hand.

Held it against his face with both of his.

She looked at him.

He looked back at her and his expression in the low dark was the most open she had ever seen it, the full undefended version of him, the one that existed in these hours and almost nowhere else, and she understood looking at it that this was what she had been given access to that nobody else had and that she intended to protect it for the rest of whatever came next.

She pressed her palm flat against his cheek.

He turned his face into it slightly.

They lay like that for a long time.

At some point she moved closer and he put his arm around her and she lay with her cheek against his shoulder and his heartbeat under her ear and his arm heavy and warm across her back and the room was as quiet as a room could be.

She traced his jaw one more time with her fingertip.

He watched the ceiling.

Outside the night was doing what nights did, moving slowly toward morning without asking permission from anyone, and inside the room two people were letting it move and not minding at all because the moving meant tomorrow and tomorrow meant the end of the thing that had been pressing in from the edges of everything since an alley behind Benedetti Square and a gunshot and twelve steps.

He said her name very quietly.

Not because he needed to say anything. Just to say it. In the dark. In the specific way that meant it belonged somewhere particular to him.

She pressed closer.

His arm tightened.

The whole night passed like that.

Unhurried and certain and completely theirs.

When the first light came through the curtains she was still awake and so was he and they lay in the early grey of it together and neither of them suggested getting up and neither of them spoke because there was nothing left to say that hadn't already been said in the dark or in the library or in the long weeks between an alley and this bed and this morning.

He pressed his lips to the top of her head.

She closed her eyes.

Outside the fountain was still running.

Below the estate the city was beginning its ordinary morning completely indifferent to the fact that somewhere above it two people were lying in the early light having spent the whole night watching each other and finding that entirely sufficient.

His heartbeat was steady under her ear.

She listened to it and thought that this specific sound, this exact rhythm, was the thing she intended to fall asleep to for the rest of her life.

She was going to make sure of it.

Today.