Chapter 129 129
Kaelen's POV:
"Multiple times. Even in front of your mom once, when we went to pick you up and you were taking a shower."
I winced. "I didn't know that."
"Your mom handled it really well actually. Just kept stirring her soup like nothing happened." Annabeth smiled a little. "Mara will go back to university soon, but she said she expects weekly updates and photographic evidence of us being 'disgustingly domestic.'"
"This counts as disgustingly domestic?"
"Apparently." She squeezed my hand. "She also said if I ever go silent on her again without explanation, she's driving here and physically shaking me until my teeth rattle."
"Sounds reasonable."
"It's extremely reasonable. I deserve the teeth rattling."
Debbie came by to refill my coffee. It was terrible coffee, the kind that tasted like it had been sitting on the burner since the Reagan administration, but I drank it anyway. Annabeth watched me with amusement.
"You're enjoying this way too much," she said.
"I promised you a terrible Denny's experience. I'm committing to it."
"The coffee literally looks like motor oil."
"I've had worse."
"When?"
"Marcus made coffee at the first safe house. Before I knew how to use the coffee maker properly." I took another sip, grimaced. "This is better than that was."
"That's not a high bar."
"It's the bar we have."
She reached across and stole a piece of my bacon. I let her. I would've let her take the whole plate if she wanted it.
"Christmas was nice," I said. "Weird, but nice."
"Nice is a strong word for a dinner where Marcus and my aunt made awkward small talk for three hours."
"They tried."
"They did try. I'll give them that." She smiled a little. "Aunt Sarah asked him about his job and he talked about construction for like twenty minutes. I didn't know there were that many things to say about pouring concrete."
"There aren't. He was nervous."
"He was SO nervous. Did you see his face when she offered him seconds? Like she was about to attack him or something."
"He's learning how to be a civilized person again."
"He's trying to be a civilized person again. There's a difference." But she was still smiling, which meant she wasn't actually annoyed. "He ate three servings of mashed potatoes. Three. Aunt Sarah was delighted. She kept trying to give him more and he kept accepting because he didn't know how to say no."
"Progress."
"Baby steps."
I finished my bacon, started on the hash browns. They were underseasoned and slightly soggy, exactly what I expected.
"So," she said. "Spring semester starts in three weeks."
"I know."
"I'm re-enrolling, and for real this time." She looked at me. "You?"
"I talked to the registrar last week. They're letting me pick up where I left off, kind of. I have to retake a few things but most of my credits transferred."
"So we're both going back to school."
"Looks like it."
"Like normal college students."
"Extremely normal."
She grinned. "With soul bonds and dragon blood and a father who works construction to stay under the radar."
"The most normal kind of normal."
"Obviously."
The bond pulsed between us, warm and steady, that constant presence that I'd almost lost and would never take for granted again. I could feel her contentment through it, her happiness, her relief. All the things she didn't have to say out loud because I could feel them as clearly as my own heartbeat.
"I love you," I said. Just because I could. Because we were alive and together and sitting in a Denny's on New Year's Day and I could say it whenever I wanted.
Her face softened. "I love you too. Even though you're drinking motor oil coffee voluntarily."
"It's growing on me."
"That's concerning."
"You should be concerned."
She reached across the table and took my hand again, lacing her fingers through mine. Her palm was warm now, warmed up from holding the milkshake glass and from touching me, and I could feel her pulse where our wrists pressed together.
"Hey," she said.
"Hey."
"We made it."
"We did."
"All that running. All that fighting. All that almost-dying." She squeezed my hand. "And we ended up here. At a Denny's. With sticky menus and bad coffee and pancakes that taste like cardboard."
"Exactly where we said we'd be."
"Exactly where we said we'd be."
Debbie came by with the check. Twelve dollars and seventy-three cents for the worst breakfast in Emberdale, and I left her a twenty because she'd refilled my terrible coffee twice without complaining.
We walked out into the January cold, our hands still linked, our breath making clouds in the air. The parking lot was still mostly empty, and my car was parked near the entrance.
Annabeth stopped walking and turned to face me. Her cheeks were pink from the cold, or maybe from the strawberry milkshake, and her eyes had that red ring at the edges that showed up when she was feeling something strong.
"New year," she said.
"New year."
"New everything, actually. New family situation. New living arrangements. New not-being-hunted-by-a-secret-organization status."
"That last one's my favorite."
"Mine too." She stepped closer, close enough that I could see my reflection in her eyes. "Thank you. For keeping the promise."
"Which one?"
"All of them. But especially this one." She gestured at the Denny's behind us, at the parking lot, at the whole mundane ordinary morning. "You said you'd take me somewhere boring. You said we'd have bad pancakes and sticky menus and the most normal Saturday of our lives."
"It's Wednesday."
"Shut up, you know what I mean."
I laughed and pulled her closer, wrapped my arms around her. She fit against me perfectly, the way she always did, her head tucking under my chin and her arms going around my waist.
"I would've promised you anything," I said into her hair. "The Denny's was the easy part."
"Yeah?"
"Yeah. The hard part was staying alive long enough to get here."
She pulled back enough to look at my face. "Well. We did that too."
"We did."
"So what now? We just... live? Like regular people?"
"That's the plan."
"Go to class. Do homework. Argue about what to watch on Netflix."
"Fight over the last slice of pizza."
"Complain about our professors."
"Visit my family for awkward dinners."
"Visit mine for even more awkward dinners because Marcus still doesn't know how to make small talk."
"He's learning."
"Baby steps," she said again. But she was smiling, that full smile that I'd do anything to see, and the bond was humming with her happiness, with both of our happiness, tangled together until I couldn't tell where mine ended and hers began.
"I'm gonna kiss you now," I said.
"In the Denny's parking lot."
"In the Denny's parking lot."
"How romantic."
"The most romantic."
So I kissed her. Right there, in the parking lot of a chain restaurant on the first day of a new year, with the cold January wind biting at our faces and the smell of grease still clinging to our clothes. It wasn't a dramatic kiss, not like the ones in movies with swelling music and perfect lighting. It was just us. Her lips cold from the milkshake. My hands cold from the air. Both of us smiling too much to kiss properly.
Perfect. Ordinary. Ours.
When we finally got in the car, Annabeth immediately started messing with the radio, looking for something that wasn't static or country. She found a station playing something with too much bass and turned it down to a reasonable level, then put her feet up on the dashboard even though I'd told her a hundred times not to do that.
"Denny's again next week?" she asked.
"You want to come back?"
"Obviously. We have to try the other terrible menu items. For science."
"For science."
"I'm thinking the Moons Over My Hammy. It sounds disgusting."
"It probably is."
"Perfect."
She reached over and took my hand where it rested on the gear shift. Just held it. Didn't say anything else.
I pulled out of the parking lot and onto the main road, heading back toward town, toward the life we were building out of the wreckage of everything we'd survived. The sun was trying to break through the clouds, not quite managing it but getting close. January first. A new year.
A new beginning.
And in the passenger seat, Annabeth was humming along to the radio, her thumb tracing circles on the back of my hand, completely relaxed for the first time in months. Maybe years.
We'd made it. Against everything. Through everything.
And now we got to figure out what came next.
Together.
THE END.