She nods. Accepts that. Doesn’t try to fix it. Just lays her head on my chest and lets the silence stretch between us like a balm.
“You know,” she says after a while, “I thought I’d hate this. Being here. With you. Like this.”
I raise an eyebrow. “Thanks.”
“No, I mean—intimacy. Trust. All that soft shit. I thought it’d make me weak.”
“And?”
She presses a kiss to my chest, right over the spot where my heart thunders against her lips.
“And I was wrong.”
That’s twice now. She doesn’t say it easy. Doesn’t say it often. But when she does—it lands.
I thread my fingers through her hair, tugging gently until she looks up.
“I’m not going anywhere,” I tell her. “You don’t have to be afraid.”
Her eyes darken, but not with fear. Something else. Something deeper.
“I’m not afraid,” she says. “Not of you. Not anymore.”
The silence that follows isn’t awkward. It’s thick. Honest. A shared breath that stretches longer than language allows.
I wish I could stop time right here. Just this. Just her and the light and the warmth and the quiet.
But I know better.
The world’s still out there, and it’s ugly. Dennis is still scheming. The districting vote’s just the start. And that whisper she passed me last night—about a nanovirus, about a plan to cleanse the aliens from this sector—it’s still burning in my skull like a brand.
But not now. Not yet.
Now, it’s just us.
“You ever think,” she murmurs, “about what it’d be like if the war never happened?”
“Sometimes,” I admit.
“What do you see?”
I tilt my head, considering. “You, in my kitchen. Yelling at me for under-seasoning something.”
She laughs, real and throaty. “Damn straight.”
I grin. “You?”
Her smile fades a little. “I think… I’d be less angry. But maybe also less awake.”
“That’s a strange thing to want.”
“It’s not a want. It’s a truth. The war wrecked everything. But it made me see. You can’t unsee that kind of grief.”
I nod. “Yeah. I get that.”
She pushes up on her elbows, straddling my hips, hair falling around her face like a curtain of fire.
“But I can still choose what I fight for now,” she says, eyes locked on mine. “And I’m choosing you. Us.”
