That's where it starts.
My left hand cupping her jaw.
Bare.
The pad of my ring finger against her cheekbone where the metal used to press.
She feels the difference.
I feel her feel it—the sharp intake of breath, the way her eyes search mine, the recognition that something fundamental has shifted.
Nothing between us. Not anymore.
I kiss her, nice and slow.
She opens to me the way she always does—without hesitation, without negotiation, the full surrender of a woman who has decided to trust.
Her mouth is soft. Warm.
She tastes like sleep and the toothpaste she used last night and something underneath that's just her—dark, sweet, the taste I've been learning in the spaces between all the other moments.
I pull back and look at her.
Her hair on my pillow.
Her eyes, dark and deep and full of a light that has nothing to do with the sun.
Her lips parted, her cheeks flushed, her shoulders brown against the white sheet.
Every inch of her is so specifically, undeniably Bex that the comparison doesn't even flicker in the back of my mind.
There is no ghost. There is no before. There is just this woman in my bed looking at me like I'm the only thing in the room that matters.
I pull the shirt up over her head.
She lifts her arms and lets me.
Underneath she's bare—she slept without anything else—and the shirt comes away and there she is.
Full breasts, dark nipples already tightening in the morning air.
The soft curve of her stomach.
The width of her hips against the sheet.
The strength in her shoulders, her arms, the body of a woman who works for a living and carries the evidence of it in every line.
I touch her the way I should have been touching her all along.
I start at her face—tracing her eyebrows, her cheekbones, the line of her jaw, the small scar at her hairline I've never asked about.
Down her neck, the tendons standing out as she tips her head back.
Across her collarbones, the ridge of bone under warm skin.
I'm mapping her. Learning her.
Committing every surface to the memory of hands that have been holding a ghost and are finally, finally touching something alive.
