“I don’t want you to stop.”
“Then let me do this right.”
And he does.
When we come together, it’s not frantic—it’s deliberate. Desperate, yes. But not for escape. For truth.
My body arcs beneath his like it remembers him. Every inch of him is a contradiction: calloused but gentle, bruised but strong. He murmurs my name like it’s the only thing keeping him from vanishing.
“Kairo,” he breathes against my shoulder. “Kairo—you’remy peace.”
My eyes sting. I press my forehead to his. “You’re mine too. Even when I don’t want you to be.”
He lets out a soft laugh. “I’ll take that.”
We move together with the kind of intimacy that doesn’t come from lust—it comes from survival. From trust. From the slow, hard-earned building of something real in the ruins.
Afterward,we lie tangled together on the couch.
His fingers drift lazily along the small of my back. I rest my head on his chest, listening to the slowing rhythm of his heartbeat. The storm’s calmed outside, and the city has gone hush-quiet—the kind of silence that only comes after something has shifted.
His chest rises and falls in steady rhythm beneath my cheek. I close my eyes. Breathe him in. The air smells like skin and rain, like citrus from the open diffuser, like something fragile and precious and fleeting.
And then I say it.
The thing I’ve been holding back, afraid of what his answer might break.
“Jav,” I murmur, tracing a lazy circle on his ribs with one fingertip.
“Hmm?”
“Are you ready to be a father?”
The words are barely above a whisper, but they slice the room in half.
He doesn’t move.
I keep tracing the circle. “Really ready. Not just because you love me. Not just because he’s mine. But because he might beyours. Because he mightlookat you one day and say ‘Dad’—and expect everything that comes with it.”
Silence.
His breath catches. Then slows.
I look up.
He meets my eyes.
And doesn’t flinch.
“Yes,” he says. “I always was.”
He doesn’t say it with bravado. Or certainty. He says it like confession. Like promise. Like he’s letting go of a fear he didn’t know he’d been gripping.
And I believe him.
For the first time—I really believe him.
I curl against him again, and the warmth of his body wraps around me like a vow.
