She looked down at our hands. At the soft gold light moving beneath my skin.
"Kael," she said after a moment, her voice dropping to something smaller. "I need to say something and I need you to just let me say it without trying to fix it."
"Okay," I said.
She took a breath. "I know what I look like. I know I'm not..." She gestured vaguely at herself. "I'm not what people expect. I'm short and I'm soft and my mother has spent my entire life telling me my hips are too much and I've never quite managed to stop believing her. And I just."
She stopped and her jaw tightened. "I need to know that you actually want this. Not because of the fated match biology or thescales or whatever your dragon thinks it knows. But because you actually want me. The way I am."
She was looking at me now, steady and terrified and braver than she knew.
I didn't give her a speech or reach for elaborate words or construct something careful and impressive. I just looked at her, all of her, the soft curves she'd spent years hiding under oversized cardigans, the warm brown skin glowing in the amber light, and took in those bright eyes waiting for me to confirm her worst fears or shatter them entirely.
"You're just right for me," I said.
The scales pulsed gold.
Her breath came out unsteady.
"Just like that?" she whispered.
"Just like that," I said. "I've watched you walk into my bakery every morning for six months and every single time, my first thought was that you were exactly right. Not despite anything. Not in spite of anything. Just exactly right."
She looked at me for a long moment and then she reached out and took the hem of my undershirt in her fingers.
I went very still.
"Show me," she said quietly. "Show me what it looks like when you actually want someone."
I closed the space between us slowly, giving her every opportunity to change her mind, and when she didn't, when she tilted her chin up and her hands pressed flat against my chest over the glow of the scales, and I kissed her for the first time.
It was soft and unhurried, and it was the way I did everything that mattered. She made a sound against my mouth that traveled straight through me and my dragon went absolutely still in the way it only did when something was exactly right.
I pulled back just far enough to look at her.
Her eyes were still closed.
"More," she whispered, a smile ghosting on her lips.
I kissed her again, deeper this time, my hands coming up to cup her face the way I'd wanted to for months, my thumbs brushing her cheekbones, feeling her breath hitch against my lips. She tasted like warmth and something sweet and entirely her and I understood suddenly with complete clarity why my hands had been making honey-ember tarts before dawn for six months.
They had always known what the rest of me was too afraid to admit. I eased her back into the nest slowly, my weight settling beside her rather than over her, and took my time. Every piece of clothing came off carefully, deliberately, my hands moving without rush across every curve she'd spent years hiding. She tensed once, her hands moving self-consciously, and I caught them gently and pressed them back down to the blankets.
"Let me," I said against her collarbone.
She exhaled and let me.
I wanted to learn her body the way I’d learned every recipe that mattered. With patience and attention and the absolute conviction that getting it right was worth taking as long as it took. Every sound she made I filed away and returned to. Every place that made her breath catch I memorized and revisited until the catching became something louder and less contained.
The scales brightened steadily.
By the time she was pulling me closer with both hands, her voice soft and urgent against my ear, they were casting warm gold light across the ceiling above us.
"Kael," she breathed.
"I have you," I said. "I've got you."
I settled between her thighs and watched her face as I pressed forward, slow and careful, giving her time to adjust to the size of me, watching for anything that said stop and finding nothing but her hands gripping my arms and her head fallingback and her lips parting around a sound that did something permanent to me.
