When she pulled back her eyes were still bright but her shoulders were loose and her scent had shifted back to that warm settled lavender that made every restless thing in me go quiet.
"I love you too," she said. "I think it started somewhere around the third honey-ember tart but I wasn't ready to admit it yet."
A laugh moved through my chest low and genuine and I pulled her into me and felt her arms wrap around my waist and her face turn into my shirt.
We stood like that in the cramped little office that smelled like cinnamon and old wood while the bakery hummed with curiosity on the other side of the door.
"Ready to go back out there?" I asked.
She took one steady breath.
"Make me a coffee first," she said. "Black."
"No sugar?"
She tilted her head back and looked up at me with those warm brown eyes that had been quietly rearranging my entire world one morning at a time for six months.
"I live plenty," she said.
I smiled so wide it hurt.
"Yeah," I said. "You do."
EPILOGUE
AMARA
Valentine's Day had never meant anything to me before. Not in the way it was supposed to and not in the way the shop windows and the paper hearts and the buckets of red roses outside every corner store suggested it should.
It had always been the kind of holiday that happened to other people, people who had someone to wake up next to, someone who remembered how they took their coffee, someone who saw them and stayed.
This year I’d woken up to Kael's arm around my waist and the soft gold glow of his scales in the early morning dark.
So.
Things had changed.
I'd been quietly nervous about today for days without admitting it to myself. I wasn’t nervous about us, because that part felt surprisingly settled, like something that had always been true and just needed time to be spoken out loud. I was nervous about the gift sitting on the nightstand wrapped in simple brown paper, tied with a piece of twine I'd found in a kitchen drawer.
It wasn't much to look at.
But it said everything about how carefully I'd been paying attention and I wasn't entirely sure I was ready to be that known by someone.
Then I thought about old cardigans pulled from a wardrobe in the dark and a tattered paperback placed in the center of a nest by hands that didn't know why they were doing it.
I picked up the gift and decided I was ready.
Kael was already in the kitchen when I padded out in his socks and my own cardigan, my hair loose around my shoulders. He was standing at the counter in a simple henley with the sleeves pushed up, holding a wrapped package and looking slightly nervous in a way that I found completely devastating on him.
We looked at each other.
"You first," we both said at the same time.
He laughed, low and quiet, and the nervousness dissolved.
"You first," he said again, just him this time.
I held out the brown paper package.
