He’s busy.
That’s all.
He’s busy, and I’m overthinking, and the humming will come back when the border dispute settles, and the one-degree difference in his voice is the product of exhaustion, not distance.
This is what I tell myself.
I tell myself this when he comes home from a late meeting and kisses me hello but doesn’t linger. I tell myself this when we’re in bed and his arm is around me but his body is turned slightly away, an angle so subtle that measuring it would require instruments more sensitive than the human heart, except the human heart is the most sensitive instrument there is and mine is tuned to him.
I tell myself this when I catch him looking at me across the kitchen with an expression I can’t read. Not the warmth. Not the composure. Something in between, something searching, something that looks almost like a question he’s afraid to ask.
And I tell myself this most aggressively on Friday evening when I’m curled against him on the couch and I lean up to kiss his neck and he goes still. Not the good still. Not the still that means I’ve found the seam in his composure and his body is deciding how to respond. A different still. A careful still. The still of a man who is holding something back.
It lasts a second. Less than a second. Then his arm tightens around me and he turns and kisses me properly, and the kiss is thorough, warm, extraordinary, and I decide that the second of hesitation was nothing.
Exhaustion.
Stress.
Bellecourts.
Not distance.
This is what I tell myself on Sunday morning when Alexei comes into the kitchen where I’m losing a war with Mariano and says, “I need to go in to the office.”
Sunday.
He doesn’t work on Sundays. Sundays are ours. Sundays are breakfast in the kitchen and the couch and the library and the long, slow afternoons where he reads and I read and the humming fills the space between us like a third heartbeat. Ruby doesn’t call. The Blood Oval doesn’t summon. Sundays are sacred in the way that only two people who are still learning how to be together can make something sacred, by showing up, by being present, by choosing each other over everything else.
But he’s standing in the kitchen doorway in a suit on a Sunday, and his expression is the composed, unreadable one, the prince, not the husband, and he’s saying he needs to go.
“The Bellecourt negotiations,” he says. “A development that requires my attention.”
“On a Sunday?”
“The Bellecourts don’t observe weekends.”
This is true. I know this is true because I’ve heard him say it before, and because vampires are nocturnal and their relationship to the human calendar is at best adversarial. And he’s looking at me with those pale eyes, and his voice is even, and nothing about this moment is wrong.
One degree.
I smile. “Okay. I’ll be here.”
He crosses the kitchen. He kisses my forehead. Not my mouth. My forehead. And the kiss is gentle and brief and it lands on my skin like an apology for something I don’t know about yet.
“I won’t be long,” he says.
And then he’s gone, and the kitchen is quiet, and Mariano hisses at me from the counter, and I stand there with my mug in my hands and tell myself: see? He’s busy. The Bellecourts. Negotiations. Sunday is an inconvenience, not a pattern. Nothing is wrong.
The forehead kiss sits on my skin like a fingerprint.
He kissed my forehead, not my mouth. And I know this means nothing. People kiss foreheads all the time, it’s tender, it’s sweet, it’s what a man does when he’s in a hurry and his wife has coffee breath. But Alexei has never once been too hurried to kiss me properly. Not when we were late for work. Not when Ruby was calling. Not when the Blood Oval was waiting.
Stop it.
I take a breath.
I let it out.
