We’re staying at Dmitri’s.
It still surprises me, how quickly that sentence stopped feeling strange, how the house became part of our rhythm the way the team did. A place that holds people without asking questions. A place where the kitchen always smells faintly of coffee and sea salt, and every spare room gets claimed.
Morning sneaks in, pale and layered. Fog clings to the low places, turning the world into a watercolor with theedges washed out. The boardwalk outside the bedroom window is damp, the planks dark with night moisture. Somewhere farther down the beach, a gull complains once, then goes quiet again.
The sound doesn’t bloom into color the way it used to when I was still raw. It arrives muted now—soft silver, diluted blue—like my mind has finally learned to stop shouting back.
I lie still and listen.
Down the hall, the house makes small, familiar noises—wood settling, a pipe ticking once, then quiet. Dmitri left us the keys and a single instruction:enjoy the silence.
We do.
Inside the room, the air smells faintly of salt and clean cotton and the soap from last night’s shower. The sheets are warm where I am and cooler where the morning has crept in. My body is tired in a way that feels earned, not frayed—sun and wind and deep sleep that comes when you stop bracing for impact.
I turn my head.
Kieran is on his back beside me, one arm thrown above his head, the other resting near his stomach, relaxed in a way that still catches me off guard. His hair is a mess. His mouth is slightly open as he breathes. There’s a small line between his brows that makes him look like he’s thinking even in sleep.
For months, I trained myself to look away from him.
Now I don’t.
I slide my hand across, not touching him yet. Shifting carefully, I ease onto my side so I can look at him without the sheet slipping away.
He doesn’t wake.
The ocean hums in the background, low and constant. In my head, the sound unfurls into color, blue folding into silver, calm enough to sit inside.
I study the curve of his mouth. The faint shadow along his jaw. The scar near his eyebrow that I once pretended not to notice because noticing meant wanting. He looks younger like this. Unguarded. Not the man who held himself perfectly still while I tested the edges of him, not the one who learned restraint the hard way, but the one who stayed anyway.
There’s a moment, quiet and unremarkable on the surface, where it lands that this isn’t temporary.
I press my palm flat against the mattress between us, grounding myself. He wakes when I move closer.
Not all at once, just a shift in his breathing, a small sound in the back of his throat. His arm drops from above his head and finds me by instinct, heavy and warm across my waist, like his body knows where I belong before his mind catches up.
“Hey,” he murmurs, voice rough with sleep.
The sound of it blooms blue and low in my chest. Not the electric spike it used to be. Something deeper. Something that holds.
“Hey,” I say back.
His eyes open slowly. They find mine without searching and without surprise. The tension that used to live there—watchful, careful—doesn’t show up anymore. He looks…settled. Like a man who knows he doesn’t have to perform.
He drags me closer until my forehead rests against his shoulder, my cheek pressed to warm skin. The sheets whisper as we move. Outside, the wind shifts the dune grass, a soft hiss through the open window.
“You awake-awake?” he asks.
“Mm,” I say. “Thinking-awake.”
He huffs a quiet laugh. His hand slides up my back, slow, absentminded, a touch that isn’t trying to go anywhere. The color that spreads in my head stays calm—silver threaded with blue, no jagged edges.
I realize something then, tucked inside the ordinariness of the moment.
This is the part I used to be afraid of.
Not the wanting. Not the breaking. This—lying here with nowhere to be, no role to play, no distance to hide behind. Being seen in the quiet after everything else has already happened.
