His arm was still around her. Numb from the elbow down. He didn't move it.
This was the part where it ended. He knew how this worked. She'd touched him and survived, yes, but it had been the adrenaline, the chaos of the assassination attempt, some temporary alignment of magic that would correct itself by morning. She'd pull away and he'd feel nothing but cold air where she'd been, and the brief, impossible mercy of her skin against his would become another thing he'd lost.
He held himself still. Didn't breathe too deeply. Stayed in thespace between sleeping and waking where she was warm against him and nothing had gone wrong yet.
Her breathing changed.
He felt her awake gradually. The shift in her body, muscles tensing as consciousness returned. The slight catch in her rhythm when she registered where she was. Who she was pressed against.
He braced himself.
She yawned against his chest.
Then she settled deeper into his side, her hand sliding from his shirt to his forearm. Her thumb traced a lazy circle against the inside of his wrist, like this was something they did. Like she'd touched him a hundred times before and would touch him a hundred times again.
His throat closed.
"Your arm is numb, isn't it?" she said, her voice rough with sleep.
"Completely."
"You should have moved me."
"No."
She tilted her head up. Her hair was a disaster, pressed flat on one side, wild on the other. A crease from his shirt collar ran across her cheek. Her eyes were half-closed, squinting against even the dim twilight.
"Stop looking at me like that," she mumbled. "I haven't even had tea."
"Like what?"
"Like I performed a miracle. I fell asleep on your shoulder. People do that."
People do that.Three words that carved straight through him. Normal people, with normal lives, fell asleep on each other’s shoulders every night without it being the most significant thing to happen to them in hundreds of years.
She sat up and stretched, arms overhead, spine arching. His arm flooded with returning sensation, pins and needles crawling from elbow to fingertips. He flexed his hand.
She reached over and took it.
Wrapped her fingers around his and held on while she rubbed sleep from her eyes with her free hand.
"Still works," she said, and the corner of her mouth curved.
"Apparently."
She looked at him, and whatever she found in his face made her go still.
"You thought it wouldn't," she said quietly. "You thought you'd wake up and I'd be gone."
He couldn't answer that. Couldn't explain the particular cruelty of hope when you'd spent centuries without it.
She squeezed his hand. "I'm still here. And you're not getting rid of me before breakfast."
She stood, then wandered toward the window, stepping directly into a stack of books he'd left on the floor.
"Those are in the way," she informed him.
"They've been there for decades."
