"You don't have to manage me. I'm not going to — I'm not going to be a problem about the others. That's not—" He stops. Tries again. "That's not who I want to be."
"Leo, I love you." I lean down and kiss him.
He makes a sound against my mouth that is relief and want simultaneously, his hands finding my waist, pulling me closer. The Leo-bond flares warm and immediate.
His mouth is familiar and his hands are familiar and when he pulls me into him it feels like coming back to something rather than arriving somewhere new.
He doesn't say anything for a while. Just his hand moving down my back.
"The furniture thing," he says. "Forget I said that."
"Already forgotten."
We stay like that until the building quiets around us.
***
Lumi's session is the next afternoon.
The room is the same as it's always been — green walls, candle, couch and chair, the smell of whatever she burns that my body has learned means safe. I've been coming here long enough that I stop looking for the angle when I walk in.
She looks at me when I come in and her face does the thing it does — reading, quick, filing.
"Sit," she says. Not a question.
I sit on the couch. She sits in the chair. The routine. Familiar enough to be its own kind of comfort, which still unsettles me slightly.
"Tell me," she says.
Not a question either.
She looks at my wrist. The four arcs, dark and permanent. She takes my arm, gently, and looks at them. She knows what each one cost. She was on that mountain. She brought some of these people down herself.
"Jake," she says.
"Last night."
She sets my arm down carefully. Something moves in her face that she doesn't try to hide from me.
"He's okay?" Her voice is even but I know what's underneath it.
"I think he went to Jim after," I say.
Something releases in her. Not dramatically — a breath, barely. "Good." She looks at the candle. "Jake needed Jim to be real again before he could be real himself. They kept each other alive on the mountain. Losing that—" She stops. Chooses differently. "It hollowed him out."
"You know all of them," I say. Not an accusation.
"I know all of them." She meets my eyes. "That was always going to be complicated when you started bonding them. I want you to know that I'm aware of that. That my investment in their recovery doesn't compromise what I offer you in here."
"I know," I say. "That's why I'm still coming."
She nods once. Then tilts her head. "How many were there last night?"
I look at her. "Excuse me?"
"You didn’t have any bonds the last time we met." She says it with the serenity of a woman who has seen a lot. "I'm asking for context, not details."
"Three," I say. "Leo and Jake. And Gray came through earlier."
