The smile is small and quick, the kind she doesn't quite know she's making yet. She peels off toward the medical building and I watch her go and feel the tight thing in my chest ease by a fraction.
"That was well done."
Dutch. Coffee in hand, appearing from behind the equipment shed.
"Don't." I take the cup he's holding out. "Don't make it a thing."
"I wasn't going to say anything."
"You were about to say something."
"I was going to say you're good at seeing what people need."
I drink my coffee and say nothing, because if I respond to that I'll have to acknowledge that his opinion of me has started to matter, and I'm not doing that before seven in the morning.
Being with him feels natural. He matches my pace without thinking about it, which is the kind of thing I notice and wish I didn't. Below us the settlement moves through its morning, alive and intact, and Dutch walks beside me like he's been doing it for years.
"So, what’s next," I say.
He glances at me.
"I want to know what you're going to do."
"I haven't decided."
“What's the problem?"
He's quiet a beat too long. "It would mean leaving."
I keep my eyes forward. The east wall. The new bracing on the third section that still needs checking. Very interesting things to look at.
"And?" I say.
"And I'm finding that harder to picture than I expected."
The morning noise fills the space between us. Harry shouting at someone about the water supply. The sound of hammering from the west side. Normal. Ordinary. Ours.
"Check the east wall with me," I say.
He lets me redirect. He always lets me redirect, and he's always still there when I come back around. That's the thing I keep bumping into, the thing I don't have a word for yet.
We go check the east wall.
That night is different from the one before.
No battle behind us. No adrenaline to explain it away. Just Dutch in my quarters because I didn't tell him not to be, sitting on the edge of the bed while I pull off my boots, and the particular quiet of two people who've stopped pretending they don't want to be in the same room.
I lean against his shoulder and we stay like that, quiet, while the settlement settles into night around us. Then his thumb traces a slow circle on my wrist and I feel it everywhere, and the nature of the evening shifts.
I turn my face up to his.
"Hey," he says.
"Hey."
He kisses me slowly. Not like the night before, that was desperate, post-battle, both of us half out of our minds with relief and want. This is so much more meaningful.
I let him take it.
