“Anything, baby girl.”
For a moment, I struggled to form words.
“Do you still want me?”
The words came out before I could stop them. Quiet. The voice from the kitchen, stripped and flat, but with something underneath now—something raw, something that had been scraped clean by the evening and was still bleeding.
“Knowing who I am,” I continued. “Knowing why I came. Knowing I climbed through your window to hurt you. Knowing I—“
“Cora.”
His hands found my shoulders. Turned me. I was facing him now—the dark eyes, the crooked nose, the jaw that had been clenched all evening and was still clenched. The face I had spent seven days learning. The face that had become, somehow, the geography of safety.
“I told you,” he said. Low. The Daddy voice, but different—softer at the edges, worn down. “Nothing changes this.”
“You didn’t know—“
“I knew enough.” His thumb found my cheekbone. Traced. The roughness of the scarred knuckle against the softness of my face. “I knew you were carrying something heavy. I knew someone had hurt you. I knew you were scared and alone andstarving for something you couldn’t name. The details don’t change that. The details don’t change anything.”
“Santo—“
“I love you.”
The words again. The same words from the kitchen, from the moment that had broken my circuits and dropped me to the floor. But different now. Deliberate. Not thrown across a room like a weapon. Given. Placed into my hands like something fragile that he was trusting me to hold.
“I love you,” he said again. “That’s not conditional. That’s not negotiable. That’s just—“ He stopped. His jaw worked. “That’s just what it is.”
I kissed him.
My hands found his face. My mouth found his mouth. This was slow. This was deliberate. This was two people who had finally put their weapons down and were touching each other with empty hands.
He lifted me.
The motion was gentle—not the urgency of before, not the possession. His arms under my thighs, my legs wrapping around his waist, my face against his neck. He carried me to the bed. Laid me down. The rabbit pressed against my shoulder. The coloring books shifted on the nightstand.
He undressed me.
Slowly. The way he’d undressed me for the bath—each piece removed with attention, with care, with the particular reverence of a man who understood that what he was unwrapping was precious. My shirt over my head. My jeans down my legs. The ruined lace that he traced with his fingers before slipping away.
I undressed him.
My hands finding the buttons of his shirt. My fingers clumsy but determined. I wanted to feel his skin. I wanted to map the territory of him—the scars, the tattoos, the places where his bodyhad recorded its history. The shirt fell. The belt followed. The rest followed.
He settled over me.
Face to face. His forehead against mine. His breath mingling with my breath. We were so close that I couldn’t tell where I ended and he began—the boundaries dissolved, the edges blurred, two people occupying the same small space.
When he entered me, it was slow.
Inch by inch. His eyes on mine. Just this—his body inside mine, the fullness of it, the specific, devastating intimacy of being known and wanting more of it.
We moved together.
The rhythm was unhurried. Ancient. The rhythm of breathing, of heartbeats, of two people who had been alone for a very long time and were learning how to be together. His hands found my face. My hands found his back. We held on to each other like we were the only solid things in a shifting world.
“Cora,” he said.
“Santo,” I whispered back.
