We moved. We breathed.
When I came, it was quiet. A shudder that moved through me like water. His mouth on my forehead. His hands in my hair. The particular tenderness of a man who had spent his whole life learning violence and was now practicing something else.
He followed. His body tensing, his breath catching, his forehead pressed against mine. I felt him. The pulse of him. The warmth. The specific, irreversible fact of two people who had found each other in the rubble and decided to stay.
Afterward, we lay tangled.
His chest against my back. His arm around my waist. The rabbit pressed between us—a soft, cream-colored witness to everything that had happened and everything that was still to come.
Midge climbed onto the pillow.
She circled once. Twice. Collapsed with the theatrical exhaustion of a creature who had supervised a great deal of emotional processing and required compensation in the form of sleep. One paw extended toward my hair. The good ear flat.
The room was still.
The moon pajamas were still on the chair. The sippy cup with stars was still on the nightstand. The coloring books and the rabbit and the evidence of the life we were building together—all of it exactly where it was supposed to be.
I closed my eyes.
His arms tightened around me.
Chapter 15
Santo
She’dputthepajamatop on at some point in the night.
I’d felt her move—the brief absence of warmth against my chest, the rustle of flannel, and then she was back, the small moons pressed between us, her face finding the hollow below my collarbone like it had GPS coordinates for the spot. Just the top. Nothing else. The buttons done wrong—one off, the whole line shifted, the kind of mistake hands made in the dark when the brain was still asleep and the body was just reaching for the nearest armor.
I didn‘t fix them. I liked them wrong.
When I woke, she was still asleep. The sleep of a person who had emptied herself completely and had nothing left to keep her at the surface. Deep. Heavy. The breathing so slow I matched mine to it without meaning to.
Midge was at the foot of the bed. Curled into a comma, the stub tail tucked, one ear up even in sleep—the eternal sentinel, monitoring for threats even when the threats had been dealtwith and the house was quiet and the only danger was a man lying awake at six in the morning watching a woman breathe.
Her eyelids moved. The flutter I’d learned to recognize—the lashes trembling, the breath shifting, consciousness arriving in stages like tide coming in. A sound left her. Not a word. A hum. Low, private, the sound of a body surfacing from deep water and finding air.
Her eyes opened.
Dark. Soft. The brief, disoriented second where she didn’t know where she was—and then the recognition. The room. The light. Me.
She smiled.
“Hi, Daddy.” she said.
“Hi, Baby Girl.”
She kissed me. Morning-lazy, her mouth soft. The kind of kiss that wasn‘t going anywhere—or didn’t know it was going somewhere yet. Just contact. Just the first thing her body wanted to do upon waking, which was find mine and confirm it was still there.
I pulled her on top of me.
Her weight settled—thighs straddling my hips, the flannel top riding up, her bare skin against my stomach. She was warm. Sleep-warm.
She moved. Not deliberately—half-asleep still, her hips shifting, finding the position that felt right, and the position that felt right was directly over me. The slow grind of her against my shorts. My body responded before my brain—hardening under her, the blood moving south with tremendous speed.
Her eyes widened. She felt it. The press of me against her. Her hips rolled again—this time deliberate, the sleep clearing, the intent arriving.
“Wait,” I said.
