An offering.
Home, not room.
Me, not us.
The kind of phrase that means more than shelter.
I close my eyes once.
Then open them and look at her.
My beautiful, impossible girl in my hoodie, holding me upright in the ugliest ten minutes of the season.
“I’m never leaving. Now that the season is over.”
That gets the smallest smile out of her.
Fragile at the edges.
Real anyway.
She brushes one knuckle over my cheekbone.
“You don’t have to say anything else tonight.”
That almost undoes me worse than the game.
That there’s a moment where every sentence feels either too small or too polished or too late.
I nod.
And because I still can’t help myself, because even grief can’t kill instinct, I reach up and tuck a strand of hair behind her ear.
My fingers catch briefly on the edge of her bracelet.
The little compass rose flashes once under the corridor light.
North.
Always.
I let out a breath that shakes on the way out.
Then I say the thing I only fully understood when I saw her standing here waiting.
“I lost tonight.”
Her fingers tighten around mine.
“But,” I add, voice rougher now, “it still feels like I won.”
Her whole face opens.
Softens.
Breaks.
Glows.
