"Yeah. We could."
Her hand finds mine. Her fingers lace through mine and squeeze. I squeeze back.
"I need to tell you something," she says.
I wait.
"When I came here. When my father signed the contract and put my name next to yours and told me this was my life now." She swallows. "I hated you. I hated everything about you. What you represented. What you'd done. What I thought you were."
"I know."
"Let me finish." Her thumb runs along the side of my hand. "I hated you, and I planned for you. I researched you. I made files on your weaknesses. I told myself I was going to survive you, and surviving was all I was willing to aim for."
The corner of my mouth lifts. "Smart."
"I was wrong." Her voice drops. Not weak. Just quiet. The kind of quiet that comes before something real. "I wasn't wrong to be careful. I wasn't wrong to protect myself. But I was wrong about you."
I turn to look at her. She's already looking at me.
"You're not what I expected," she says. "You're better. In ways I didn't know to look for."
Something cracks open in my chest. Something I've been holding shut since long before she came along.
"Aoife."
"I'm not going anywhere." She says it the way she says everything. Direct. No flinching. Looking right at me, so I can't pretend I didn't hear it. "Whatever happens on Sunday. Whatever comes after. I'm here. I choose this. I choose you."
Something shifts in my chest. Something I don't have a word for and don't want to examine too closely, because if I look at it straight on, it might disappear.
I pull her to me. My hand goes to the back of her head, my fingers tangling in her hair, and I press my face against her neck, and I breathe.
"Say it again," I manage.
"I choose you."
I pull back enough to see her face. She's steady. Certain.
"I don't deserve that," I say.
"I know." The ghost of a smile. "I'm giving it to you anyway."
I kiss her. Slow. Not desperate, not frantic. Her mouth opens under mine, and the taste of her floods through me and my hand tightens on her waist hard enough to feel bone.
She pulls me closer, and the kiss deepens, and the room falls away. Just her mouth. Her breathing. The warmth of her body pressed against mine.
"I don't know how to do this," I say against her mouth. "I don't know how to be this."
"You're already doing it." Her forehead against mine. Her breath on my lips. "You've been doing it."
I lay her back on the bed. She pulls me down with her.
This isn't like the dining room. Everything in me slows down. Every touch deliberate. Every second, something I want to keep.
I unbutton her blouse. One button at a time. She watches me do it, her chest rising and falling, her lips parted. The fabric falls open, and I put my mouth on her collarbone and trace the line of it with my tongue.
Her hands slide under my shirt. I pull it off. Her palms flatten against my chest and move down, over my stomach, to my belt.
"Wait," I say.
