“This version of you.” His mouth curves faintly. “Floating in a lake, being mouthy, pretending you weren’t about to climb me in front of your friends.”
Heat rushes through me so fast I swat lightly at his shoulder. He catches my wrist under the water, smiling like he’s already won.
“Silas.”
“What?” he asks, entirely too pleased with himself. “You were.”
“That is a wild accusation.”
“It’s a very accurate accusation.”
The banter should make the moment smaller. Somehow it doesn’t. It only makes it sweeter, the ease of us now, the fact that we can go from almost unbearable tenderness to this without either one cheapening the other.
My fingers return to the scar on his side, tracing its shape through the thin wet fabric. His eyes follow the movement. His hand stays warm over my own scar, not hiding it, not pitying it, simply knowing it is there and refusing to treat it like something that needs to be flinched from.
For a long breath, neither of us says anything.
The dock feels farther away. The voices of our friends blur into harmless noise again. The lake gleams around us. Above his shoulder the sky is impossibly blue, but I can only really see him.
“This,” I say softly.
His gaze lifts back to mine at once.
“This is where your scars meet mine.”
The words settle between us with a weight that feels almost holy.
Something in his face opens.
Not dramatically. Worse than that. Quietly. The kind of emotion that does not need tears to devastate. His forehead comes to rest against mine, his eyes closing for one suspended second as if the sentence hit somewhere too deep to answer immediately.
When he looks at me again, the heat is still there. So is the tenderness. So is that terrible, beautiful love that has only grown stronger each time life has tried to break it loose from us.
“Yeah,” he says, voice roughened by more than want now. “It is.”
Then he kisses me.
Slowly. Deeply. Like he is kissing every awful thing we survived and every gentle thing we built after. One hand stays at my scar. Mine stays over his. The lake rocks us together while his mouth moves over mine with a reverence that feels even more intimate than desire.
On the dock, somebody groans loudly enough to suggest we’ve become disgusting again.
Neither of us cares.
Not when the world has already given us so many places to break.
Not when this, here in the water with his hand over my scar and mine over his, feels so much like the place we were always meant to find.
His forehead rests against mine, his lashes still damp from the lake. His mouth is a little swollen now, softer from kissing, redder where my lipstick and his need blurred together in the summer light. Every time I think I have learned how to survive the sight of him, he goes and looks at me like this and ruins me all over again.
No hurry lives in the space between us now.
Only fullness.
The kind that comes after surviving enough to understand exactly what it means to be held by the right person. The kind that turns ordinary afternoons into something sacred because both of you know what it cost to get there.
His thumb brushes once more over the scar at my side.
My fingers answer at the one on his.
