"Do you want to come in?"
"Yes."
I unlock the door and he follows me inside. The houseboat is small and clean and full of the life I've built, with books on the shelves and a quilt my mother made draped over the couch and coffee cups washed and drying by the sink. Through the windows, the lake catches the gray October light. He takes it in with the quiet attentiveness I remember, and I watch him see the life I've made.
"It's good," he says. "It looks like you."
"It looks like Elena."
"Elena is you. She was always you."
I close the distance between us and press my palms against him, feeling for the heartbeat that told me the truth when his words couldn't.
It's there. Rapid and hard. The same.
"I missed you," I say. "Every single day."
"Every single day." He covers my hands with his. "Every Saturday, I thought about this. About finding you. About whether the thread would still be there."
"It was always there."
I rise on my toes and kiss him, softly at first, the tentative exploring kiss of two people reacquainting themselves with each other's taste after too long apart. He tastes like coffee and rain and patience, and when he kisses me back with his hands cradling my face, I feel the last wall inside me come down.
The softness lasts about ten seconds. Then all those months of deprivation ignite.
His hands go from cradling my face to gripping it, angling my mouth against his, and the kiss turns deep and consuming, his tongue stroking against mine, his teeth catching my lower lip. I moan into his mouth and fist my hands in his flannel and pull, and buttons fly for the second time in our history, scattering across my kitchen floor.
"I'll buy you a new one," I gasp.
"I don't care." He shrugs the shirt off and pulls my sweater over my head in the same motion, and then his mouth is on my neck, my collarbone, the swell of my breasts above my bra. His hands find the clasp and he unhooks it and my breasts are in his hands, rough and possessive, his thumbs dragging across my nipples until they ache.
"Bedroom," I manage.
He doesn't carry me this time. He walks me backward down the hallway, his mouth never leaving my skin, his hands never leaving my body, kicking the bedroom door open with his foot. We fall onto the bed together in a tangle of half-removed clothes and desperate hands, and the urgency is nothing like the safe house's controlled escalation. This is every letter never written and every phone call never made and every Saturday morning spent staring at an empty chair, and it comes out of us like a dam breaking.
I shove his jeans down and he kicks them off. His cock is hard, straining against his briefs, and when I palm him through the cotton he groans into my throat, his hips pressing into myhand. But my eyes catch something first, new ink on his inner forearm, a date in clean black script.
I take his wrist and turn it and read the numbers.
It's the date I gave him the thread.
My throat tightens so hard I can't speak. I press my lips to the tattoo, feel his pulse hammering beneath the ink, and he cups the back of my head and holds me there.
"Every day," he says quietly. "I looked at that every day."
I push the briefs down and wrap my fingers around him, skin to skin, feeling him pulse against my palm, thick and hot and achingly familiar.
"I dreamed about your hands," he says, his voice guttural. "Every night. Your hands and your mouth and the sounds you make when I'm inside you."
"I'm right here." I stroke him, slow and tight, my thumb circling the head, smearing the wetness there. "No more dreaming."
He makes a sound that's barely human and rolls me beneath him, settling his weight between my thighs. He pulls my jeans and underwear off in one rough motion, and then I'm naked under him and his eyes sweep down my body with a hunger that's been sharpening for months.
"You're so fucking beautiful," he says. "I forgot. I thought I remembered, but I forgot."
He lowers his mouth to my breast and sucks the nipple until I cry out, then bites down gently before moving to the other. His hand slides down my stomach, between my thighs, and his fingers find my pussy wet and swollen and aching for him.
"Already this wet," he murmurs against my breast. "All those months, Sofia. All those months I've been thinking about this pussy."
