I stare at him. “Boring.”
“Yes.” One shoulder lifts. “Maybe it looks like coffee on a terrace and not giving a shit if someone sees you touch my hand. Maybe it looks like you reading while I swear at paperwork. Maybe it looks like taking a nap in the same bed and not having to wake up already halfway to goodbye.”
The simplicity of it knocks me sideways more than any grand promise could have.
He walks us backward until my back hits the window frame and his body brackets mine, not caging exactly, just making a small, sheltered place between himself, the sea, the room, and all the years still trying to reach for us.
“Maybe free doesn’t have to mean dramatic all the time,” he says. “Maybe that’s the part we never got to learn because everything around us was always trying to kill it before it settled.”
I let out a slow breath. “You’re making too much sense.”
“Don’t spread it around.”
“Your reputation would suffer.”
“It already has. I bought a fucking island for my Italian lover.”
I laugh again, and this time when the sound leaves me, there’s less ache caught in it. He watches that happen too, like he’s cataloging the exact second my shoulders drop another inch.
Then his expression turns serious again, quiet and sure. “Listen to me.”
I do. How could I not?
“Even if we can’t be together outside of this,” he says, and I feel the words before I fully hear them because he’s right, and I hate that he has to say them aloud, “even if there are parts of the world where we still have to be careful, where we still have to wear the wrong faces and say the wrong things and go back to being kings first, we will always have Isle Lucia.”
The sentence nearly steals my breath.
“This is ours. No one else’s. They don’t get it. They don’t get to touch it. They don’t get to decide what it means or how often we come back here or what we call each other when we’re on this ground. Outside, maybe we still have to be careful. Maybe we still have to move like men who know what a bullet costs. Fine. But here—” His hand tightens slightly at my waist. “Here, we’re not hiding.”
There are tears in my eyes before I can do a single thing about them.
I look away on instinct, and he catches my chin almost immediately, not rough, just enough to turn me back and keep me from pretending I’m more composed than I am. “No.”
I laugh weakly through the first stupid tear. “You’ve become very demanding.”
“You love that.”
“I resent how often you’re right.”
He kisses the corner of my mouth, then the tear before it can fully fall. The tenderness of it is so obscene, I nearly come apart all over again. “You don’t have to know how to be calm with me yet,” he says against my skin. “We’ll learn it.”
We.
The word is almost worse than the island.
I rest my forehead against his and let myself breathe him in. Salt from the sea. Soap. Whiskey from earlier. And the clove cigarettes that are so uniquely Nikolaj that no amount of time ever managed to erase the part of me that knows him instinctively. “You make everything sound simple.”
“No,” he says. “I make it sound survivable.”
That is, perhaps, the kindest thing anyone has ever said to me.
I close my eyes and let the tension in me loosen by degrees, because he’s right.
We survived secrecy. We survived forgetting. We survived eight years of being wrong-shaped men in rooms too small for the amount of grief we carried. Maybe learning how to breathe where no one is trying to cut the air out from under us is simply the next ugly skill.
His arms come around me then, and I go willingly. No hesitation and no performance. My hands flatten against his back, and I hold him as tightly as I’ve wanted to since the second I understood what this island was really offering us.
Outside, the sea keeps moving. Somewhere farther down the rise, I hear a laugh—old, male, familiar enough to belong to either father, depending on what kind of miracle the evening has forced on the world. The sound drifts up from the cottage and vanishes in the wind.
