“Tell me something,” Nikolaj says eventually.
“What?”
“What you thought when you saw them on the porch.”
I laugh into his shoulder. “That I’d finally gone insane and the afterlife was poorly supervised.”
His body shakes once with the force of his own laughter. “That’s fair.”
“I also thought your father had lost his mind.”
“He probably has.”
“Your family does seem to process emotion through structural collapse.”
He leans back enough to look at me, a grin appearing full now, brighter than before. “Says the man whose father brought a cane and a thirty-year apology to a terrace.”
I groan softly. “Do not remind me.”
“Can’t help it. It’s still funny.”
“It is not funny.”
“It’s a little funny.”
“It’s traumatic.”
“Those two things are not mutually exclusive.”
The grin he gives me after saying that is so familiar, I feel the years between the boy and the man collapse in a way that no longer hurts. Or at least hurts less.
There he is. The filthy-mouthed, emotionally inconvenient, brutally beautiful thing I loved before memory, and still love now with all the extra damage age has piled on us both.
I touch his face because I can. Because here no one is counting how often my hands betray me. “You’re impossible.”
“I am.”
“And entirely too smug about being right.”
“Again, I am.”
I shake my head. “Monster.”
“My King.”
That title from his mouth will never stop undoing me.
I breathe out slowly and feel some final stubborn knot in my chest loosen enough to stop pulling blood with it.
The heartbreak is still there. I suspect it always will be, because nothing erases the years we lost or the boys we were when the world first taught us to hide. But heartbreak, I’m realizing, does not always mean damage. Sometimes it is just what the heart feels like when it has to stretch around more joy than it expected to survive.
“Alright,” I say quietly.
His hand slides up into my hair at the nape, thumb brushing my skin there in a way that makes me want to stay exactly where I am until the sea dries up. “All right, what?”
“Maybe we learn what boring looks like together.”
His grin softens into something infinitely worse because it’s pleased and moved and trying not to show too much of either.
