I'm something else now, and I don't miss who I was at all.
Katriona
Six weeks.
That's how long it's been since Marsh went in and rebuilt the wreckage that used to be my pelvis, and now I'm sitting on the edge of an examination table in a paper gown, swinging my feet like a child, while he reads something on his tablet and makes the small approving sounds of a man whose work has gone well.
Akyl is in the chair against the wall. He came in with me, because he comes in with me to all of them, and because I stopped pretending I minded around week two. He's wearing a charcoal suit and an expression of careful neutrality and he hasn't said more than four words since we arrived, but I can feel his attention on me like a hand at the small of my back.
"Everything looks excellent," Marsh says.
There's that word again. I've stopped flinching when I hear it. I've almost started to expect it.
"The internal healing is complete. The excision sites have closed beautifully. Your last bloodwork was the best I've seen from you, and your pain journal shows what I'd hoped for." He sets the tablet down and looks at me over his glasses. "You're a different patient than the woman who first came to see me."
"I'm a different person," I say. "It turns out chronic agony was doing wonders for my personality."
Akyl makes a low sound from the corner that might be amusement.
Marsh smiles. "I want to keep you on the hormonal treatment, and I'll see you again in three months. But as far as restrictions go." He pauses, and I swear he glances at Akyl for half a second, because the man is not stupid and he has eyes. "You're cleared. Fully. Normal activity. Exercise, work, travel." A beat. "Everything."
"Everything," I repeat.
"Everything," Marsh confirms, with the diplomatic blandness of a doctor who knows exactly what he's authorizing and intends to never acknowledge it directly. "Listen to your body. If something doesn't feel right, you stop, and you call me. But there's no reason for you to hold back from any part of your life anymore."
I should say thank you. I should say something composed and gracious. What I actually do is turn my head and look at Akyl, and find he's already looking at me. The careful neutrality is gone from his face entirely.
What's underneath it makes my mouth go dry.
The drive home takes twenty-two minutes.
Neither of us speaks. His hands are steady on the wheel in a way that I'm learning to read as the opposite of calm. The more controlled Akyl appears, the more is happening underneath. I've watched him sign a contract that moved eight figures with less visible tension than he's carrying in his jaw right now.
I put my hand on his thigh, just above the knee. I feel the muscle go rigid under my palm.
"Katriona." His voice is very even. "If you want to arrive home in one piece, you'll move your hand."
"And if I don't move it?"
His knuckles whiten on the wheel. "Then I pull over on a public road and that's not how I intend the next several hours to go."
Heat blooms low in my stomach, in the place that for years only ever meant pain and now means something else entirely. I leave my hand exactly where it is.
He drives slightly faster.
We get home and the house is empty. He arranged that too, I realize. Kasimir gone, the staff dismissed, the whole of it ours and silent and gold-lit in the late afternoon. He's thought about this. He's planned every part of it, and the knowledge of that, that I am the thing he has been planning around for six weeks, undoes something in me before he's even touched me.
The door closes behind us. I turn to face him in the hallway and he's right there, closer than I expected, and for a moment neither of us moves.
"You waited," I say.
"I told you I would."
"Six weeks. You gave me oral on the night you proposed and then you didn't touch me again. Not really." I look up at him. "Do you know what that did to me?"
"I have some idea." His voice drops. "I know what it did to me.” He lifts one hand and brushes my hair back from my face, and the touch is so gentle and so deliberate that it makes the rest of me ache. "Marsh said everything."
"He did."
