He looked at me and then the untouched toast. Slowly he dragged his hazel eyes back to my face. You're pale."
"Again with the pale," I said.
He frowned, setting the trowel on the porch railing outside before coming in. "You're usually hungry by now."
"I'll eat later."
"You said that yesterday."
I smiled despite myself. "Are you keeping notes?"
He paused but only briefly. "Possibly."
He made me tea without being asked, chamomile with honey the way I had mentioned once in passing three weeks ago. I apparently never needed to mention again how I liked my tea, and set it in front of me and went back to the flowerbeds without making a production of it. I wrapped my hands around the mug and felt the warmth work its way through my palms and thought, not for the first time, that I had absolutely no idea what I had done to deserve him showing up across the street.
Work waslong and relentless and I couldn’t wait to get home and crawl into bed. I drove home with the windows down and sat in the driveway for a moment longer than necessary before getting out.
Azrael was on the porch and fixing something attached to it, which had become one of those facts about my life that I had stopped noticing the way you stop noticing that the sky is blue. Today he was crouched at the far end of the railing with a wrench, doing something to a support post that had been loose since I moved in.
I dropped my purse just inside the door and walked back out without really thinking about it, and I wrapped my arms around him from behind and put my chin against his shoulder blade and closed my eyes.
He went completely still, the kind where he was processing something unexpected and giving it the same focused attention he gave everything. Then, slowly, he relaxed.
"Long day," I said.
He frowned a little, “I noticed."
"How?"
He shrugged, “You sighed before you got out of the car."
I laughed into his shoulder. He reached up with one hand and covered both of mine where they were linked across his chest, and then he turned back to the porch railing and finished tightening the support post one-handed because I had no intention of letting go and he had apparently decided that was fine.
He cooked dinner, and I had learned that attempting to help resulted in being redirected to the counter with a glass of water. Demon bae had been doing things on his own for a century, like developing his cooking skills and didn’t need me in the way.
“You're impossible," I told him from my position on the counter, stealing cherry tomatoes from the cutting board.
"I've been told," he said, without looking up.
The kitchen smelled like garlic and herbs and something warm and savory that had been simmering since before I got home, and for the first twenty minutes it was lovely. Then he moved the pan and the smell of the meat hit me directly, and my stomach lurched with a violence that surprised me completely.
I was at the sink before I had made a conscious decision to move. Nothing happened, just the nausea cresting and receding and leaving me gripping the edge of the counter with my eyes closed and my forehead tipped forward.
"I'm okay," I said.
"You aren't."
"I'm just." I stopped. I genuinely did not have an ending for that sentence. "I don't know what's wrong with me."
He didn't answer right away. He turned off the burner and came to stand beside me, and he rubbed slow circles against my back with one hand, steady and unhurried, not pushing, notasking, not making me explain something I couldn't explain. Just there.
After a moment the nausea eased back enough that I could breathe normally, and I straightened up and let him steer me gently toward the back door.
We ended up on the porch swing with the untouched dinner inside and the mountains going purple in the fading light and fireflies beginning their slow drift across the yard. I had my legs across his lap and my head against his shoulder and neither of us said anything for a long time, which was one of my favorite things about being with him, the way silence between us had stopped being something that needed filling.
The yard was warm and soft and entirely still. Somewhere in the tree line a bird called once and went quiet.
"You know," I said eventually.
