She didn’t wake.
Didn’t open her eyes, didn’t startle, didn’t tense.
But her body responded—instinctive, unconscious. Her breathing hitched, just slightly, a small catch in the rhythm that lasted half a second before settling back into something slower, deeper. And then she leaned into me. Not a conscious movement—nothing deliberate or aware—just her body recognizing mine in sleep, gravitating toward the warmth and the pressure and the shape of me behind her, settling backward into the curve I’d made for her, her body finding the fit without searching for it.
My throat tightened so hard that I couldn’t swallow.
I pressed my face into her hair, burying myself in it, breathing her in with long, slow, deliberate breaths that filled my lungs with her scent and pushed out everything else—the rot, the blood, the ocean, the dead. All of it receding, all of it losing its grip, replaced by this. By her.
I tightened my arm around her waist, pulling her closer until my lips brushed the back of her neck—not quite a kiss, just the natural consequence of holding someone this close and needing them this badly. Her skin carried the same warmth as the rest of her, soft and smooth beneath my mouth, and I let myself linger there, my breath moving across her skin in slow, unsteady waves.
“Hey,” I whispered against her skin. “Libby.” Just her name. Then, quieter: “I love you.”
Three words I had never spoken to anyone outside of family. They emerged steadier than I expected—no stumble, no hesitation—and then the room simply held them there, in the dark, against the back of her neck.
I reached up and brushed the hair from her face, my thumb catching on the faint stiffness tears had left along her cheek. My fingers trembled—exhaustion, cold, something else—and I let them rest there, against the side of her face, until my hand steadied.
“I’m here,” I said again, softer still, my lips moving against the shell of her ear. “I will never leave you again.”
She shifted in my arms. I thought her eyes might open and find mine, and I’d get to watch the moment she understood.
But she didn’t. She slept on.
Her body pressed back against mine with a quiet, unconscious certainty, her hand drifting in sleep until her fingers found my forearm where it crossed her body and curled around it.
And I held her.
This—right here—this moment, this room, this woman in my arms, her heartbeat against my chest, her hand on my arm, the warmth of her soaking into me and driving out the cold that had lived in my bones for months.
This is what I wanted.
Not the running. Not the fighting. Not the empty rooms and the easy exits and the carefully maintained distance I’d spent my entire adult life treating as strength rather than what it actually always had been—fear.
My eyes closed.
The exhaustion that had been waiting finally collected what it was owed, pulling me down into the mattress, into her warmth, into the dark.
One thought made it through before the rest went quiet.
Don’t lose this.
Whatever it takes.
Don’t lose this.
I hadn’t known, until tonight, that there were things worth being afraid of losing. Now I did. Now I knew exactly what I stood to lose, and exactly what that would cost me.
I held her tighter and let go.
Forty Nine
Your Here -Libby
Iwoke with a dull, pounding headache pressing against the inside of my skull, and an awful, disoriented heaviness. My body had dragged itself back to consciousness, but the rest of me hadn’t agreed to follow, leaving me stranded somewhere between sleep and waking, unable to place myself.
For a second, I didn’t know where I was.
Too still.
