“You did.”
“One time. In passing.”
“You were listening,” I said.
He was quiet for a moment. I felt the quality of it, the specific weight of a man sitting with something that had arrived with more force than he’d been prepared for.
“I’m always listening to you,” he said.
The words arrived with the particular simplicity of something true. Not constructed, not offered as reassurance. Just true, stated in the way he stated true things, flat and certain, like a fact he was reminding me of rather than telling me for the first time.
I looked up at him.
He was already looking at me. That expression again, the surprised-to-find-it-real one, the one that had been arriving and departing all evening, and this time it didn’t depart. It just stayed, warm and unmanaged, on a face I had come to know the controlled version of so well that the uncontrolled version felt like something I had been given access to that I understood the value of.
“I love you,” I said.
I had not planned to say it first. Had assumed, if I was honest, that the rhythm of who we were would produce a particular sequence, him, then me, the careful exchange of two people managing the weight of something significant. Instead it had arrived simply, the way the truest things arrived, when I’d admitted to being in love with him with this night had begun. Stating it again now was just as organic.
He looked at me for a moment.
“I know,” he said. And then, before I could find the appropriate response to that particular piece of Jared Kane nerve: “I love you. I have been… not handling that gracefully for some time.”
I pressed my lips together. “Not handling it gracefully.”
“Checking my phone. Forgetting my jacket.” He looked at the ceiling with the expression of a man reviewing his own recent history and finding it undignified. “Sitting in front of a computer in the dark making career-altering decisions based on what I was feeling instead of what I was supposed to be doing.”
“That last one I’m grateful for,” I said.
“Yes.” Something in his face shifted, the undignified reflection becoming something warmer. “So am I.”
The room held that for a moment. Outside, Asgard had gone still, the kind of stillness that only existed after something important had changed. I thought about the tapestry in the main room—the Valkyrie, unhurried and fierce—and thought about my mother and about the inheritance she had left me and about the particular courage required to choose something real when everything in your history said that real things didn’t survive.
“Tell me about your friends,” I said. “All of them. Properly.”
He looked at me with a slight raise of one brow.
“I’ve met Raia,” I said. “And Mari. I’ve met Dottie, who I think may be the most important person in this entire story.”
The corner of his mouth twitched.
“I know about Erik from Raia and Dottie.”
I shifted slightly so I could see him better.
“But I want to know them from you. What they’re like. How it works.”
I hesitated.
“Whether there’s room.”
The real question.
I had asked it as directly as I could without saying it plainly, which was about as direct as I got with the things that mattered most.
He understood. Of course he did.
“There is room,” he said. No hesitation. No qualification. “There has been room since the first night at Midgard. Dottie made that determination approximately twenty seconds after meeting you and communicated it to the relevant parties before you’d finished changing out of the UV dress.”
