I laughed. It came out unguarded, the real laugh, the one that arrived when something was genuinely funny rather than socially funny. “She didn’t.”
“She absolutely did. I received a full report.” The corner of his mouth was doing the thing it did, the almost-smile becoming the real one, the unpolished version that I had been collecting since the first time I’d seen it appear by accident and couldn’t stop seeing now. “Erik and Raia will love you. Raia especially. She came into this world the same way you did, as an outsider, and she will understand things about it that the others can’t.” A pause. “Noah and Shelby are wonderful and chaotic in a way that somehow works for them. Gabriel and Rose.” Another pause, this one warmer. “Declan knows everything now. He’s not angry. He’s the least angry person in this story, which is either his best quality or evidence of a deeply suspicious level of patience.”
“And Zara?” I said.
He looked at me. “What do you know about her?”
“From the others who talk about her like she is a force of nature.”
The corner of his mouth twitched.
“That’s a reasonably accurate assessment.”
“Is she intimidating?”
“No.” He thought about it. “Not intentionally. Zara just has a habit of making decisions and then rearranging reality until reality agrees with her.”
I laughed.
“That sounds exhausting.”
“It is. Colin and Lincoln seem to enjoy it.”
The image of the three of them appeared immediately in my mind and, unexpectedly, made me smile.
“You’ll like her.”
“You sound very certain.”
“I am.”
A pause.
“Zara has never met a person she wasn’t prepared to adopt.”
I filed this under things to revisit and shifted slightly against him and felt the warmth of the room and the warmth of him and let both of them simply be present without analyzing either.
“There’s one more thing,” he said.
Something in his voice had changed. Not serious exactly, careful. The tone he used when he was choosing words with more than usual precision.
I waited.
“In our world,” he said slowly, “there’s a thing called a collar. You know what it is. You’ve been in the lifestyle long enough to understand what it means. Not a fashion accessory. Not a scene prop.” He paused. “It’s a declaration. A formal one, the kind that the people who matter to me understand as permanent.” Another pause. “I want you to know that it’s something I want. Eventually. When the time is right and when you’re ready and when I’ve properly earned it.” He looked at me. “I’m not asking tonight. I’m telling you it exists. That I want it to exist. Between us.”
I sat with this for a moment.
A collar. The thing that Rose wore at Asgard with Amora, property of Master Heimdall inscribed on the inside. The thing that Zara wore with Solveig, our forever heart. The declaration that the people in this world understood as the real marriage, the one that meant something in the language they all spoke.
He wanted that. With me.
The warmth of it was enormous. I let it be enormous rather than managing it down to something more handleable, because I was done managing things down, because my mother had never gotten to let things be enormous and I had her eyes and her voice and her fierce stubborn belief that daughters were worth more than their fathers decided, and I was going to let things be enormous when they deserved to be.
“Ask me again,” I said, “after the Barnes Foundation thing.”
He stared at me for a moment.
Then he laughed.
