Tonight she came, and I got my arms around her, and she pressed her face against my neck, and we stayed like that for a heartbeat, her breathing slowing, both of us letting the night decompress around us.
Then she pulled back enough to look at me and kissed me in the parking lot with her hands inside my jacket and no apparent concern for who might see. The adrenaline of the evening was still in it, that much was obvious. But underneath was something slower and more deliberate, the camaraderie of two people who'd come through something together and were still on the right side of it.
When she pulled back, her forehead rested against mine.
"Your place," she said.
"Yeah."
We drove separately, and she beat me there, which told me she hadn't second-guessed herself at any point on the way. I found her leaning against the apartment door in the dark, keys in hand, her jumpsuit still carrying the faint smell of the evening's kitchen.
I got the door open, and she came in without waiting to be asked and kicked her clogs off on Sofia's mat, and it was such an ordinary thing, so completely without ceremony, that it hit me somewhere I hadn't expected.
This is what it would look like. Every night. This.
She turned to face me from the middle of the room, and in the pink light of the lamp she looked triumphant and tired and more certain of herself than anyone I'd ever known.
Later, lying in the dark with the ceramic cats on their shelf and the needlepoint sampler above the headboard and Nadia's hand flat on my chest, I listened to her breathing and waited for it to even out into sleep. It didn't.
"Daemon."
"Mm."
"I want to say something, and I need you to let me get all the way through it."
I went still. She must have felt it, because her hand pressed flat against my sternum, steady, the way she'd steady a tray.
"A while back, you told me that being terrified means you're doing something that matters." Her voice was low and even in the dark. The voice she used when the information was important and she didn't want anyone to panic.
"I've thought about that more than I've admitted. Because I've been terrified for weeks now, and tonight I stood in a parking lot with you and worked out exactly why."
The lamp was off. The streetlight through the curtains gave the room its edges and nothing else. I could feel my own heartbeat under her palm, the way I had that first night. Unnecessary information for both of us.
"We made a deal," she said. "We say things when we know them. So here it is." Her hand didn't move. "I'm in love with you." The room held it. "I'm not asking for it back," she said, before I could do whatever I'd been about to do. I never found out what that was.
"That's not why I'm saying it. I'm saying it because I know it, and the deal was that knowing it means saying it. So now you know too."
I had the words. They came up the way they always came up, fast and certain, and met the wall the way they always met it. This time I pushed. I got as far as opening my mouth. I got as far as her name. "Nadia, I?—"
The wall held. I lay there with the sentence right there, complete and true, and I couldn't carry it across the last three inches. The harder I pushed, the louder the old arithmetic ran underneath it.
My mother had believed every promise I made her, and I'd made my biggest ones out loud. Saying the words was how you got someone to lean their weight on you. Saying the words was the part that came right before the failing.
"I'm not going anywhere," I said. Four words. The same four. They had never sounded smaller.
She was quiet. Her thumb moved once against my ribs, the small motion I knew now, the one that meant she was filing something away.
"I know," she said.
Not for now. She didn't say for now this time, and I lay there understanding exactly what that meant. She'd stopped marking the arrangement as temporary because she'd just made her side of it permanent. The only side still open was mine.
She settled against me, her cheek finding the spot on my shoulder that apparently belonged to her now. When she spoke again, her voice had already gone soft at the edges.
"Terrified together, Daemon. That part hasn't changed."
Her breathing evened out. Slow. Trusting. A woman sleeping soundly in the bed of a man she loved out loud.
I stared at the ceiling. She had put the whole thing on the table. No conditions, nothing held back to soften the landing if I dropped it. And I had matched it with four words and a wall.
