But tonight it felt deliberate. Like she'd known we were coming.
I wouldn't have put it past her.
I got Nadia through the gate and the garden, and finally around to the back of the house and into the apartment without incident.
Something of a miracle, given that Sofia's kitchen light was on and the curtain twitched when we passed the window. It also left me feeling like a thirteen-year-old smuggling his girlfriend into the house after lights out.
Inside, the lamp cast its usual hideous pink glow across my room. The doilies, the ceramic cats, the needlepoint samplers. All of it exactly as it had always been. Nadia looked around the room and something softened in her face.
"I missed this place," she said.
"Nobody has ever said that before."
"I missed it." She turned to look at me. "I missed you."
That was the end of the conversation.
She came to me, or I went to her. I wasn't sure which, and it didn't matter. What mattered was that she was in my arms and I had my face in her hair, and for the first time in weeks, everything that had been wound tight in my chest simply let go.
I kissed her slowly. Like I had time, like there was nowhere else either of us needed to be. She made a sound against my mouth, and her hands slid under my jacket, pushing it off my shoulders, and I walked her backward toward the bedroom without breaking the kiss.
The pink striped curtains were doing their usual thing with the streetlight outside, turning the room soft and rose-colored. Nadia sat on the edge of the bed and looked up at me with her hair loose around her shoulders. I thought about the morning she'd laughed at the doilies and felt something I'd been holding for a long time let go.
I reached for her and she reached back, and we took our time with it. No urgency, no edge. Just the ease of being with someone you'd almost lost and hadn't. Her hands were on my face. My mouth at her throat. The soft sounds she made when I touched her in the way she loved.
When I finally covered her, she wrapped herself around me and pressed her forehead to mine, and we stayed like that, breathing slowly.
"Still here," I said.
"Still here," she agreed, pulling back far enough to look at me. Whatever she found on my face, she sucked in a sharp breath. I reached up and tucked a strand of hair behind her ear, slower than I needed to, because I wasn't in a hurry anymore. We'd wasted enough time.
"I've got you," I whispered. "I'm not going anywhere."
She answered me by reaching for the buttons on my shirt.
I let her work through them while I pressed my lips to her forehead, her temple, the curve of her jaw. By the time she pushed the shirt off my shoulders, I'd worked the zipper at the back of her dress, and she shivered as the fabric slid away. This was less from the cool air than from the way I was looking at her.
"Still the most beautiful thing I've ever seen," I said.
"You're biased."
"Completely." I laid her back against the pillows and took my time. Her curves, her freckles, the places I'd been memorizing since the beginning and had been afraid I'd never get back. I relearned all of it with my hands and my mouth until she was breathing in short, unsteady bursts and her fingers were twisted in my hair.
"Daemon." My name on her lips, low and urgent.
"I know." I kissed her throat, her collarbone, the soft curve of her breast. "I know."
My hand slid lower, finding her warm and ready, and she arched into me with a soft gasp that undid something in my chest. I stroked her slowly, watching her face in the pink lamplight, committing it to memory the way you committed things to memory when you understood what it meant to almost lose them.
She came apart quietly, the way she always did, her body trembling and her lips pressed to my shoulder, her hands gripping my arms like she needed something to hold on to.
I gave her time, but she was having none of it.
She pulled me down to her, and I pressed into her slowly, feeling her exhale beneath me as I settled deep, both of us going still.
"Still here," she whispered.
"Still here." I kissed her, soft and long. "Always."
