"Don't apologize," she said, her voice breaking slightly. "Just—say it again."
"I love you." No hesitation. Easier the second time. "I love you, Nimisha. I think I have for a long time. I just didn't know what to do about it."
She made a sound that was somewhere between a laugh and a sob and then she was in his arms, her face pressed into his neck, her hands fisted in his shirt.
He held her with everything he had.
"I love you," she said against his skin. "I've loved you for so long it stopped feeling like new information."
He pulled back enough to see her face—her eyes bright, her expression open and unguarded and luminous.
He kissed her.
She kissed him back.
And Bruno, across the foot of the bed, exhaled an enormous sigh of profound relief, as if he'd been waiting for this particular development and found the timing somewhat overdue.
They both heard it.
Both laughed.
The laughter cracked something open, and they held each other and laughed in the dark bedroom with the dog sighing at their feet, and it was the most domestic, ordinary, extraordinary moment of either of their lives.
"Finally," Nimisha said, when they'd stopped laughing and settled together. "Boo Berry thinks so too."
"Don't put words in my dog's mouth."
"He's my dog too."
Samarth looked at her, at the ease with which she said it, at the home she'd made in the unlikeliest of places—his bed, his office, his bathroom, his dog's heart, and apparently his own, without either of them quite noticing.
"Yes," he said. "He is."
He turned off the light.
She settled against his chest.
Bruno shifted at their feet, resettling with a groan.
"He's very dramatic," Nimisha murmured.
"He gets it from you."
"He absolutely does not—"
"Sleep, Nimisha."
She smiled against his chest.
He loves me,she thought, feeling the shape of it.He said it. He loves me.
Outside, Mumbai moved through its nighttime rhythms, indifferent and vast.
Inside this room, something that had been broken for a long time had quietly, finally, put itself back together.
CHAPTER 21
Elysium - Upper Floor, Private Balcony - Three Weeks Later
