I pull back just enough to look up, my hands already rising, trembling, to his face. “Are you okay?” My palms cup his jaw, thumbs brushing over the sharp line of his cheekbones, tracing the familiar scar that cuts through the edge of his mouth.
His hand is on my cheek too. “I’m okay enough.”
“What does that mean?” I study him like I’m afraid he might disappear.
“It means I’m right where I need to be. Right now. With you.” His eyes—those winter-blue eyes I’ve dreamed about every night—are locked on mine, but they’re darker now, shadowed with exhaustion and something heavier. Like the last three months carved pieces off him we won’t get back.
“I missed you.” I choke on a sob while I search every inch of him. The slight hollow under his cheek. The tension in his jaw. The way his breath catches when my thumb gently traces the scar he used to hide from me. I’m looking for cracks. For the monster they might have tried to turn him into. For any sign that the man I’ve fallen in love with didn’t make it back to me whole.
“You’re really okay? You’re still…you?” It’s barely a whisper, and his arms tighten around me. “Tell me you’re still you. Tell me she didn’t… tell me she didn’t break you. Tell me you’re still mine.”
His eyes flutter closed for a second under my touch, like the gentleness hurts more than anything else. When they open again, they’re glassy, raw, stripped of every wall he usually keeps between us.
“There’s no place I’ll come back from where I’m not yours.”
My heart fucking explodes, like fragments of glass piercing every last part of me. It hurts so damn much I crane my neck, push myself on my toes, and kiss him.
His lips are exactly how I remembered them and nothing like I remembered them at all. Softer than the rest of him. Warm in a way that moves straight through my mouth and into my chest and doesn't stop there. It keeps going, down through my sternum, into my stomach, into the backs of my knees, into every place that's been cold and hollow for three months.
I make a sound against him that I've never made before. Something that comes before desire, something that lives underneath it—relief so profound it registers as pain, the specific agony of a thing you needed so badly finally arriving.
I feel him go still. One suspended second where he just… receives it. Like he's not sure it's real. Like he's been running the memory of this for so long he doesn't trust the actual thing.
Then his hand comes up and cups the back of my head, and he kisses me back.
And oh, God.
Oh, God, I forgot. I forgot what it does, having his full attention turned on me like this—the way he kisses the way he does everything, completely, with his entire self, like there is nothing else in the world worth doing.
His mouth moves against mine slow and deep and consuming, and I grab his jacket with both fists, pulling him closer, and I taste him—really taste him, his tongue against mine—and something cracks open in me so wide that a sob moves through the kiss, a broken, helpless thing that he swallows without pulling back, his hand tightening in my hair.
Months. Weeks of flowers and absence and reaching across empty space, andthisis what I was reaching for. This exact warmth. This specific weight of being kissed by someone who has been memorizing me for years and finally, finally has permission to stop pretending he hasn't.
My heart, my head, my soul, everything is a fucking mess, and I can hardly put a single thought together as I pull back, the need to look at him again getting the better of me.
“I was so scared,” I whisper, fresh tears slipping free as I cup his face, my thumbs stroking his cheekbones again, slower this time, searching for the man I remember—the one who looked at me like I was the only soft thing in his violent world.
“Every night I lay awake imagining what she—whoever she is—was doing to you. What was being taken from you. And I couldn’t do anything but wait. I couldn’t help you. I couldn’t even know if you were still alive.”
His hands come up to cover mine, holding them against his face like he’s afraid I’ll pull away.
“I’m still me, Sophia. Still yours. She didn’t get all of me.”
A broken sound escapes me—half sob, half relief—and I lean in, pressing my forehead to his chest, breathing him in while he weaves his fingers through my hair again.
“I missed you so much it felt like dying,” I whisper against his shirt. “Every single day. Every stupid morning I opened that door hoping today would be the day you came back. It felt like I couldn’t breathe without you, Reth. And I know that’s insane because we barely had a chance to be together before?—”
He crashes his lips into mine, stealing every frantic thought, silencing weeks of worry, until all that matters is him kissing me. Until all that matters is his taste and the feel of his hands moving in my hair, his rough knuckles skimming the skin at the back of my neck, his breath coming fast and ragged as he presses me closer.
The relief, the ache, the disbelief that he’s really here all crashes into something I’ve never felt before. Something that turns from a simmer to boil to a burn. Relief. Anger. Fear. Rage. Desire. It’s too much, and it all explodes into mayhem.
I pull back hard and hit him with both hands, open-palmed, slamming against his chest. Not a shove—a hit that comes from somewhere deep below rational thought, from the place wherethree months of terror has been living rent-free in my body and finally has a target.
“You left me.” My voice doesn’t sound like mine. It’s cracked open, raw, trembling with every unshed sob I swallowed for three fucking months. “You stood in that doorway and you looked at me and you told Ian to go and you—” I hit him again, harder, my palms stinging.
He doesn’t move. Doesn’t flinch. Just stands there and takes it, like he knows he deserves every single blow.
“Do you have any idea what that did to me? Do you have any idea what it’s been like not knowing if you were alive? Not knowing if you were being hurt, being broken?”
