The fireplace has no business being alive in July.
I said this forty minutes ago, right before Reth lit it anyway without a word, and now I'm lying on the living room floor with my head on his chest and the windows cracked and Paris doing its warm summer night thing outside and the fire doing its warm everything thing inside and I find I don't have a single complaint left in my body.
We haven't left this apartment the entire time he’s been here.
It’s been days of his hands and his mouth and the specific, consuming way he looks at me when he thinks I'm not looking back. Mornings of apple cinnamon muffins, nights of take-out deliveries and sex, and the fireplace in July and the city of love existing somewhere beyond these walls without us in it.
“You know,” I say, tracing an absent pattern on his forearm, “Paris is apparently the most romantic city in the world.”
“Apparently.”
“People come from everywhere. To see it. To be in love in it.”
“Mm.”
“We've seen the ceiling.” I tilt my head back to look at him. “And the kitchen counter. And the shower wall. And the?—”
“I know what we've seen.”
“Just making sure you're aware of the cultural experience you're depriving me of.”
The corner of his mouth moves. Almost. “Do you want to go outside?”
I consider this for approximately half a second. “Absolutely not.”
The sound he makes is not quite a laugh but close enough to borrow its warmth. His hand moves to my hair—slow, absentminded, the way he touches me sometimes when he's not thinking about it, when it's just reflex. Just need.
I close my eyes. There's a quality to him that I want to live inside forever.
Not just the hunger, though that's been constant and devastating and I have the marks to prove it. Something underneath it. Softer and more permanent than want. The way he keeps looking at me like I'm the only fixed point in a universe that's been moving too fast for too long. The way his hands find me in the dark not because he needs something but because I'm there and being there is enough, is everything, is the whole answer to a question he stopped knowing how to ask.
I could stay in this exact feeling for the rest of my life. This warm, firelit, completely ordinary extraordinary thing of being known by someone. Of being the place a person comes back to. Of lying on a living room floor in summer with a fire burning for no reason except that he lit it and I didn't complain, and feeling—for the first time in as long as I can remember—like I am exactly where I am supposed to be.
Not safe, exactly. Nothing about him has ever been safe.
But home.
That's the word. That's the feeling I want to live inside forever. Reth is home.
It’s ridiculous, complete madness for me to feel this way, but I do. I do, and it terrifies me. But what is love if it doesn’t scare you a little? What is love if it isn’t crazy or reckless? If it’s a love that has a shape I can fit into a little box, I don’t want it. I want a love that has the power to tear my heart out. Even if it means waking up one morning with nothing left.
“You’re thinking very loudly.” His hand travels up my arm.
“You’re not supposed to listen to my thoughts.”
“Hard not to when your whole body changes register.” His thumb traces a slow circle on my shoulder. “You went from relaxed to terrified in about four seconds.”
I lift my head and look at him. “I'm not terrified.”
He looks back at me with that expression—the steady, unhurried one that sees everything and waits for you to catch up to what it already knows.
“You get a small line right here when something scares you.” He touches the space between my brows with one finger. Barely a touch. “And you go very still. Like if you don't move it won't notice you.”
I stare at him.
“You do the same thing when the elevator in this building makes that sound on the third floor. And when you're reading something that's about to go somewhere you don't want it to go—you stop turning pages and just hold the book.” A pause. “And when you wake up in the middle of the night and I'm not next to you because I'm standing by the window watching you. You go still the same way—like if you don't move, whatever's wrong won't find you.”
“You know that?”
