“I know everything about you, Cherry-red.” Not arrogant. Just true. The way gravity is true. “I've been paying attention for a long time.”
Something moves through my chest so completely I have to look away. He knows me the way people only know each other after years of choosing to look. Except he never got to choose openly. He chose from streets below and darkened doorways, from a diary and a house built from words I wrote alone at midnight.
And he still knows every single thing.
“What was I thinking about?” I ask quietly.
He looks at me for a long moment. “That I frighten you.”
“That’s ridiculous. I’m not scared of you.”
“No.” His eyes don't move from mine. “You're scared because you know I'm going to cost you something.”
I lick my lips, keep his gaze. “Maybe.” A pause. “Ask me if that changes anything.”
I hold his gaze, but he doesn't say anything. Just looks at me with those winter-blue eyes that take everything in and let nothing out, and somehow that is answer enough.
Because he already knows.
He knows it doesn't change anything. He knows I'm here anyway, fully and without reservation, cost and all. He knows because he knows everything about me.
He reaches up and cups my jaw, tilts my face toward his, and kisses me—deep and unhurried, the kind of kiss that has no agenda except this, just this, just him and me and the fire burning in July and Paris outside not knowing it exists.
When he pulls back, his eyes are still closed for a moment. Then they open and find mine, a ghost of a smile appearing on his beautiful face. “You apologize to furniture under your breath when you walk into it.”
I stare at him. “I do not.”
“You do. Yesterday it was the dining chair. Today the coffee table.” A beat. “Twice.”
“That's—” I open my mouth. Close it. “That's completely normal behavior.”
“Yeah.” He smiles wickedly. “Completely normal.”
“Furniture have feelings, too.” I feel the smile breaking through before I can stop it—the real one, the unstoppable one—and he watches it happen with that expression that isn't quite a smile but has given up pretending it isn't trying to be.
“You've been watching me apologize to furniture,” I say.
“I watch everything.”
“That's insane.”
“Not arguing that.”
“You're annoyingly perceptive for someone who barely speaks,” I say.
“I don't need to speak.” He tucks a strand of hair behind my ear, unhurried. “I just need to watch you. You say everything without knowing you're saying it.”
“That's deeply unfair.”
“Yes,” he agrees. “It is.” He kisses my cheek and shifts himself up to sit against the couch, the throw draped over his naked lap. I sit up too, cross my legs, and notice the lines on his arms again as he reaches for his beer. Lines I’ve asked him about before, at the mountain house. Lines I’ve concluded means one of…something.
I should ask. Maybe he’ll open up to me, finally. Say something that’ll help me understand who Reth is when he’s not with me. I should ask because I'm trained to ask, because sitting with someone's pain without naming it is its own kind of abandonment, because the professional in me knows that silence around the things that mark us only gives them more power.
But I shouldn't ask. Because some things are said in their own time, and forcing them open before they're ready doesn't heal anything—it just exposes the wound to air it wasn't ready for. Because he's here, warm and present, the firelight doing soft things to his face, and I don't want to be the person who pulls him back into whatever dark place those lines come from.
I look at his arm.
I ask anyway.
