"Together is harder."
"Together is the only thing that works. We proved that."
I look at him. Morning light cuts across his face. His jaw is tight enough to crack teeth. This is the man who has been holding me together since we were sixteen, with the same hand that once engineered comfort and now presses steady over my heart.
"When Maya was holding you that morning," I say. "I said I love you."
"I remember."
"I said it with Maya there. In the group. In the crisis. It was true. Every word. But I've been thinking about it since. Abouthow I said it while everything was burning down around us. When it gave all three of us something to stand on."
Cole goes very still.
"I want to say it when the room doesn't need it. When it's just us. When it serves nothing except the truth."
His hand is on my chest. My heart beats against his palm.
"I love you," I say. "I love you and the mess is enormous and I don't know how to hold it all."
His eyes fill. He doesn't blink.
Cole kisses me.
His hands close over my face and pull me off the counter. His mouth hits mine hard, open, wet with salt. Cole Maddox is crying, and I know it only because I can taste it.
I kiss him back. My hands go to his waist, his hips, pulling him against me. My back hits the counter. His mouth stays on mine, and for one second there is only salt and breath and the word I finally gave him.
He pushes me. Both hands on my chest. The same redirect Maya uses. I catch myself against the counter.
"Bedroom," he says.
"Which one?"
"Yours."
My room is full of daylight. No lamp. No darkness. Nothing soft enough to hide in. Cole stands beside the bed and looks at me like he intends to memorize what the dark used to keep from him.
I pull my shirt off. He watches the scar on my ribs he's traced in the dark a hundred times, now visible. The tattoos he's mapped by feel, now in color. His eyes travel down my chest to my stomach to the waistband of my jeans.
"You're staring," I say.
"I've been waiting six years to stare."
Crossing the room, I stand in front of him. Inches between us.
"You said it," he says. Quiet. "In the kitchen. Just now. To me."
"To you."
He strips his shirt. Chest bare. The lean muscle hockey built. The compass rose tattoo on his inner wrist. Daylight gives me the body I've known by feel for six years. I put my hands on his shoulders and push him down onto the bed. He goes willingly. His body falls against the mattress, trusting the hands that guide him down.
I follow him down. My body over his, my weight settling carefully over him. I kiss his neck, the spot below his ear. His head tips back. Throat exposed.
My mouth moves down. Collarbone. Chest. His nipple under my tongue. He gasps, louder than the dark ever allowed. Every sound costs more in the daylight.
I kiss down his stomach, over the trail of hair below his navel. His hips lift. I pull his jeans and boxers off in one motion, and Cole is naked on my bed in daylight.
My hand wraps around him. He arches off the mattress. "Fuck—Dante—"
