She stirs, tilts her head to look up at me. “What are you thinking?”
I look down, caught between truth and silence. “That I don’t want you to go.”
She sighs, lifting a hand to my face. Her thumb brushes the corner of my mouth. She studies me for a moment.
“I prefer the cabin,” she says. “Not because this isn’t gorgeous, it is. But look?” Her eyes drift around the room, then back to me. “We’re doing the same thing. A couch is a couch anywhere.”
I laugh. “Fair point.”
“You're more comfortable there,more yourself.I like it when you can just breathe and be,” she says. “That makes me happier than any chandelier or marble floor.”
I watch her, let the silence settle between us. The words sit in my throat. I want to tell her I love her, and I do. But what I really want to say isthank you for never wanting what I'm afraid everyone else does.For just being here, for treating me likeI'm enough.
“I’m struggling for words,” I say finally. “That’s a hard-won honor for anobscene poet.”
She laughs softly, eyes crinkling at the corners. I don’t say anything else. Just let my fingers trace her temple, her jaw, the curve of her shoulder. She looks up at me, eyes calm, knowing. In the long stretch of that gaze, I realizeI don’t have to say it.
She already understands.
She breaks the silence with a grin. “Well, at least this place has shampoo,” she says. “Unlike the cabin. I desperately need some after the flight and walking half of London.”
She stands, stretching, and the second she leaves my lap, something inside me dims like a neon sign flickering off. It sends a jolt of panic through me. How attached she makes me. How I wrote about this kind of thing for years without everreallyfeeling it until now. I thought I understood love. But I didn’t. Now I do and it terrifies me.
What if she can’t handle it? What if I fuck it up? What if anythingeverhappens to her? Maybe you only know you’re really in love when you start dreading the possibilities you can’t control… and worse, the onesyou can.Because how can I be trusted with something as delicate as her heart,in my hands?
She sees it. Every bit of it across my face, so she kisses it away. Doesn’t say a word. Just leans in and lets her mouth find mine, grounding me before I fall too far into my own head.
Then she holds out her hand. “Since the bathroom is the size of mywhole house,” she says, a teasing light in her eyes, “and our time’s limited, I guess there’s plenty of room for you to join me?”
I look at her hand, the gleam of invitation there, and before I take it, I pull my shirt over my head and toss it onto the ridiculously reflective floor.
She laughs, bright, alive and I scoop her up, pressing my mouth to her ear. “You couldn’t have kept me away,” I growl softly.
Her laughter shivers through me, her back against my chest, the sound reverberating through me like the low hum of a stage before the lights come up. I press a kiss to her shoulder that evolves into a bite, just enough to make her gasp.
“Rafe,” she says, breathless, half laughing, “Idoneed a shower before I’m used as a food source.”
I laugh against her skin, hands tightening around her waist, and think there’s no universe where I ever let her go.
I thought this would turn into something wild, but it doesn’t. Neither of us moves that way. We just fall into the rhythm of helping each other, soap, shampoo, the gentle, practical intimacy of it. Herhands slide over my shoulders, mine over her back, the water running warm and constant between us.
She feels like clay under the wheel, shaped by touch and care. I once did a charity shoot at a pottery studio, all cameras and mud and pretending to understand metaphor. But the real thing is this: the weight of her under my hands, every curve, every line, is something I could never have sculpted from imagination alone.
We touch, and touch again. There are kisses, soft, grateful, full of the kind of longing that lives closer to prayer than hunger but it never tips into anything else. The world’s too still for that, too holy in its smallness between us.
After a while, I lean back against the tiled wall and just watch her. The water sheets over her shoulders, flickers through her hair like light over river stones. It’s hypnotic, unbearable. Dawn’s coming; I can feel it somewhere deep in my chest. There’s nothing I can do about it. If I could, I’d run fast enough to turn the world backwards, stop the sun, steal another hour. Instead, I stand there, in awe of her. The way she tilts her head under the stream, the curve of her throat, the little smile she wears when she thinks I’m not looking.
Then she tosses her hair back, eyes catching mine through the steam. She sees how far I’ve gone, how lost I am, and she closes the space between us. When she presses into me, I breathe her name. The water hits our skin, steady as a heartbeat. I hold her close, kiss her wet lips, and for a moment it feels like creation, the kind of beauty no amount of talent could evermake, onlyfind.
We curl up under the rich linen, skin to skin, the city stretching out beyond the glass like it’s standing guard. Kasia’s back fits perfectly against me, her body warm and clean from the shower. I can feel everything, every deepening of her breath, every brush of her hairagainst my chin and it’s torture in the sweetest way. The rest of my body longs for rest but certain parts are clearly waking up.
She must feel it too because she laughs, low and drowsy. “You know that’s not very subtle,” she murmurs.
“Try being in my shoes,” I mutter, voice rough. “Around you all the time. Naked no less.”
She laughs again, turning her head just enough for me to see the curve of her smile. “Iamin your shoes. Just in reverse.”
It takes me a second to realize what she means. Then I go still, a little embarrassed and undone. The thought had never even crossed my mind, that she might be just as lost in it, just as wrecked. The symmetry of us. She hides it better, that’s all.
