Cinder moved quickly taking me by surprise, sitting on me, straddling my legs and wrapping his arms around me. Bringing my chest flush to his. "Do you remember what happened with us?" Cinder asked, his voice muffled against my neck. "After you shifted in front of me?"
I went still. The memory was right there, vivid and sharp. The mountain road. The headlights. My body tearing itself apart and reforming into something ancient and enormous and terrifying, scales and frost and a wingspan that blocked out the stars. And Cinder, standing in the road with his hands at his sides, not moving. Not screaming. Not running.
"You didn't run," I whispered.
"I didn't run." He pulled back just enough to look at me, his eyes fierce and wet and absolutely certain. "You turned into adragon the size of a truck, Taz. You were covered in ice. The road cracked under you. The temperature dropped so fast my breath crystallized mid-air. And I didn't run."
My chest shuddered. The cold inside me flickered, unsteady, reaching for him the way it always did.
"Your mother called you 'it,'" Cinder said, and the gentleness in his voice made the word land differently than it ever had before. Not as an accusation. Not as confirmation of everything I'd feared about myself. As evidence of her failure, not mine. "She looked at her son and saw something to be frightened of." He paused. "I looked at a dragon and sawyou."
Something behind my ribs cracked. Not the ice. Something older. Something that had been holding up every wall I'd ever built between myself and the possibility that someone could see all of me and stay.
"I didn't run then," Cinder said, pressing his forehead to mine. His breath was warm against my lips. "And I'm not going to run now. Not from the cold. Not from the dragon. Not from your father's grief or your mother's cruelty or whatever faceless bastard thinks he can threaten us into breaking apart." His hands cupped the back of my neck, fingers threading into my damp hair. "You are not an 'it,' Taz. You are not broken. You are not your father's ending. You're the man I love, and I am staying right here."
I tried to speak. Nothing came. My throat had sealed itself shut around something too big for words, something that had been lodged there since a January morning in Manitoba when a boy watched his father walk into a blizzard and learned that love wasn't enough to keep people alive.
I kissed him.
Not desperate this time. Not claiming. Something quieter and more devastating than either. I kissed him like I was finally setting down the weight my father had carried to his death. Ikissed him like the boy in the bedroom with ice climbing the walls, the boy whose mother couldn't say his name, the boy who'd spent decades convinced that closeness was the thing that killed people, had finally been given permission to believe otherwise.
His mouth was warm. It was always warm. And the cold didn't recoil from it, didn't fight it, didn't try to freeze him the way it froze everything else. It curled around him like recognition. Like the ice had known, long before I had, that this was the person it had been waiting for.
His fingers tightened in my hair. I wrapped my arms around his waist, pulling him closer until there was no space left between us, until his heartbeat was pressed against my chest and I could feel it, steady and strong and stubbornly, beautifully alive.
I was shaking. Not from cold. From the certain tremor of something structural giving way and being replaced, beam by beam, with something that could actually hold weight.
"Say it again," I whispered. My voice was wrecked. I didn't care.
Cinder's thumbs traced my jaw. "I love you."
"Again."
"I love you, Taz." He pressed his lips to my forehead. "I love you." To my temple. "I love you." To the corner of my eye, where the tears had frozen into tiny crystals against my skin.
The last one melted under his mouth, and the warmth of it spread through me like something thawing from the inside out. Not fast. Not all at once. The way spring came to places that had been frozen for so long they'd forgotten any other season existed.
I lifted my hands to his shirt. Slowly. Giving him time to stop me, the way he always gave me time, the way his patience had never once felt like obligation. My fingers found the hem and pulled upward, and he raised his arms without hesitation,without the careful clinical distance he used with everyone else. Just surrender. Just trust.
His skin was warm beneath my palms. Always warm. I mapped it with my hands the way I'd never let myself before, not fully, not with the lights on and the silence between us holding nothing but honesty. The ridge of his collarbone. The soft plane of his stomach. The scar on his left side that I'd noticed weeks ago and never asked about because I'd been too busy pretending I wasn't memorizing every inch of him.
"This?" I murmured, tracing it with my thumb.
"Appendectomy," he said. "I was thirteen. Terrible surgeon."
I huffed a sound that was almost a laugh and bent to press my mouth against it. He shivered, and the shiver had nothing to do with cold.
I pulled my own shirt off because I needed his hands on me. Needed the warmth against the cold, needed the circuit completed, the current that only ran when we were touching, skin to skin, with nothing between us but the truth. He didn't hesitate. His palms flattened against my chest, and I watched his face as the cold hit him, the way it always did at first, that half-second intake of breath.
Then the settling. The recognition. The moment his body stopped registering the temperature as threat and started registering it as mine.
"You're freezing," he murmured, but he was smiling.
"You're not."
"Funny how that works."
I pulled him closer, shifting us both until we were lying down, his weight half on top of me, his legs tangled with mine. The bed creaked. The frost on the headboard crackled softly, retreating by degrees, and I realized with a distant wonder that the cold was actually receding. Not because I was controlling it. Because it didn't need to protect me anymore.