The scaffolding came down. We're standing on our own now.
Evening. The penthouse is warm. My clothes are in the closet beside his suits. My laptop is on the desk. My tea in the kitchen. The domestic archaeology of a life reclaimed.
Nico comes home from Elysium. I can read something heavy in his posture — a meeting, a conversation, something that costs. He carries weight in his shoulders the way other men carry it in their faces. The suit jacket comes off. The shoes. He finds me in the kitchen in his shirt and bare legs with my hair loose, and the look he gives me is the look I've been memorizing since the first morning after the Knock: hunger and tenderness and the particular disbelief of a man who cannot quite accept that this is his life now.
"Hey."
"Hey."
He looks at me. I look at him. The kitchen is quiet. The city outside the windows. The distance between us is six feet of marble floor and nine days of exile and a factory and a chair, and it's also nothing. It's also the thinnest membrane in the world.
"Take me to bed."
Not a question. A decision. The same way I knocked on his door: my choice, my terms, walking toward what I want because I want it.
Chapter 40
Nico
* * *
Icarry her.
She wraps her arms around my neck, and I lift her and carry her through the hallway to our bedroom, and the act of carrying is not about strength. It's about needing to hold her. To feel her weight against my chest. To know with my body what my mind has been telling me for days: she's here. She's real. She's not in a chair in a factory or a house in New Hampshire or the passenger seat of a car I sent away.
I set her on the bed. Stand over her. Look.
"What are you doing?"
"Looking at you."
"You've seen me before."
"Not like this."
Not like this. With the knowledge of almost. She's in my shirt, and her hair is across the pillow, and her eyes watch me with the steady clarity that has defined her since she sat in my office and said,"I'm not most people."She was right.
I was a fool. And she's here.
I kneel beside the bed. Take the hem of the shirt. Lift slowly. Kiss the skin as it reveals: her hip. The curve of her waist. Her ribs. She lifts her arms, and the shirt comes off, and she’s bare beneath, and I stop breathing the way I stopped breathing the first time and will stop breathing every time because the sight of her undone is the thing that undoes me.
"I almost lost you."
"You didn't."
"I would have destroyed the world."
"I know." She reaches for me. Pulls my shirt over my head. Her hands on my chest. My scars. She traces the bullet wound on my shoulder, the long scar down my ribs. The cartography she's memorized. "Show me."
I undress her the rest of the way. Slowly. Each piece of clothing removed like something sacred. I kiss her neck. The curve of her shoulder. The inside of her wrist.
I stop there.
The marks. Where the zip ties cut. Fading now, six days later, but visible. Pink lines against her pale skin. The physical record of what she survived because I packed a bag.
I press my lips to the marks. She tenses.
"Don't."