He pauses—neither rushing in to fix nor recoiling in shock—just absorbing this truth I’ve carried alone. Then he murmurs, “That shouldn’t have happened to you. And you’re most definitely not a disappointment.”
The words settle in my chest like warm stones. I blink, eyes still on the bright grid beneath us though I’m not really seeing it anymore.
He shifts his grip just a little, sliding his hand higher under my ribs, fingers splaying to anchor me more surely. “You weren’t too much,” he continues, voice steady as a metronome. “You were with people who didn’t know how to hold you.”
Something in me cracks open, a sliver of relief seeping through.
“That’s not who you are with me.”
I lean back until my spine curves against the firm press of his chest. “I don’t know,” I whisper, voice thinner now, my hand running along the cool railing. “It feels like a pattern.”
“Or a failure of pattern recognition,” he replies softly.
I let out a small, confused laugh. “What?”
“You kept ending up in the same kind of environment,” he says, thumb tracing gentle circles. “That doesn’t make you the problem—it just means no one interrupted it.”
The word lands heavier than any blame ever could. I taste it on my tongue, let it settle somewhere beneath my sternum.
“You were alone longer than you should’ve been,” he adds, and there’s neither judgment nor pity in his tone—only that calm certainty.
No one’s ever put it that way before—not what’s wrong, why I’m so “difficult,” but simply that I’d been abandoned.
I don’t notice how far I’ve reclined into him until his arm tightens around my waist, drawing my body flush against his. “I’m fine now,” I say quickly.
He brushes a strand of hair from my temple. “I know.” No argument. No caveat. Just quiet confidence. “Come here,” he whispers.
I turn in his arms, just enough to angle my face toward his.
Then his palm slides up the small of my back, then rises vertebra by vertebra until his fingertips warm the nape of my neck. His thumb drifts along my hairline. “You’re okay,” he says. He pauses, then adds, softer still, “You’re more than okay, little poison.”
My shoulders drop. My chest loosens. That strange nickname again—part fierce, part cherished—lands like a key.
I close my eyes for a long second.
He murmurs into my hair, “I’ve got you, Ivy.”
And for the first time, I believe it. There’s no caveat, no hidden edge—only the warmth of his body behind me, the measured pulse of his thumb, and the night stretched wide and softened before us.
For the first time, the burden of being me and growing up the way I did doesn’t feel like something I have to carry alone. Idon’t feel the need to shrink it or make it easier for someone else to take in. I don’t have to adjust myself around it.
I just exist with it.
And with Soren, that feels like enough.
When I finally close my eyes, resting fully against him, his hand still steady at the back of my neck, the rhythm of his thumb slow and consistent, something settles quietly into place.
A realization I don’t question. Don’t analyze. Don’t try to pull apart.
I don’t feel alone when I’m with him. I don’t want to remember what that felt like anymore.
I don’t just want to stay.
I don’t want to exist anywhere else.
CHAPTER 35
IVY