When he finally lets me surface, he keeps his forehead against mine. "Do you love it?"
I pull back just enough to look at him properly. My eyes are absolutely swimming. I nod, and a tear escapes, and his expression does something complicated and tender that I don't think he even knows is on his face.
He tucks me into his side, I press my face briefly into his chest and breathe, and then we move to the blanket on the grass together.
I sink down, lean back on my hands, and look up. Axel settles beside me, close enough that our arms press together the full length, and neither of us speaks for a long time. The lights shift overhead, green into violet, violet back to green, in a slow rhythm like something enormous breathing in and out. The cold is sharp, but the blanket is thick, Axel is warm beside me, and I feel very far from everything difficult.
"I used to think," I say finally, "that if I ever saw them I'd feel something enormous. Like an answer to something I couldn't name." A new ribbon rolls across the sky, and I watch it travel from one edge to the other. "I don't feel an answer. I just feel very small."
"Is that bad?"
"No." I think about it honestly. "It's actually the nicest I've felt in months. Like nothing I'm carrying is as heavy as I think it is."
He doesn't respond right away. I hear him breathe deeply.
I turn my head to look at him and see him looking back at me. The light moves across his face, and I think about who he was to me weeks ago — a man I met in a club, a stranger with silver hair — and I can't reconcile that person with this one, the one lying beside me on a hillside he rented so I could see something I've always wanted to see.
"I love you," I tell him.
He goes still.
Not the controlled stillness he uses in meetings. Not the quiet before something dangerous. This is different.
"I've been sitting on it for weeks," I continue, because now I've started and I can't stop. "Because it scared me. Because everything about this is fast and complicated and there are people trying to kill you and I'm pregnant and my father isn't speaking to me." I hold his eyes. "And none of that changes what I feel. I love you. I wanted you to know."
The silence stretches.
His mouth opens. Closes. He looks away for a second, jaw working, like the words are somewhere inside him and he'strying to find the way to let them out. He's not performing the difficulty. It's real, visibly real, a man reaching for something he has never once in his life picked up before.
Then he looks back at me.
"I love you." His voice comes out low, rough, and slightly unsteady in a way I have never heard from him, not once. He clears his throat, like that'll fix it, but it doesn't. "I don't — I don't know how to do this properly. I've never done it. Never wanted to before." His eyes stay on mine, and there is something almost bewildered in them, like he's surprised to find himself here, on this hillside, saying these words, meaning every syllable. "But I think about who I was before you walked into that club. What my life looked like. And I can't—" He stops. "I don't want to go back to that."
"You won't," I say softly.
"I don't know how to be this person yet." The admission is so honest it physically aches. "Don’t yet know how to properly love you."
"You just did." I reach over and cover his hand with mine. "You're doing it right now."
He turns his hand over and laces his fingers through mine. We lie back on the blanket together and look up at the sky.
The lights are still moving. They'll move all night, Margareta told me, all these hundreds of miles of sky doing this ancient thing ithas always done, indifferent and extraordinary and completely unaware that somewhere below it two people are lying in the cold, figuring out how to love each other.
I rest my free hand on my stomach without thinking. The small, barely-there curve of it beneath my coat. Not visible in most clothes yet, just a gentle new roundness that is still half the time making me do a double-take in the mirror.
Axel notices.
His eyes drop to my hand. His expression goes quiet in a different way, the bewildered softness from a minute ago deepening into something wordless.
He lifts our joined hands and rests them gently over mine.
Neither of us says anything.
I look back up at the lights. Green and violet and white against all that dark, moving the way they've always moved, the way they'll move long after tonight is a memory.
I think — we are so small down here. We are so small and so scared and so determined to build something real in the middle of all this chaos, and somehow that doesn't feel impossible tonight.
Tonight it just feels like love.