“Yeah,” he whispered, brushing his nose against mine. “You are.”
He kissed me—a deep, lingering kiss—and my whole body loosened under him, the ache in my ribs easing as his mouth moved over mine.
When he pulled back, his thumb stroked once over the scar at my throat, light as breath.
“I’m going to take care of you,” he said simply. “Even when you pretend you don’t need it.”
“And when I do need it?” I asked.
His hand cupped my jaw, fingertips curling against my stubbled skin. “Then I’ll give you everything.”
I held him close, stroking absent patterns against skin I used to touch without thinking.
“I thought I lost you,” he said quietly. “Not just that day. But after. When you woke up and looked at me like… like I was a stranger walking around in my husband costume.”
I winced. Not because he was wrong, but because he wasn’t.
“Adrian,” I whispered. “I didn’t mean to hurt you.”
“I know.” He swallowed hard. “But I still felt it. Every room we were in together… it was like someone had walked through first and erased all our fingerprints.”
My breath stuttered—because yes, that was exactly how it felt on my side too: as if our entire history had been wiped clean with industrial-strength bleach while the rest of the world went on as if nothing had changed.
“I was scared to touch anything,” he continued, voice soft. “Scared if I reached for you, I’d smudge whatever progress you’d made. Ruin something. Make it worse.”
I blinked up at him, heart twisting. “I missed you. Even when I couldn’t remember all the reasons why, I missed you. Like muscle memory. A language I’d forgotten how to speak but still dreamed in.”
He smiled, small and pained. “You still talk pretty, you know that?”
I huffed. “I talk fine. You just think you’re supposed to be the poetic one.”
He snorted. “Please. My metaphors are trash. You’re the one who once compared us to—what was it?—‘two halves of a broken compass that still point home.’”
I groaned loudly. “I was twenty-two and caffeinated. Don’t hold that against me.”
He grinned. “I loved it.”
“You loved everything I said back then. I could’ve compared us to… to mismatched socks, and you would’ve swooned.”
Heraised a brow. “Swooned?”
A laugh cracked out of me, surprised and helpless. God, it felt good.
He leaned in closer, skin to skin. “But since we’re revisiting metaphors…”
My stomach fluttered ridiculously.
He traced the scar again with his lips, pressing his love into my skin with invisible force.
“You’re like… a lighthouse after a storm,” he murmured between kisses. “A beacon that still stands, even when half the coast looks like hell.”
I blinked hard. “That’s… that’s not trash.”
“I’ve been saving it,” he admitted. “Didn’t want to waste it while you were concussed.”
I swatted his shoulder. “You can’t call your husband a storm-wrecked lighthouse and then make concussion jokes.”
My chest warmed. God, it felt good to say the word husband out loud, to feel confident in it.
