“I installed child-safe latches, Selene.”
I put a hand over my eyes for a second. “That is insane.”
“It is practical.”
“It is psychotic tenderness disguised as infrastructure.”
That gets a real, brief laugh out of him. Low, rough, quickly gone, but real.
I drop my hand and look at him again.
The lamplight catches at the edges of his face, the old command lines softened by civilian clothes and fatigue and whatever this new life is making of him. He does not look like someone improvising. He looks like someone who made a decision some time ago and has simply been waiting for me to say its name aloud.
“You really thought I was staying,” I say.
“Yes.”
“You say that like it was obvious.”
“To me, it was.”
I shake my head once in disbelief and something unknots in me so quickly it almost hurts. All this time I’ve been trying not to demand too much too soon, not to mistake survival intimacy for permanence, not to build castles out of procedural aftermath and grief and one warm kitchen in a neutral district.
And the bastard has been over there building actual shelving.
“I hate you a little,” I say.
“No, you don’t.”
“No,” I admit. “I really don’t.”
We are both quiet for a moment after that.
Not awkward. Not empty.
Full.
The apartment seems to gather itself around us—the low light, the papers still spread over the table, the dark windows holding the city at a distance, the kettle cooling on the stove, the faint spice-and-tea scent in the air.
I don’t remember moving first.
Maybe neither of us does.
One second there is still space between us, charged and deliberate and thinning. The next, I’m stepping closer and he’s meeting me in the middle with the same care he brings to everything that matters now—not caution born of fear, but choice made visible.
His hand comes up slowly, giving me every chance to stop him, and cups the side of my face.
Warm.
Callused in places that civilian life hasn’t smoothed over.
I lean into it before pride can object.
His thumb brushes once beneath my cheekbone, and the gesture is so gentle it feels like truth with no rhetoric on it.
When he kisses me, it is not adrenaline.
Not tribunal-heat, not disaster-survival, not the wild edge of finding each other inside a burning structure and mistaking impact for destiny.
