“Devon warned me.” His voice drops. “That first week. He told me a man who swears he can’t love you is most often a man already terrified that he does. I thought I’d slipped the trap. I hadn’t. He read me like weather, and I fell exactly where he said I would.”
My tears are coming faster now, and faster still as Loukas cups my face in both hands, like he’s holding something fragile, something he couldn’t bear to see broken twice.
“I kept the line, that night, and every night,” he says. “Not out of indifference, whatever I let you think this morning. I kept it because it was the one true thing I had in a whole week of pretending, and I wasn’t going to spend it cheaply on a woman who deserved to be wanted out loud, in daylight, by a man brave enough to mean it.”
His hand shifts against my cheek, and I feel the tremor in it.
“Marry me,agapi. No cameras, no investors, no money left to make it convenient. Marry me, and we can argue forever.” My own invented proposal, the lie I dressed up for a dinner table, handed back to me made true.
“I love you, Blythe. I’m in love with—”
He doesn’t get to finish, because I’ve already thrown myself into his arms.
I’m crying and laughing and kissing him all at once, and I feel his mouth break into a smile against mine, just for a second, before he sweeps me up off my feet entirely.
“I love you, Loukas.”
I have to say it. I need to say it, out loud, in daylight, before anything else happens, before the kiss he’s already lowering his head to give me—
Oh.
Before this.
This being Loukas kissing me so deep and so sure that the cabin and the train and the whole long pretending journey simply fall away, since none of it was ever the real thing.
And this, finally, is.
Epilogue
THE THE TUB IN HISbathroom is the size of a stock tank and twice as decadent, and it isn’t his bathroom anymore, it’s ours, and I’m sitting in it up to my collarbones in water gone bath-warm and still, eyes shut, feeling like the single most ridiculous woman in the state of Texas.
A forty-year-old bride. Married four hours. Soaking in the bath.
I’d like to claim I’m in no hurry, that a woman is entitled to a long soak on her wedding night and it means nothing at all, but the truth is my heart has been going quick under the warm water for a solid ten minutes, and it has nothing to do with the wine and everything to do with the man who is, at some point very soon, going to come through that door.
A month. That’s how long the whole impossible business took, start to here.
The deal died on that train and stayed dead. Artie bought him out, the sanctuary’s back forty is in my name now and the lights will stay on past winter, and Loukas came home from signing it all away lighter than I have ever seen him, a man who’d set down something he carried so long he’d stopped feeling the weight until it was gone.
He won’t talk about what he walked away from. I’ve decided not to make him, since the only thing either of us is selling anymore is the truth, and the truth is that I married him and he married me and none of the rest of it signifies.
I’m still smiling about that, eyes shut, somewhere far inside the warm and the steam, when the water moves.
A splash, low and unmistakable, a wave of displaced warmth against my shins, and that’s the only warning I get.
My eyes come open.
“You took your time,” I tell him, since one of us has to have the last word and it was always going to be me.
He settles into the water across from me, this proud impossible man, easy and assured and in no rush at all, his black eyes gone the shade they only go for me, and he reaches through the steam and takes my hand the way he took it on a porch a lifetime ago, like it was always going to be his.
”Agapi,” he says, low, the accent thick with it. “I have only just begun.”
And then he shows me what he means.
There was a line, all those nights. The one he swore he wouldn’t cross and didn’t, through the storm and the jealous quarrel and the tender wordless dark, the one he held like a breath he refused to let go.
And tonight, for the first time, it is ours to cross, the two of us, on purpose, married, and he crosses it the way he does everything, in his own time, as though we have the rest of our lives and he means to use every hour of them.
