"So." I exhale. "What actually happens now?"
He turns to look at me, and there's something in his face I haven't seen before—not the controlled version of him, not the professor or the dad or the man who navigates every interaction like he's already mapped the exits. Just him. A little tired. A little undone. "I've been thinking about taking a sabbatical," he says. "It's been…a long time since I've had one."
I blink. "A sabbatical."
"Shahar and Wulfric are getting married," he says. "They might want time—just the two of them, to start. I would hate for Solvi to fall by the wayside while they’re newly mated.”
I look at him.
He looks back.
"You're going to take a year," I say slowly, "to be adad.”
"I'm going to take a year," he says, "to be with Solvi. And to do some writing I've been putting off. And to—" he pauses. His tendrils shift faintly. "To see what this looks like. When I'm not your supervisor. When I'm just…a person. In your life."
Something happens in my chest.
It's not new, exactly. It's been building for a while now—since the noodle shop, since the closet, since he looked at that committee and saidnot once have I opposed your work. Since this morning when he kissed me like it cost him something and saidit has always been easy to care.
But it lands differently now, out here in the open, next to a fountain, after I've just finished yelling at him about it.
I think I've been in love with him since before I knew what to call it. Since I read one of his papers in a library on Earth. Since I started using his rubrics as the metric I measured myself against, since I got angry on behalf of his research when other people dismissed it, since I decided that his opinion of my work mattered more than anyone else's and told myself that was just professional respect.
You're an idiot, Lyn.
The fondest kind,some other part of me says back.
"For the record," I say, "you're still in trouble."
"I know," he says.
"I'm serious. You don't get to go noble on me without a heads-up."
"Understood."
"And if you ever?—"
"Lyn." He reaches over and takes my hand, threading his fingers through mine the way he did this morning, easy and deliberate, like it's already a habit. Like we've been doing this for years. "I know."
I look at our hands. His turquoise knuckles against my brown ones, his thumb tracing a slow line across the back of my hand.
"I love you," I say.
Just like that. Surprising both of us.
He goes very still.
"I know that's fast," I say immediately, the words tripping over themselves. "And I know I've been a disaster about this whole thing, and I'm not—you don't have to—I'm not saying it so you'll say it back, I'm just saying it because it's been sitting in my throat for approximately two weeks and I almost said it in bed this morning and then didn't, and I just yelled at you for not telling me things, so?—"
"Lyn," he says.
"—it seemed hypocritical not to?—"
"Lyn."
I stop talking.
He's looking at me with that expression—the one I didn't understand for months because I kept reading it as irritation, or impatience, or professional disapproval. I understand it now. I understand it completely.
