"I'm not finished." I take her hand, turn it over, and press my lips to her palm. "I watched you walk back into that dining room three weeks ago with your chin up after finding out the worst thing your own family had ever done to you. I watched you survive a dinner table full of strangers calculating your worth in numbers. I watched you face your own brother today and refuse to fold the way you've apparently folded for six straight years, and every single time, Liv, every single time, I have fallen further into something I have never once felt before in my entire life." My voice roughens around the edges. "I don't need to say the actual word for you to understand what's happening to me. I think you already know."
"I know," she whispers, eyes shining. "I think I've known for a while. I just didn't trust myself to be right about it."
"Well, you are right about it." I pull her back against my chest, tuck her head under my chin, feel her exhale slowly,fully, like something in her has finally been given permission to stop bracing. "For what it's worth, I think I fell that first night. Everything since has just been me catching up to a decision some part of me already made at a dinner table surrounded by men writing numbers on cards."
She laughs, wet and surprised, against my shirt. "That's a very specific moment to fall in love."
"I'm a specific man." I press another kiss to her hair, content in a way I don't think I've ever fully let myself be before, not with any of the noise and women and easy charm I used to fill the silence with before Liv.
We sit there a long while, tangled together on the sofa, the city slowly shifting from morning into the brighter light of midday, and I let my mind wander somewhere I haven't let it go before, not with anyone, not even close.
I picture her in a kitchen that isn't this glass and concrete bachelor pad anymore, somewhere warmer, somewhere with actual photographs on the walls instead of art chosen by a designer who never met me. I picture a child with Liv’s red hair and my size, already loud at four years old, already incapable of sitting still through a family dinner, terrorizing Rovin's careful house the way Serik joked about at dinner last week. I picture teaching that child to throw a punch properly and watching Liv pretend to be horrified while secretly being delighted, the way she gets when I do something she finds simultaneously alarming and irresistible.
I picture growing old, gray-haired and slower, still finding her across some crowded room decades from now and still feeling that same gut-punch of wanting to know what's behind her eyes.
It unnerves me slightly, how easily the picture forms, how little resistance I find in myself to wanting all of it immediately and completely. I've spent thirty years believing I was built forexactly two things, ending men and entertaining women, and somewhere in the last three weeks that entire picture quietly rebuilt itself around a redhead who didn’t know what she was walking into and walked into it anyway.
"You're doing the staring thing again," she says, voice soft, muffled against my chest.
"I'm doing the imagining thing, actually. Different category entirely."
"Imagining what?"
I consider lying, making it light, turning the moment into a joke the way I usually would, but I find I don't want to.
"You. A few kids running around being far too loud, probably my fault entirely, genetics being what they are." I feel her go very still against me. "I've never wanted that before, Liv. Not once. Not with anyone. I've spent my whole life being the brother who shows up for everyone else's milestones and quietly assumes he'll skip his own. And now I can't seem to stop picturing mine, and they all seem to involve you specifically, which I find both alarming and the least alarming thing that's happened to me in years."
She lifts her head, eyes wet and wide, searching my face for the joke that isn't there.
"You mean that," she says, not quite a question.
"I have never meant anything more in my entire life."
"That's a lot to put on a Wednesday morning."
I tuck a strand of hair behind her ear, thumb brushing her cheekbone, memorizing this exact moment, certain already that I'll want to come back to it for years. "You don't have to say anything back. I'm not asking for matching declarations on a schedule. I just wanted you to know what's actually happeningover here, on my side of this, while you're busy rebuilding your own life one brutally brave conversation at a time."
She presses her face back against my chest, and I feel her smile against the fabric, feel the tension finally draining fully out of her shoulders, replaced by something looser, something that looks, from where I'm sitting, dangerously close to hope settling somewhere permanent.
"Okay," she says, the same small word she gave me the night of the auction, except this time it doesn't sound like surrender at all.
It sounds like the beginning of something neither of us is in any hurry to rush past.
Epilogue
Liv
The dress hangs in the spare room, sealed in its garment bag, and I haven't looked at it once since the final fitting because some superstitious, hopeful part of me wants tomorrow to be the first time I see myself in it properly.
Volody isn't supposed to see it either, technically, though I'm not sure how much that tradition applies to two people who've shared a toothbrush holder for the better part of three months.
"You're doing the staring thing," he says, coming up behind me in the doorway, arms sliding around my waist, chin settling on top of my head. "At a garment bag. That's new, even for you."
"I'm just thinking about how strange it is. Tomorrow I become Alivia Mostovoia, and a year ago I was pretending I had a plan for my own life that didn't revolve entirely around keeping Cole standing upright."
"Any regrets about the new plan?"
"Zero." I turn in his arms, looking up at him, this enormous, loud, endlessly patient man who rearranged his entire life around making space for mine instead of swallowing it whole. "Cole sent a card, by the way. For tomorrow."
