"No more fence," she repeats.
I drop the sledgehammer. Twelve pounds of dented steel hits the grass with a thud that shakes both our lawns.
Both.
Ours.
I kiss her.
Not gentle. Not careful. Not the way a reformed warband orc who alphabetizes his spice rack and irons his shorts is supposed to kiss. I kiss her like the fence was the last thing standing between me and oxygen and I just took my first real breath in a decade.
My hands find her waist. Mud-caked overalls, warm skin underneath, the ridge of her hip bone pressing against my palm. She drops the red cup. It bounces off my boot and rolls into the wildflowers and neither of us watches it go because her fingers are already climbing my front, fisting the front of my ruined shirt, pulling me down to her with a strength that has no business living in a body that small.
The crowd noise blurs into nothing.
Her mouth tastes like cheap beer and cheaper frosting from Mrs. Patterson's victory cake and something underneath both that's purely her, warm and green and reckless. Her teeth catch my lower lip. A sound comes out of me that I haven't made since the siege camps, low and raw and hungry, and her answering laugh vibrates against my tongue.
"Inside?" she whispers against my jaw.
"No."
The word surprises both of us. But the sky is wide open above our heads, purple and gold, the last of the sunset bleeding into the first scattered stars, and the grass beneath our feet is ours. Not mine. Not hers. Ours. I want the sky and the dirt and the open air. No walls. No roof. No more barriers.
I pull back just enough to look at her. "Here."
Her pupils swallow the color of her irises. She nods.
I scoop her up. One arm under her knees, the other behind her back, and she weighs nothing, she weighs absolutely nothing against the memory of siege gates and falling trees and forty-seven cedar planks, and I carry her past the fence wreckage to the flat stretch of grass where her wildflower border meets my bluegrass. The exact center of the combined yard.
I set her down on the grass and she pulls me with her, fingers hooked in my collar, and my knees hit the ground on either side of her hips and the earth is soft from the golem battle, churned and damp and alive, and I don't care about the mud, I don't care about the stains, I don't care about any of it.
Her hands push under my shirt. Palms flat against my stomach. Her fingers trace the ridges of the runic tattoos that climb my ribs, the old warband marks that I've hidden under cotton and discipline for years, and her touch is so light it almost hurts.
"These are beautiful."
"They're scars."
"I know."
She pulls the shirt over my head. I let her. The night air hits my skin and the tattoos pulse faintly, green-gold, the old magic responding to something it recognizes. Her mouth presses against the lowest rune on my left side, just above the hip, and my spine locks and my hands dig into the grass on either side of her head, ripping up fistfuls of perfectly maintained Kentucky bluegrass that took me three seasons to cultivate.
Gone.
Worth it.
I unclip the straps of her overalls with fingers that can snap a two-inch oak branch but tremble now against the brass hardware. The fabric falls away from her shoulders. Underneath, a thin cotton tank top, paint-stained, torn at the hem, the most beautiful garment I have ever seen on a living being.
"You're shaking," she says.
"I'm terrified."
"Of what?"
I lower myself until my forehead rests against hers. Our breath mingles. The stars multiply above us, hundreds of them now, punching through the darkening sky like someone drove pins through velvet.
"Of not being enough."
Her hand cups my jaw. Thumb tracing the thin green line the cedar splinter carved into my cheek. "Flynn Danger, you just demolished a forty-seven-plank fence with a dented sledgehammer in front of the entire neighborhood."
