"Valerio." His name came out wrecked.
"Again," he said, against her palm.
"Valerio."
"Again."
"Valerio, I—"
He kissed her before she could finish, which was a mercy, because she had no idea how that sentence ended, and it stopped mattering, because his hands were shaking again and hers had joined them, and there were new scars on him her fingers didn't know, small ones, careless ones, eight years of a life she hadn't been there to stand in front of, and she hated every one of them, individually and by name, for happening without her.
"Tell me you're real,ma belle," he said.
"I'm real."
"Again."
"I'm real. So, so real, Valerio." She pressed her hand over his heart, which was going like something trying to break out of him. "Feel that? That's me. I'm—"
"Eight years." It broke, and what came after broke with it, low and rapid and unmistakably not English, a handful of words she didn't know the shape of but understood anyway, because grief only ever sounds like one thing. Then, into her hair, in avoice that had come apart along a line she'd never known it had. "Eight years, Aislinn, and I never once—"
He didn't finish either.
And he still smelled like the memory she'd spent eight years trying to evict, and his heart was still arguing under her hand, and somewhere very far below them a party lay in ruins and a chess set sat unopened, and none of it, none of it, could reach this room.
He laid her down without once letting go of her, as though letting go was the one skill he'd refused to learn, and clothes went the way clothes go when eight years are done waiting, and then there was nothing between them but the shaking.
"Look at me," he said, and she did, and that was how he took her, with her eyes open and his name half-formed on her lips, and when he finally entered her, Aislinn cried out, because it was too much, it was all of it at once, eight years and a ballroom and a boy with his face and the impossible living weight of him, here, real, hers.
Mine,he thought, and for the first time in eight years, let himself believe it.
Her arms wrapped around him like they'd been waiting all this time at the ends of her shoulders for exactly this assignment.
He groaned her name into the curve of her neck and began to move, slow and devastating and utterly certain, the same patient thoroughness he'd kissed her with, like nothing about this would be rushed twice in one lifetime, and every time the tears spilled over she felt him find them without breaking rhythm, his mouthat her cheekbone, her temple, the corner of her eye, kissing them away as fast as eight years could produce them.
"I'm here," he said, against her jaw. "I'm here. I have you."
"Valerio." She was sobbing it now, and she couldn't have said whether it was grief or the other thing, the building, gathering, impossible other thing, and it didn't matter, because they'd become the same wave. "Valerio, I can't, it's too—"
"You can." His voice had gravel in it, and his hands were still trembling where they held her, this man who didn't tremble, and somehow that was the most intimate thing of all. "Stay with me. Stay."
She stayed.
She stayed until staying broke her open, until eight years came down all at once, and she came apart with his name in her mouth and her heels pressed hard against the world, and he followed her over the edge with a groan that sounded like the end of a long war, her face held in both his unsteadied hands.
For a long while after that, there were no words in the suite at all. Or none that belonged to language.
Afterward, wrapped in hotel silence with her pulse slowly remembering its manners, he propped himself on one elbow and cupped her face again, his thumb moving over her cheekbone like he was checking she was real, and that tenderness, that exact tenderness, was what undid her.
She started crying again.
"What's wrong?" His voice came out raw. "Tell me. How do I—"
"I thought you were cheating on me."
Chapter Six
EIGHT YEARS AGO
