Just that. No argument. No negotiation. He knows it too. He’s known it probably since before I did, and he’s been waiting for me to get here, and now I’m here, and he’s just saying yes. Simple as that.
I nod.
I get up off the futon. My back makes a complaint about the futon that I ignore. I step out of the circle, back into my living room, and I sit cross-legged on the floor at the circle’s edge. The carpet is slightly dusty from everything that happened yesterday, and there’s a crack in the wall I’m going to have to fill. And at some point I have to go downstairs and look at the coffee shop properly and work out what happens next.
But first.
I close my eyes.
I’ve been carrying the binding for weeks now. Long enough that I’d stopped feeling it as something separate from myself, the way you stop feeling a ring on your finger or a scar that’s healed over. It’s just part of the background. Part of the way the flat feels. But now that I’m looking for it, I can feel all of it. The wards threaded through the walls and the circle laid into the floorboards beneath the carpet and the binding that connects them, all of it my magic, all of it mine.
I start with the wards. I find the edges of them and I begin to unpick them carefully, the way you unpick a seam, thread by thread, letting each one go rather than cutting. It takes patience. I’ve always been better at the intricate work than the brute force, and this is intricate, three weeks of careful, layered magic unwinding at my hands.
The wards go first. I feel them release, one by one, the flat losing that particular texture of magical alertness, becoming just a flat again.
Then the circle.
This magic is older. Deeper. The runes I laid into the floorboards before Dis arrived, before any of this started, when I was a different version of myself with a plan that made sense and a clear idea of what revenge was supposed to look like. The chalk is long gone, but the intention is still there, still holding, still doing what I asked it to do.
I ask it to stop.
The magic unravels slowly. I feel it go, all of it, the binding and the circle and everything that has kept this particular impossible situation in place for weeks, and there’s a moment where the flat feels very strange and veryempty without it, like a room with all the furniture taken out.
Then it’s gone.
I open my eyes.
Dis is looking at me.
I stand up. My legs are slightly unsteady, the way they always are after significant magical work. I brush off my knees. I meet his gaze across the space that used to be a circle and is now just a patch of living room floor with a slightly singed carpet and a battered futon on it.
He steps out.
It’s such a simple thing. One step, from inside to outside, from the space that was his prison to the rest of the flat, the rest of the world. He does it without hesitation, without looking down, just steps across the line that isn’t there anymore with the ease of someone who has been waiting for exactly this and knew exactly what he would do when it came.
He crosses the distance between us in two more steps.
He kisses me.
Not like a question. Not tentative or uncertain or asking for permission. Like something that has been decided for some time and is simply, finally, happening. His hands find my face, and the kiss is thorough and unhurried and tastes like everything I’ve been not thinking about, and I stop not thinking about it and just let it be true.
When we separate, I’m slightly breathless and my hands are fisted in his shirt, and the morning light is coming through the plastic-covered window and making everything very clear indeed.
“Well,” I say. My voice comes out slightly wrecked. “Okay then.”
Dis looks at me. Something in his expression that I have a name for now, something I’ve had a name for since he said he didn’t entirely hate me, or possibly earlier, possibly since the Scrabble board or the first time he told me I had a pleasant laugh.
He kisses me again, and suddenly we are stumbling towards my bedroom. Well, I’m stumbling and he’s gliding, but it’s the same thing.
My bedroom door crashes open. I think that was magic, but I’m not really sure of anything right now, except that Dis is kissing me and it’s wonderful and he’s free and this definitely isn’t feeding. It’s goodbye. The best kind of goodbye there is, and also the worst, and I’m going to stop thinking now because I want this.
We fall onto the bed, tangled together. I land on my back, with Dis on top of me. Neither of us breaking the kiss for one moment.
I don’t want to stop kissing him. I don’t want to waste one single second. Kissing him is like kissing a thunderstorm, all that wild, natural power. It’s exhilarating. It makes me feel as powerful as he is, maybe even more so, because I’m the one the thunderstorm wants to kiss.
Shadows glide over me. His hands work, stripping my clothes off extremely competently. How is he so good with human clothes? It’s uncanny. But I’m not complaining.
I shiver as the last bit of cloth leaves me. Now the only thing touching my skin is Dis.
