This break lets air in. It’s like my whole damn body is cracking open. I look up at her. “You’re saying you want me to sign these so I can marry you again?”
A watery laugh slips out of her. It’s small and cracked and perfect. “No.”
My stomach drops again.
She squeezes my hand fast. “No, I’m saying I want you to sign them so we can be free to decide what comes next. Without the clubs. Without our families. Without a bargain hanging over us.”
I stare at her.
She blushes then, pink climbing up her throat. “But… yes. Eventually. If you ask me properly. And if I say yes properly. And if we do it because we want to. Because we’re in love.”
In love.
The words hit like a hammer. I’ve heard men talk about love like it’s weakness. Like it’s a leash. Like it’s a soft thing that makes a man stupid. I used to think maybe they were right. My mother loved my father, or thought she did, and it destroyed her. My father loved nothing but control and his own rage, and that destroyed everyone around him.
I never wanted love. Then this woman walked into my life with hate in her eyes and fear under her skin, and somehow, wanting her became the easiest and hardest thing I’ve ever done.
“You love me?” I ask, and I hate how raw it comes out.
Ami’s eyes shine. “Yes.”
My heart stops.
“I don’t know how to do it right,” she says quickly. “I don’t know how to be normal. I might panic. I might get scared. I don’t know. I’m not promising it will be easy. But I’m choosing you.”
“I don’t need easy.”
“No,” she whispers. “You never did.”
I set the pen down. Then the papers. Careful and deliberate like they might explode.
Maybe they already have.
I take her face in my hands. She sucks in a breath, but she doesn’t pull away. Her skin is damp under my thumbs. Warm. Real. Mine only if she wants to be.
Always only if she wants to be.
“I love you, Ami. All of you, the good and the bad. And even when you accused me, I still wanted you. Always you. I want to date you properly,” I keep going, because now that the words are coming, I can’t stop them. “I want to take you to dinner where nobody bleeds. I want to sit beside you at family shit and let you decide when my hand goes on your back and when it doesn’t. I want to learn what makes you smile when you’re not trying to hide it. I want to know what kind of coffee you drink. What side of the bed you actually like when you’re not trying to escape me.”
“I wasn’t trying to escape you last night,” she whispers.
My thumb stills on her cheek.
No. She wasn’t. That memory rolls through me, hot and tender and dangerous, but I keep my hands gentle.
“I want to build something with you,” I say. “Something that’s ours. And if that starts with signing those papers, I’ll signthem. If it starts with me sleeping on the couch for a month, I’ll do that too. If it starts with you going home and me showing up tomorrow with flowers like some idiot who doesn’t know what to do with his hands, I’ll do that.”
“You’d bring me flowers?”
“I’d bring you a whole fucking garden if you wanted it.”
Her face softens in a way that steals every hard thing out of me.
“I don’t need a garden,” she says. “All I need is for you to always be honest with me. No deciding what’s best for me behind my back. My father did that, and while I’ve forgiven him. I don’t want us to have that kind of relationship.”
“I won’t.”
“And I need you to understand that choosing me means choosing all of me. Even the broken parts.”
