Page 95 of Property of Scar

Everything that can be controlled has been controlled.

And yet…

“She used to do this,” Cali says quietly, not looking at me, her chin angled toward the sky. “My mother… I’d wake up and find her out back, just standing there in the dark, staring up like the rest of the world didn’t exist.” She exhales slowly. “She told me once that stars were the universe’s way of leaving the light on.” She pauses for a brief moment. “I thought that was ridiculous when I was nine.”

“And now?”

She exhales. “And now I stand outside and stare at the stars.”

Something moves in my chest, familiar enough to be dangerous. I watch the way her hands rest on the parapet, the deliberate stillness of them. I understand, in the way I understand very few things about human grief, that she carries her mother the same way I’ve carried Astrid, pressed flat against the inside of the ribs, sharp enough to cut if you breathe too deep.

“For three hundred and fifty years,” I say, and then I stop, because the words have arrived unplanned, and I’m still deciding what to do with them.

She waits.

I choose to let them out. “For three hundred and fifty years, I’ve been going through the motions. Violence, business, routine. Then I joined this club, I have protected the New Hampshire territory, I’ve kept the machine turning, and I have done all of it from the inside of a life that I’d stopped actually inhabiting.” I don’t look at her. I look at the sky, because it’s easier to say hard things when no one is watching your face. “Then you crashed through a skylight and reminded me what it means to want something.”

The silence that follows is different from the one before it.

“Scar—”

“I’m not asking you for anything,” I say quickly. “I want you to understand that. I’m not putting this on you. I just thought, tomorrow being what it is, that I should have said it before now.”

Cali turns to face me, and I make myself meet her eyes because she’s earned at least that much. Whatever guard she normally keeps between herself and the rest of the world has slipped. I’ve caught glimpses of it before, flashes lasting a second or two before the walls came back up, but this time it stays, and I know what I’m looking at. Not because I’ve seen it on her face before, but because I’ve carried it myself.

Centuries of standing with one hand on the throttle and the other hovering over the brake, staring at something that mattered and not trusting it enough to let go. Centuries of wanting to believe in something while already preparing for the moment it breaks.

I know that look.

I’ve worn it for most of my life.

“I’m afraid,” she says, and the words come out carefully. “Not of tomorrow… of this. Of letting myself want something, only to lose it. I’ve lost everyone I have let myself need. I’m not…” She exhales slowly. “I’m not sure I know how to be brave about that anymore.”

I turn to fully face her, and the space between us closes by an inch, not enough to be anything, just enough to matter.

“I’m afraid too,” I tell her. “And I have hundreds of years of practice at pretending I’m not, so you’re going to have to trust me when I say that’s not a small thing.” My voice is quieter than I intend it to be. “But I’m more afraid of never knowing what this could be. Of walking back into another century of going through the motions because I was too careful to reach for the one thing that made me feel like I was actually living inside my own life.”

She looks at me for a long moment, this woman who has made a career of reading scenes for threat, and I let her read this one without flinching. Then she reaches up, and her hand curls around the back of my neck, and she pulls me down to her.

The first touch of her mouth against mine is slow, a choice made consciously, and the world narrows to the press of her lips and the warmth of her hand at my neck and the way five centuries of careful control simply… stop. She tastes like night air and something warmer underneath it, something that is purely, impossibly her. I slide one hand to her jaw and the other to the small of her back, and I kiss her the way I’ve wanted to since approximately the second time she looked at me like I was a problem she intended to solve.

When we finally break apart, it isn’t by much. Neither of us seems in any hurry to put real distance back between us.

Cali stays where she is, close enough that I can feel the warmth of her breath, her forehead brushing mine while the world slowly works its way back into focus. The open night air, the shining stars, and the hundred reasons why this is a bad idea.

None of them seems particularly important right now.

Her eyes stay closed for a moment, and I watch the tension leave her a piece at a time. Not all of it. Cali isn’t built that way. But enough. Then she looks at me.

There’s something different in her expression. The caution is still there, the intelligence and instinct that keep her alive. But they’re sharing space with something else, something that reaches into my chest and wraps around places I stopped acknowledging a long time ago.

“Okay,” she says quietly.

The word lands harder than it should.

Maybe because it isn’t really about the kiss.

Maybe because it feels like permission.