Page 109 of Blood and Bells

She looks at me like she’s already decided something and is just waiting for the rest of the world to catch up. Her hand comes to rest on my chest, catching slightly on the cable knit, and I still without meaning to.

I had intended to wait. There was, at one point, a structure to this. Timing. Atmosphere. Possibly a line that did not involve accidental rhyming.

She ruins all of that by being here, and it is perfect.

“I love you,” she says.

It happens in a kitchen that smells of thyme with a hint of overconfidence. The tap drips once. The stew cools. The books on the shelf lean into one another like they’ve agreed not to fall tonight.

And still⁠—

Everything shifts.

“Oh,” I say, as several centuries of language fail me entirely.

Her mouth twitches. “That’s all I get?”

“No,” I say, quickly. This is not a moment one fumbles without consequence, and I will not be a man who fumbles anything, especially not anything that involves Holly Frost. “No, you get considerably more. I’m simply reorganizing my entire internal landscape.”

She blows out a laugh, but her hand stays where it is.

“I was going to do this properly,” I admit. “There was a plan. It involved patience, and dignity, and possibly a poem that would not have survived scrutiny.”

“You wrote a poem?”

“One line,” I say. “It was…ambitious.”

She smiles, and that is the end of any remaining strategy.

“I love you,” I say.

I take her face in my hands—not because I practiced it, but because it feels like the correct thing to do when presented with something I intend to keep.

“I love you when you’re certain,” I add, “and when you’re not. When you’re organizing a town like a military campaign, and when you’re stealing my spoon and calling it instinct. I love you in the middle of chaos and at the end of it, and—” I glance around the kitchen, at the quiet, the ordinary miracle of it— “I love you here as well.”

Her eyes shine, and then—predictably, sensibly—she stops me talking.

The kiss is not the kind that announces itself. It’s not trying to prove anything. It’s familiar already, like it’s been waiting for us to stop pretending we didn’t know how this would end.

She presses herself against me. I follow, because I am not an idiot. Not about this.

Her hands slide up into my sweater, and I feel her relax—properly relax—under my hands like this is not a risk anymore, only a decision.

That does something far more dangerous than any declaration.

When we part, she doesn’t go far. Neither do I. Neither do her hands. This appears to be a part of our new arrangement.

“Good,” she says.

I nod. “Good.”

We return to the kitchen in theory. In practice, we orbit it. Plates are washed, eventually. A glass is dried twice. She confiscates the towel on the grounds that I am leaving philosophical streaks.

“You’re smudging,” she informs me.

“I am contemplating,” I correct.

“You’re contemplating in circles.”