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“Then close your eyes.”

I closed them.

He kissed me.

It was a slow kiss, and a soft one, and it went on for a long time. His mouth was cool and then warm. His hands slid up into my hair. The spray fell on us like rain, and the light came up, gold and pink and green, and I felt the whole world wheel and settle and turn. I thought of the first kiss, on the ice, in the dark. I thought of how afraid I’d been. How sure I was that it would be nothing.

Kiss me and feel nothing.

I laughed against his mouth.

“What?” he murmured.

“I was thinking about that stupid bet.”

“Which?”

“The rink. I said if I kissed you and felt nothing, it was over.” I pulled back, grinning. “I lost.”

“I believe,” said Maksim, gravely, “that we both did.”

“We won. “

“I have been told that is what losing feels like, when you do it correctly.”

“You’re a nerd.”

“I am an old man.”

“You’re my old man.”

“Yes,” he said, and I saw it come up in his face: that slow, dawning, unstoppable joy. “That is precisely correct.”

He kissed me again.

MAKSIM

I was wrong about the poison.

I want to set that down, at the end, in the plain light of the morning, with the water falling behind us and the whole of his warm weight in my arms. I was wrong, and I am glad.

For a thousand years I believed that to love a mortal was to court a kind of death. That the mating bond, if it failed, was a venom. That it turned in the blood and killed the thing it touched. I built my life on that fear. I lived behind it, as a man lives behind a wall, and I told myself it was wisdom.

I did not understand that the poison was not in the bond.

It was in the silence. It was in every night I lay awake and did not reach. It was in every door I kept locked because I feared what was on the other side. The kiss, when it came, was not a poison. It was the antidote. It was a hot, clumsy, human hand on my face, on a rink, at midnight, saying: I’m not gonna break you.

And it was ice, in the end, only ice, cold and clear and thin and easy to crack.

It cracked, and it let the light in.

He lifted his head from my shoulder. He looked out at the falls, at the pool, at the rainbows arching over the stone, and I felt him take a long, slow, contented breath.

“We should come here every year,” he said.

“We shall.”

“On our anniversary.”