Page 13 of Into Ember

Slower.

Slower.

There.

I hold his face and feel everything settle.

I kissed him to calm him down.

Mostly.

“Better?”

“…Yeah.” He lets out a long exhale and the whole ridge of his shoulders comes down. “Thank you. I needed that.”

“I know.”

We stand there a moment longer, breathing the same air, and I don’t say any of the things I could say. Not about her. Not about us. Not about the way this always goes, him running loud and me standing still. He knows I know. That’s the arrangement. It has been for a very long time, and tonight is not the night to renegotiate it — tonight already has enough impossible things in it.

“You going to make it through dinner?” I ask.

He thinks about it. Honestly, which is rare.

“…Probably not.”

“Fair.” I let go of his face. “Let’s go see what happens.”

He huffs — almost a laugh, the first one in hours — and follows me down.

She looks up when we hit the bottom of the stairs. Both of us, together. Something crosses her face, quick and warm, and this one she says in a language I know.

She’s happy for us.

She’s caught something, she doesn’t know what, and she’s glad — glad like she would be for two men that have nothing to do with her. Somebody else’s story, their happily ever after.

She has no idea she’s the reason. She has no idea she’s ours — his, mine, all of it — and she turns back to her plate and says something to Rayner about load-bearing fireplaces, and the room laughs. Beside me Gunnar makes a sound like a man who has just been shot somewhere non-fatal.

Probably not, he said.

Definitely not is more like it.

Chapter 5

Elara

“Is the fireplace load-bearing?”

Rayner looks at the fireplace, then at me, with the expression of a man who wants very badly to give the right answer to a question he does not understand.

“It’s stone,” he says carefully.

“So that’s a yes.”

“That’s a — the wall is holding the wall up.”

“Agree to disagree.”

The guys laugh, and I let them, because the food is unfairly good and the fire is warm and my feet have been granted amnesty under the table, and for about eleven minutes I have allowed this dinner to feel normal.