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Darkness cloaks us.

I take a slow breath.

Oscar cracks the blinds, letting a sliver of light in. Then he comes to me and puts his hands on my shoulders. “Po?”

“Yeah?”

“Get into bed.”

Even if I can’t hear it, I don’t miss the weight in his repeated instruction. Or how easy it is to obey him, and it reminds me of the night we met. When he asked absolutely nothing of me, but the moment his lips touched mine, I saw something older beneath his gentle calm, and I left him with a quiet certainty that if I ever handed him the reins, he’d know exactly what to do with them.

That certainty hasn’t diminished. If anything, it’s stronger now, and that side of Oscar, however buried deep it is, isn’t surprising.

What shocks me is how completely I trust it. How I crave it, even if I know he’s not—we’re not—ready to see it yet.

I take the rest of my clothes off and get in bed. Already naked, he does too, and by now, I’m so used to the sight of him checking his watch one last time before he settles, to him setting a juice carton on the bedside table in case he runs low in the night, I barely notice it.

Instead, my noisy brain catalogues how normal it feels for us to slide closer and say goodnight without words. Without anything, really before instinct has me rolling onto my side, my back to his chest as he wraps his inked arm around me, like he does in my bed, only this time, we haven’t just made each other come. We haven’t done anything but exist, and now we’re falling asleep together.

And it’s perfect.

I wake before dawn. For a heartbeat, nothing happens. Nothing grounds me. I’m untethered in a place I’ve never been before. Then comes the familiar jolt, as if I’ve been dropped into a silent world from the moon.

But this morning, though it’s still dark, like every morning I’ve woken up with Oscar, the shock of remembering what’s permanent—it doesn’t last. Doesn’t settle. Instead it ebbs, leaving me with the dreamlike heaviness of Oscar’s arm looped around my waist, his hand resting across my stomach, and his beard tickling my shoulder, and it’s as perfect as it was when I fell asleep.

I close my eyes and almost knock out again, but the need to see Oscar nudges at me—a habit I’ve formed by accident.

If I wake first, I look.

I check.

Carefully, I roll onto my back.

His lips move, an unintelligible murmur, but I’ve learned he does that in his sleep, even when his face is as peaceful as it is now, all the steady responsibility smoothed away.

He’s so gorgeous like this.

I mean, Oscar’s always gorgeous. Whatever he’s doing, whatever he’s feeling. But away from the weight of responsibility that never really leaves him, the dim pre-dawn light softens the lines of a man who’s hauled nets, carried his son, and survived a storm that should’ve broken him. He’s a soul who belongs wherever he is and I take a moment to soak up his easy masculinity before I remember why I turned over in the first place.

Unbidden, my gaze shifts to the bedside table. The juice carton from last night is empty and crushed into a neat square for recycling. Which means he went low in the night and dealt with it while I slept, and then came back to how we fell asleep.

Back to me.

Back to us, maybe, and I like the warmth unfurling inside me as I check his watch and clock the steady line on the graph. I like that he found me in the night—in his sleep, perhaps—and never let go.

The room is still dark. The house quiet in ways that have nothing to do with sound. I rise and pull on my clothes without contemplating why I’m awake enough to bother.

Something draws me to the window. An intangible tug in my gut that, for a moment, is stronger than the pull in my heart to stay with Oscar.

I peer through the gap in the blinds. For a second all I see in the soft outline of the horizon, Porth Luck bleeding into farmland—my land—and absorb the feeling that comes with that. Then light flashes, small and moving in the top field, and cold tension floods me.

Lamping?

No. It’s the wrong time of year. The nights are too short and the crops too high, and I have no livestock for anyone to steal⁠—

The light moves. Circling before it seems to come to a stop and cut out, darkness flooding the field again.

Breath caught, I wait for another flare. But it doesn’t happen, and disquiet builds in my gut, every instinct I possess wide awake and razor-sharp with the need to defend what’s mine.