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“I love you,” he said.

“I love you,” she said.

He sank into her slowly, and they both stopped breathing.

For a long moment neither of them moved. He stayed there, deep inside her, his forehead pressed to hers, and she could feel his heart slamming against her chest and her own heart slamming back. The sun was coming up. It came in through the east window across the bed, gold and pale, and she could see it on his shoulders and in his hair.

Then he began to move.

Slow. Deep. Every stroke deliberate, like a choice he was making, and making again. She wrapped her legs around him, her full soft thighs holding him close, and pulled him deeper, and he groaned into her neck. She ran her hands down the long muscles of his back and felt them working. He looked at her the whole time. He watched every small change on her face like it was something he wanted to remember for the rest of his life.

“Look at me,” she whispered, and he already was.

He sat back and pulled her up with him, into his lap, his arms wrapped all the way around her, and she wrapped her arms around his neck and her legs around his waist, and they moved together like that, chest to chest, skin to skin, so close there was no space between them anywhere. His mouth was at her throat. Her face was in his hair. She rolled her hips against him, slow and sure, and felt him shudder, and felt her own power in it, her body soft and strong and wholly hers, moving exactly the way it wanted to. The sun was on both of them now. Through the window over his shoulder she could see the whole frozen lake turning gold.

“You’re going to ruin me,” he said into her throat.

“Good,” she said, and rolled her hips again, slower, and he stopped talking altogether.

This, she thought. This is what it feels like.

Being chosen on purpose. Out loud. Over and over. By someone who had looked across the whole room from the very beginning and known.

And being free. Being so safe that she could be every part of herself at once, every soft and loud and wanting part of her, and have every single bit of it wanted back.

It built slowly, the way everything with him built. Warm and deep and certain, rising the way the light was rising over the lake. She felt it coming and didn’t rush it. She took his face in her hands and looked at him, and he looked back at her, and neither of them looked away.

“I love you,” she said. It came out easy this time. It came out like breathing.

“I’ve got you,” he said. “I love you. I’ve got you.”

She came apart in his arms with the Christmas sun on her back and his name on her lips, and he held her through every second of it, and followed her with his face pressed into her neck and I love you breaking out of him low and unsteady, like it had been waiting under everything for a very long time.

They stayed like that for a long while.

Neither of them moved. She could feel his heartbeat against hers, both of them slowing down together, until she couldn’t tell anymore which one was which.

And from somewhere across the valley, faint and clear through the cold morning air, the bells of the little white church on Elm Street began to ring for Christmas.

* * *

He made coffee.

She sat at her kitchen table in his flannel shirt, which came halfway down her thighs and smelled like woodsmoke and him, with her knees pulled up and her hair a disaster, and watched him move around her kitchen like he had always lived there.

He poured the coffee into two mugs. Her chipped blue one from the city. And the new one, the one she had made him in the school kiln, speckled brown, with the handle that leaned a little to the left.

He set them both on the table. Side by side. Close enough to touch.

Above them on the wall, Sophie’s drawing hung in its walnut frame. Main Street in the snow. Two small figures standing together between The Brook and the hardware store.

He sat down across from her and wrapped his hand around the crooked handle, and his thumb settled into the thumbprint she had pressed into the clay. It fit exactly. She had known it would. She had measured too, in her own way, from four months of watching his hands.

He noticed. She saw him notice. He looked down at his thumb in her thumbprint for a long moment.

He didn’t say anything about the thumbprint.

“I love you,” he said instead, to his coffee, like he was trying it out in the daylight.