Page 148 of Falcon’s Forever

"If you ask me that again I'm putting you back in the hospital myself."

He laughs, rough and surprised, and the laugh turns into something else the second I pull him down on top of me, all that careful restraint is finally, fully gone. His mouth finds my throat, my collarbone, and he moves lower, unhurried and thorough, learning every response my body gives him like he's cataloguing it for later. When his hand finally slides between us I arch up into it without a trace of hesitation, because there's nothing in this room tonight except him and want and six weeks of waiting finally, completely over.

"Falcon." His name breaks in half coming out of me.

"I've got you." His voice is wrecked, low, right against my ear. "However you want this. However hard, however long, I've got you."

"Then stop talking," I gasp, and he laughs again, breathless this time, and does exactly what I ask.

There's nothing careful about the hour that follows. He's thorough and unrelenting and exactly as attentive as he promised to be without once treating me like something fragile. He’s reading every gasp and shift of my body like a man determined to get this right, and when I finally, helplessly come apart under him, the sound that tears out of me isn't fear, isn't memory, isn't anything but pure, unshadowed want, and I feel him groan my name against my skin like it costs him something to hold on a second longer, and then he doesn't have to anymore, and we come apart together, tangled and gasping and completely, finally unguarded with each other for the first time since I came back into his life.

Afterward, wrapped around each other with his heartbeat slowing steady under my ear, I trace the new scar at his side, careful now in a different way, tender instead of anxious.

"Does it still hurt?"

"Not tonight."

I smile against his skin. "That's not an answer."

"It's the only one that means anything right now." His fingers move slow through my hair. "I love you. I know I keep saying it. I don't think I'm ever going to get tired of the way it feels leaving my mouth after five years of not being allowed to."

"Say it as many times as you need."

"I love you," he says again, and I feel it deep in my chest like it's finally, permanently found somewhere to live. "For real this time. No war standing behind it. No patch on the line. Just you, and me, and whatever we build next."

I press a kiss to the scar under my palm, over his heart, and let myself believe, for the first time in longer than I can remember, that whatever comes next, we're finally facing it the same direction.

Epilogue

Cara

There are thirty-one people at Sunday dinner, and I know because Emily counted twice, Harrier counted once and got into an argument with her about whether children should count as half a person because they eat less.

"That's not how math works," Emily says from across the clubhouse.

"It's exactly how math works." Harrier points a fork at her.

"Then you're wrong at math."

Rook nearly chokes on his beer. I lean back in my chair and let the chaos wash over me, because this is what Sunday dinner has become, an argument nobody started on purpose that somehow lasts through dessert.

It started with eight people. Now we need three tables pushed together, and there's a place at the end of the middle one that's always set and never filled, a small ceramic dish of the peppermints Carrot used to steal off Harrier's desk sitting where his plate would go. Nobody decided that formally. It just happened, the second week after, and it's stayed every week since, and nobody's ever needed to explain it to anyone new who joins us at this table.

His mother comes most months now. Not every week, grief doesn't work on a schedule that convenient, but often enough that Emily's learned exactly how she takes her coffee and Harrier's learned to stop swearing the second she walks in before he catches himself and does it anyway, which makes her laugh every single time in a way that used to make Falcon flinch and now just makes him quietly, fiercely glad. She sat in Carrot's old seat once, the first time, and none of us said anything, and she never has again, choosing instead to sit beside whoever needs the company most that week, which is its own kind of tribute to a boy who never once thought about himself first either.

Harrier's been campaigning for a fourth table ever since Maggie started bringing two of the women from Haven House most weeks, along with whichever prospects discover there's free food and decide that counts as an invitation.

Falcon says if Harrier drags in a fourth table, he can clean underneath all of them himself. The campaign's stalled, for now.

Emily catches me watching and narrows her eyes. "What?"

"Nothing."

"That was a look." She smiles at me.

"I don't know what you mean."

She turns to Sarah, who's helping Frankie cut a cake big enough to feed the whole yard. "Cara's doing the thing again."