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After a moment of what looked like an internal war, he blinked. And then he blinked again.

“Is it gone?”

He smiled. “No. It’s just not as good as a second ago. It was the perfect lighting.”

I hadn’t even noticed a difference, but then again, why would I? Taking his hand off my face, I pressed his palm to my lips and kissed it, then did the same to all of his fingers.

“I didn’t expect you,” he said after a long while.

“What do you mean?”

With a shrug, he passed his hand down his face and covered a yawn. “I don’t know. Obviously, I thought you were gorgeous. And mean. Which probably shouldn’t have done it for me. And I think I wasn’t even sure how I felt for a while other than I couldn’t stop thinking about you. And when I got hurt and you were there in the hospital…”

I braced myself.

“I didn’t expect to be relieved, but I was. In that moment, it felt like you were the only person who’d be willing to tell me the truth.”

I wanted to burrow in his arms, beneath his skin, go live in his chest so I could protect him from feeling shitty. Which was a weird-as-fuck mental image, but I was going to own that. Even if I wasn’t going to say it out loud.

“I’m sure you would have been fine if your friends had been with you,” I told him.

He laughed and laid his cheek against the top of my head. “Maybe. I don’t know. I kept hoping you’d come back, but I was too afraid to admit what that meant. I think…I don’t know. Maybe I just wasn’t in a good place to accept rejection.”

“There has been no rejection,” I reminded him. I pulled back and frowned. “Only enthusiastic consent and horniness.”

He burst into laughter, then took me by the chin and kissed me. Hard. “Yes. There has been a lot of that. Which is what I meant when I said I didn’t expect you. I didn’t expect this.”

“No regrets?” I asked, lying back against him.

He curled his arms around me. “No regrets.”

I wasn’t sure he’d stick to that the moment my aunties and dad arrived, but for now, I allowed it to be his uncontested truth.

“So.” I slid water across the counter to Tiago as I waited for the rice cooker to finish. There were fifteen minutes left, and the other decent thing I could make—a baked fish—was resting in the pan on the oven.

Tiago raised his brows. Though his eyes were fixed on a spot behind me, I knew I had his attention. “So…”

“Your family.” He groaned. “What did your brother have to say?”

We hadn’t talked about his phone calls with his nephew’s dad, though there had been several of them, and they were all long. I was also doing my level best to avoid thinking about Leon’s bullshit attempt to reach out to me.

If I fell down that rabbit hole, I’d never come out, and I was not going to let Leon ruin this one good thing I had in my life.

Tiago sighed as he sat back and ran his finger around the rim of his glass. “He was apologetic for using his son to drop that shit in my lap. He tried to cop an attitude with me for not doing a better job at lifting Oliver’s spirits.”

“Well, that’s fucking garbage,” I blurted.

Tiago snorted. “Yeah. Something is seriously wrong with them. They act like my life should be some poor blind man’s version of Oliver Twist, where I’m begging for scraps, but also that I should be a walking blind-man pride parade or something, ready to conquer all the mountains. They’re going to destroy that kid if they’re not careful.”

“They didn’t destroy you,” I pointed out. I leaned my forearm on the counter, then reached out to play with Tiago’s fingers. I couldn’t seem to stop touching him, and I kept waiting for him to pull away, but he never did.

He was everything Leon hadn’t been. And I hated that I’d met Leon first instead of someone like Tiago who’d be willing to take me as I was.

Why couldn’t I keep this forever?

“They didn’t destroy me because I’d already written them off for being shitty. But Oliver was the golden grandchild, and I’m not sure how well he’s going to do when all of that changes.”

Biting my lip, I studied his fingers. His hands were rough like all hockey players. Bitten nails and calluses, thick knuckles, scars from getting slashed with skate blades after fucking around playing shinny.