Every Room We Built
NICO
One Year Later…
One year later, I had abs.
I want to be clear about this. I did not earn the abs.
I did not do a single crunch or hold a single plank or engage in any form of deliberate abdominal conditioning.
The abs arrived on their own, sometime around month three of being a vampire, along with cheekbones that could cut paper and a jawline that made Evie say “oh, that's not fair” the first time she saw me in daylight.
Vampire blood apparently came with a complimentary renovation of the entire physical structure, and the renovation had opinions about body fat percentages that I had not been consulted on.
I was not complaining.
Draco found excuses to put his hands on my stomach. He touched my waist when he passed me in the hallway. He stared at my torso when I changed shirts in the morning with that he believed was subtle and that was visible from orbit.
“You're looking at my abs again,” I said.
“I am looking at the shirt.”
“The shirt is not on my body.”
“The shirt is in the vicinity of your body. My eyes are transitioning between surfaces.”
“Your eyes have been transitioning for four minutes.”
“The fabric is interesting.”
“It's a black t-shirt.”
“Black is a complex colour.”
I let him have it because the alternative was him being smug about everything.
The shop opened at six.
Not Second Life Antiques on the old block in Brooklyn, though that shopfront was still there.
Remy ran it now with a competence that had surprised everyone except Evie, who had apparently been training him in appraisal and inventory management for months without telling me.
The old shop was smaller and focused on the mid-range restoration work that kept the lights on and paid the bills.
Draco and I had built a new shop the ground up.
He had found the building, a converted warehouse on the border of Red Hook and Carroll Gardens with original exposed brick and twelve-foot ceilings and a freight elevator that still worked.
I had designed the interior to show the inventory the way it deserved to be shown.
Draco had funded it without blinking, which I had argued about for three weeks before accepting because the argument was not about money and we both knew it.
The sign above the door read Second Life & Associates in gold lettering on a dark background, and the Associates part was Draco's suggestion because he said a business should reflect its partnership.
The opening party was tonight and the warehouse was full.
Evie was by the bar. She was six months pregnant and radiant. She was drinking sparkling water and judging the wine selection and her left hand rested on her stomach.
Remy stood beside her with his arm around her waist, still mildly astonished after seven months of marriage that she had said yes. It was in his face every time he looked at her.
“Your brother is staring at his wife again,” Draco said, appearing beside me with a glass of wine in his hands.
“He does that.”
“Is it a Venn trait? The staring?”
“You stared at my abs for four minutes this morning.”
“Fair point”.”
My father was in the corner near the Victorian writing desk that was the centrepiece of the new collection.
He had spent the past year doing the slow work of becoming a man his sons could look at without flinching.
He came to the shop twice a week and helped with inventory and never once asked to be forgiven.
He was talking to Tomas. The two of them had formed an unlikely friendship built on the shared foundation of being older men who had made mistakes and were trying to fix them without expecting the fixing to be fast.
Mateo and Rowan were by the door. They had gotten together in the spring.
Mateo had made the first move, which surprised no one.
Rowan had taken three weeks to respond, which also surprised no one.
The first time I saw them kiss was in the Blackthorne kitchen at two in the morning when they thought no one was watching, and the tenderness of it had made me back out of the room and go find Draco and kiss him for no reason and refuse to explain why.
They were good together.
Amara was at the wine table with Luca. This was a pairing I had not seen coming and that made complete sense once I stopped being surprised by it.
Luca had been at Blackthorne for a year, slowly rebuilding an identity that had been constructed by someone else and was now, for the first time, his own.
Amara had overseen his recovery, and in the process of teaching him how to eat regular meals and sleep through the night, the two of them had developed a dynamic that was no longer supervisory.
Luca had been shy about it but Amara had noticed. And after two months of watching Luca turn red every time she entered a room, she had walked up to him in the Blackthorne kitchen, put her hand on his face, and said “Enough.”
That was three months ago. They were still figuring it out.
But Luca smiled now, which was new, and Amara laughed now, which was newer, and the two of them stood at the wine table with their shoulders touching and their glasses half-full and the easy silence of people who had found the person they didn't know they were looking for.
Elara sat in the armchair by the front window with Drake in her lap.
The two of them had developed a relationship that I did not fully understand and that Draco found mildly threatening.
Drake, who tolerated most people and loved very few, had decided that Elara was acceptable company, and Elara, who had spent a thousand years avoiding attachment, had decided that a cat with hostility issues was an appropriate companion for a witch in her twilight centuries.
Then there’s Draco who had been rebuilding his sun tolerance.
This was the funniest thing I had witnessed in my first year as a vampire.
The process of regaining sun resistance involved gradual, controlled exposure, which meant Draco stood in the Blackthorne garden at dawn for increasing intervals while Amara timed him with a stopwatch and I watched from the kitchen window and tried not to laugh.
The first week he managed four minutes before the burn became unmanageable.
By month three he was up to twenty minutes.
By month six, an hour. He was currently at approximately ninety minutes of direct sun exposure before he needed shade, which was a fraction of what he'd had before and was, according to him, proceeding at an acceptable pace.
He was less broody. That was the change that everyone noticed and nobody mentioned directly, because mentioning it would have made him self-conscious and the lack of broodiness would have been replaced by a different, more annoying form of composure.
But it was there. He smiled more. Not often, but the smiles arrived without being earned through sustained effort, and they stayed longer before the mask reassembled itself, and sometimes, when he thought no one was looking, the smile reached his eyes.
The party was winding down. The collectors had made their assessments. The Brooklyn restoration community had approved of the space. Tomas had given me a nod across the room that carried more weight than any review, because Tomas did not nod unless he meant it.
I was talking to Evie about the baby's room, which she wanted me to restore a cradle for, a request I had accepted immediately and that was going to consume the next three months of my life because Evie's standards were as high as her fire was hot.
When I looked up, Draco was standing in the middle of the room and the room had gone quiet around him in the way that rooms went quiet when Draco decided they should.
“I would like to say a few words,” he said.
The room settled.
“I am not good at this. Everyone in this room knows that, and most of you have suffered through my attempts to improve.” He paused. Amara smiled.
He looked at me.
“Then I met a man who restored broken things for a living.
He walked into my home and argued with me about where to put a lamp.
He fed a stray cat in my kitchen without asking permission.
He fell asleep in my library with sawdust in his hair.
He bled for the people he loved without hesitating and he fought for people he'd never met without being asked, and he opened rooms in my life that I had locked shut so long ago I'd forgotten they were there.”
My chest was tight and my eyes were burning.
“I built my whole life thinking I was constructing a fortress.
Nico walked in and I understood that I hadn't been building walls.
I'd been building a home. And it had been sitting empty, waiting for him, and I was too stubborn to notice until he rearranged the furniture and told me the lamp looked better by the window.” His voice cracked.
He let it. “He was right about the lamp.”
The room was very quiet. Evie was crying.
Remy was crying. Mateo's jaw was clamped shut and his eyes were bright.
Rowan had his hand over his mouth. Dad was looking at the floor and his shoulders were shaking.
Amara was pressing her lips together so hard they had gone white.
Luca stood beside her with wide, wet eyes.
Then Drake jumped off Elara's lap.
Draco reached into his coat pocket and dropped to one knee.
Drake trotted across the shop floor with a small velvet pouch in his mouth. He reached Draco's knee, dropped the pouch, sat down, and licked his paw.
Draco opened the pouch and took out a ring. It was dark iron, old, set with a single stone that was the deep blood-red of the bloodstone's crystal, and it caught the light of the shop.
“I have been told I am the most difficult man in this city. I am not going to argue with that assessment tonight. Nico, I am the most broken thing you have ever restored. Will you keep me? Will you stay in the house that was waiting for you? Will you argue with me about furniture for the rest of our lives? Will you marry me?”
The room held its breath.
“Oh my goodness, you dramatic man. Yes.” I squealed and ran up to him.
I pulled him to his feet by the lapels of his coat and kissed him, and the room exploded.
Evie screamed. Remy whooped. Mateo and Rowan were both clapping and both crying and pretending they were doing neither.
Amara had given up on composure entirely and was laughing with her hand on Luca's arm.
Dad was standing at the back of the room with tears running down his face and a smile that I had never seen him wear before and that looked like it fit.
I pulled back from the kiss.Draco's eyes were wet and his hands were on my face and the ring was still in his fingers, and I took it and put it on and the iron was warm against my skin and it fit perfectly.
“I love you,” I said.
“I love you,” he said.
I kissed him again. And for the first time in my life, every door was open and none of them were closing.