Chapter Forty-Seven Learning Each Other
They spent the following weeks doing nothing of consequence at all, and Elena found she treasured it more than any of the danger and drama that had come before — long evenings on the terrace where Dante taught her, badly and with much laughter, to play the card games his father had taught him as a boy; slow Sunday afternoons in the library where she read aloud and he pretended to work while actually just watching her mouth shape the words; nights where they talked for hours about nothing important at all, simply for the pleasure of discovering each other without the shadow of debt or danger hanging over every conversation.
"Tell me something you've never told anyone," she said one night, tangled together in the dark, her fingers tracing idle patterns across his chest.
"I used to want to be an architect," he admitted, quiet and a little embarrassed, as though the confession cost him something.
"Before my father decided otherwise. I used to draw buildings in the margins of my schoolwork.
Bridges, mostly. I liked the idea of building something that connected two places that couldn't reach each other otherwise. "
"That's beautiful."
"It's naive. I was twelve." But his mouth curved, soft in the dark, at the memory regardless. "Your turn. Something you've never told anyone."
Elena considered it, tracing the line of his jaw.
"I used to think I'd never fall in love," she said.
"Not because I didn't want to. Because I watched my parents' marriage — all that silent tension, all that unspoken fear — and decided love was mostly just two people quietly disappointing each other for the rest of their lives.
I told myself I'd rather be alone than end up like that. "
"And now?"
"Now I think I just hadn't met the right disappointment yet.
" She laughed at his affronted expression, softening it with a kiss to his jaw.
"I'm teasing. Now I think I was wrong. I think love, done properly, is two people choosing each other again every single day, even after they've seen the worst of what the other person is capable of. Especially after that, actually."
Dante rolled her beneath him, slow and unhurried, his eyes tracing her face like he was still, after all these months, memorizing something he couldn't quite believe he'd been allowed to keep.
"I choose you," he murmured, "every single morning I wake up beside you.
I intend to keep choosing you for the rest of my life, tesoro, whether or not I ever learn to cook eggs. "
"That's an incredibly low bar."
"I contain multitudes." He kissed her, slow and thorough, and the rest of the night unfolded exactly as it so often did now — unhurried, certain, two people who had started as a debt and become, somewhere in the space between danger and ordinary Sunday mornings, something neither of them had known to hope for.