40. Leah
LEAH
Time doesn’t march here. It meanders.
That’s the thing no one tells you about peace—it’s not loud. It doesn’t announce itself with banners and horns. It shows up in the small, quiet hours. In the soft clink of dishes being stacked in the drying rack. In the way the light moves through the window at the same time every morning.
On Glimner, time passes gently. Like it trusts us not to waste it.
Our cottage sits perched on a bluff above the western surf. One of those squat, sunwashed little places built back when island zoning laws didn’t assume secrecy meant danger. The windows are round, like portholes. Salt crusts the sills no matter how often I wipe them.
The floor hums with old solar lines.
The sea always whispers just outside.
Inside, everything breathes slow.
Kalev fixes the hinges on the back gate in the morning while Clancy pretends to fly over the garden beds. Our son’s laugh echoes through the soil like sunlight, bright and stubborn. Kalev grunts at the bolt rust but his hands are gentle. He’s always gentle, these days.
He cooks more than I do.
He tells Clancy stories before bed—long, winding tales about vakutan scouts and sky islands and ships that can talk. His voice lowers into that deep, melodic rhythm that used to command entire battlefields. Now it tucks our son into sleep.
And me?
I wake up without flinching.
I move through rooms without listening for surveillance clicks or drone wings or footsteps that don’t belong.
It still startles me, sometimes. The ease of it.
Like I’m waiting for the other boot to drop, only to remember we burned the boots. Both of them. Together.
Clancy grows fast. Stronger every week. His shoulders are already broadening in that way that mimics his father. His skin changes with the light—peach to bronze to dusky rose, depending on the hour. His eyes, though, are all Kalev. Sharp and dark and full of questions.
He asked me last week what a “secret operation” was.
I looked up from the dishes and nearly dropped a plate.
Turns out he overheard one of the neighbor kids talking about League spies.
Kalev just arched a brow and said, “A very bad idea.”
Clancy giggled like it was the best joke he’d ever heard.
That’s what amazes me the most. Not the safety. Not the structure.
The joy.
Kalev hums when he works now.
Sometimes it’s Vakutan. Sometimes not. But there’s melody in him where before there was only mission.
We plant herbs together. Repair the fence. Catch fish off the rocks with long reels and zero finesse. He grumbles about the bait. I grumble about the heat. Clancy falls in the tide at least once a week and insists it was on purpose.
There’s a kind of domestic choreography to it all.
He reaches for my hand without thinking. Wraps an arm around my waist when I lean past him in the kitchen. Leaves little written notes on the wall screen—water heater fixed, dinner thawed, love you.
We don’t talk about the war.
Not because we can’t.
Because we don’t need to.
We carry the weight. But we don’t let it steer.
This morning, I find him barefoot on the porch, sipping citrus tea and watching the horizon. The robe hangs low on his hips. His hair’s still mussed from sleep.
I lean against the doorframe and just look.
He senses me there without turning.
“You’re staring.”
“You’re pretty.”
He smirks. “You say that like it’s a warning.”
I pad barefoot across the deck and slide into his lap.
He doesn’t even flinch. Just shifts his cup, loops his arm around me, presses a kiss to the inside of my wrist.
“Clancy still asleep?” he asks.
“Probably pretending not to be so he can eavesdrop.”
We sit like that for a while.
Not talking.
Not rushing.
Just being.
Eventually, he speaks again.
“You think it’ll last?”
The question doesn’t shock me.
But the softness in it does.
I turn my head to meet his eyes.
“I think we’ll fight for it if it doesn’t.”
He nods. Slow. Accepting.
Then: “I never thought I’d have this.”
I reach up and trace the line of his jaw with my thumb.
“You earned it.”
He catches my hand and kisses the inside of my palm. Holds it there against his cheek like a vow.
The tide changes.
Wind picks up off the surf.
Somewhere down the hill, Clancy whoops with joy—probably having successfully launched himself off another rock ledge with zero regard for gravity.
Kalev groans.
“I swear, that boy inherited your chaos gene.”
“You love it.”
“I tolerate it with deep admiration.”
I laugh into his shoulder.
This is peace.
Not the absence of danger.
But the presence of something worth protecting.
And knowing it’s yours.
Not borrowed.
Not conditional.
Ours.
We don’t talk about the war unless someone asks.
Even then, we keep it short. Truthful, but not raw. Like running a finger along a scar—acknowledging the shape of it, but not pressing hard enough to reopen.
Clancy asked me once if his dad had been a soldier.
I told him yes.
Then I told him what mattered more: that Kalev became a father who came home.
We stand in the garden together most evenings, watching the sun pull long gold streaks across the surf. The herbs lean toward the light like they believe it’s permanent. Sometimes I think I do, too.
Kalev pulls weeds with an intensity that would make a League commander nervous. He teaches Clancy how to spot invasive growth by the stem curve. He tells him soil is memory, and it forgives if you treat it right.
I watch them—my men, my world—and I realize something profound:
We’re not surviving anymore.
We’re building.
There’s a difference. A vast, aching difference.
Survival is teeth and tension and checking the locks twice. It’s counting meals and planning exits. It’s holding your breath in your own home because your past might hear you breathing.
Building?
It’s choosing a paint color just because it’s pretty. It’s baking three loaves of bread when you only need two. It’s making space. Planting roots. Leaving marks on the land because you believe you’ll be here long enough to see them grow.
Kalev started carving.
At first, it was just wood scraps. Driftwood pieces smoothed by tide and time. Now the shelves are full of little figures—birds, fish, a lopsided vakutan scoutship Clancy insists is perfect.
When I asked him why, Kalev just shrugged.
“Something to leave behind,” he said.
Not because he expects to go.
But because he knows we’ll stay.
I carry that in my chest now. Like warmth. Like breath.
We tell stories over dinner, not war reports. Clancy tells us what the neighbor kid said about sea monsters in the reef. I tell him I’ve seen bigger teeth on his father before breakfast. Kalev hums and lifts an eyebrow like it’s a compliment.
The house is messy.
The good kind.
Boots by the door. Crumbs on the table. A laundry basket perpetually half-sorted. Clancy’s shoes in places they shouldn’t be.
Peace doesn’t look like perfection.
It looks like living.
I catch myself singing sometimes. Old tunes. Songs from before everything broke. Kalev never interrupts. Just listens like the sound fills something quiet in him, too.
Sometimes, late at night, we sit with our backs against the porch railing, legs tangled, stars above us thick as dust. He’ll reach for my hand, and I’ll let him. No reason. No defense.
Just because we can.
The past doesn't press down on me like it used to. It still exists—I still wake up with echoes sometimes—but it doesn’t own me.
I dreamed last week of the camp.
But in the dream, I walked out.
Not ran.
Not hid.
Walked.
Kalev told me that means something.
He’s right.
We framed new photos last week.
One of Clancy standing on a rock with both fists in the air like a champion. One of Kalev kissing my cheek while I try to pretend I’m annoyed. One of the three of us, blurry with motion, laughing so hard it made the cam tilt.
I look at them every morning.
Proof of life.
We’re not waiting for the other shoe to drop.
We tossed the damn shoes in the sea and watched the tide take them.
I still keep emergency packs in the back closet.
Still have a contact or two buried deep in secure channels.
But they don’t rule me.
They’re just shadows.
And we walk in daylight now.
It starts like a whisper against the sea.
One second, we’re walking barefoot along the tide line, hand in hand, sand sticking between our toes and the air thick with salt and citrus. The next, the sky splits open and summer comes down in sheets.
Warm. Heavy. Glorious.
I shriek, more out of instinct than protest, tugging Kalev’s arm. He doesn’t move fast—just tips his head up like he’s listening for something ancient and holy. His shirt goes dark with water in a heartbeat, clinging to every inch of carved muscle like it was tailor-made to worship him.
“You planned this,” I accuse, laughing as the rain pelts harder.
“Did I?” He grins, slow and wicked. “Guess I’m lucky then.”
“Lucky?” I wipe at my eyes, blinking through the downpour. “We’re drenched.”
“We’re alive.” His voice drops into something low and reverent. “And together.”
That shouldn’t undo me. But it does.
He threads his fingers through mine and pulls me toward the dunes, where the slope dips and the brush grows taller, offering some illusion of privacy—though the rain’s so thick now it may as well be a wall.
I let him.
No, I follow him.
Our bodies are soaked through, clothes plastered to skin, breath fogging between sudden kisses and laughter and the slap of water off our cheeks.
By the time we stumble beneath a wind-blown cypress, Kalev’s got me pressed back against the tree trunk, both of us panting, pupils blown wide. He cages me with his body, not rough but definite. Certain.
The way only he can be.
I reach for the hem of his shirt and he lets me strip it up over his head, water pouring off the fabric as it hits the ground.
God, he’s beautiful.
Not perfect—not untouched. But mine.
His skin is battle-map and worship-ground both. Scars I know by heart. Heat I crave like oxygen.
“Kalev,” I whisper, running both hands down his chest, watching him shiver at the contrast of rain-chilled air and my touch.
“You sure?” His voice is raw, hoarse, held tight.
I nod.
And then I kiss him like it’s the only thing that’s ever made sense.
He lifts me easily, palms gripping my thighs, pressing me back into the tree. My legs lock around his waist like instinct. Like home.
The rain drums a steady rhythm around us, louder now, drowning out everything else.
His hands find my hips.
My shirt joins his on the ground.
He kisses down my neck, my collarbone, teeth grazing skin like a promise.
I gasp when his fingers slip beneath the waistband of my soaked shorts. He finds me wet for him already—more than the rain, slick and ready and aching. His breath stutters against my jaw.
“Fuck, Leah…”
He doesn’t make me wait.
He never does.
His fingers slide inside me, curling just right, and I arch into him with a moan, nails digging into his shoulders. The tree bark behind me scrapes rough but I don’t care. Not when he’s inside me like this, coaxing every whimper from my throat with slow, patient precision.
I come apart on his hand with a gasp, shaking under the weight of it, and he doesn’t stop—just holds me through it, whispering things in Vakutan I don’t fully understand but feel down to my bones.
When I catch my breath, I drag his face back up to mine and kiss him hard.
“Now,” I murmur against his mouth. “I need you now.”
He doesn’t need telling twice.
His pants are already open, his cock thick and flushed and pressed hot against my belly.
He rolls a condom down with the kind of practiced ease that makes my stomach flutter.
Then he’s inside me, one slow push at a time, filling me until I can’t think, can’t breathe, can only feel. I cry out, head tipping back, and he buries his face in my neck.
“God, Leah,” he groans. “You’re everything.”
We move like the rain decides the tempo.
Steady. Deep. Unrelenting.
He fucks me like he’s pouring all the years we lost back into me, one stroke at a time. No rush. No cruelty. Just us. Together. Real.
My fingers claw at his back, his name ripped from my throat again and again.
And when I come this time, it’s not desperation.
It’s celebration.
Kalev follows me over the edge with a curse and a groan and my name like a prayer.
He doesn’t let go.
Not for a long time.
We sink to the wet sand, tangled and panting and so full of each other it hurts.
He pulls me onto his chest and wraps his arms around me like he’ll never let go again.
“I love you,” he whispers into my soaked hair.
“I know,” I whisper back. “Me too.”
The rain eases eventually.
But we don’t move.
There’s nothing left to chase.
Only everything left to keep.