Bolin smiled as he admired Asami's profile. She dozed in her favored chair, her left hand resting lightly in her open book, her right dangling over the end of the chair's arm. He looked at the shelf behind her and let his eyes gloss over the exotic-sounding titles: Animal Dreams, Unaccustomed Earth, The Small Rain. Bolin had never been much of a reader; then again, it wasn't as if he and Mako had had much access to books as street children. Yet he got a certain pleasure out of watching Asami read, for her small movements were rarely more elegant or precise than when she gently turned a page or lightly penciled a note in a margin.

He felt as if he glowed with some sort of warmth that he couldn't identify. It wasn't only attraction to his fiancée, he thought, but something that he'd felt before, a long time ago. Something he'd once known, but seemingly had forgotten. He pondered it for a moment, then hit on the exact word: contentment.

Mild Sunday afternoons such as this hardly offered the bubbling joy that he typically identified as happiness, but with Asami aside from him, her soft beauty even more apparent than usual, and Pabu's furry body snuggled against his leg, he felt as if nothing could be more right in the world.