It isn't just us, Lieu stepped back in through the apartment door, and I shielded the flame of the candle I was holding from the gust of air. His teeth chattered. I asked the neighbours—the entire floor is out. Probably the entire building then.

I can't see any lights out the window either. I glanced out it again—but there was nothing visible but the reflection of the moon on the snow and the swirling, lashing flakes slamming against the glass. This is bad, then.

Ping next door said that this is the worst storm he's ever seen, and he's lived here all his life. I clenched my teeth against the urge to chatter them. I was from the North Pole. I had seen plenty of storms like this—my bones ached just thinking about the singular one that I had been caught in. This is three days now.

Blizzards rarely hit Republic City even with how far north it was. It was because of the bay—we got ocean winds from the Fire Nation more than inland storms from the northern Earth Kingdom. We had gotten unlucky this time, though. The blizzard had hit suddenly and without warning. The entire city was down. The radio had stopped broadcasting, the telegraph lines were down, the electricity now too. Everybody was snowed in.

I heard Lieu's footsteps and felt him move behind me, wrapping his arms around my chest and curling close before I tugged the towel back over the window. It was cold. It reminded me too much of home, and the look on my brother's face as I had stared him down in the snow, and thrown everything I had ever loved away.

We should go back to bed, Lieu told me, and I nodded. We moved back to the bedroom by the light of the candle, and shed our clothes, layer by layer, onto the floor in piles beside the bed, I set the candle on my bedside table, and we climbed in before the cold could seep into our bones. The cheap Republic City apartments weren't exactly built for this kind of weather—they were better suited for the summer months, when at least you could get a nice breeze going. In the winter all that you could do was try desperately to stay warm—and fail. Thus, body heat.

Crammed into bed and knotted as tightly with Lieu as I could be, I turned and slid one arm around his chest, pillowed my head on his bony shoulder, and he sighed, tangled our legs tighter.

It'll get warm again soon, he said, like he believed it. How long do blizzards at the North Pole last?

Depends. I closed my eyes, smelled his skin. It can be a few hours, or a few days. I didn't want to think about the North Pole. There was one when I was five that lasted two weeks. That one I did remember well—it had been before Bending had broken apart our family. It had been so cold that my parents had finally consented and we had all crammed into bed together, Tarrlok and I pressed between their bodies, my mother sleeping on my father's shoulder, and Yakone telling us stories long into the night. It had come at Midwinter, and it had been dark for a long, long time. Tarrlok probably didn't remember it, he had been too young. I hardly did.

Our family had never really managed any memories anywhere near that good. I only wished I could go back in time and find myself sitting in that bed, listening to my father's heartbeat, and tell myself to never show my Bending to my father.

He wasn't even my father in my head anymore. Just Yakone.

Lieu brought me out of those thoughts with a kiss to my temple, and then to my lips, and I closed my eyes, pressed them away. Those people, that life, was gone. And I would never look back.

— Chapter Seven : —

Sir, he may live:

I saw him beat the surges under him,

And ride upon their backs; he trod the water,

Whose enmity he flung aside, and breasted

The surge most swoln that met him;

And oar'd himself with his good arms in lusty stroke

To the shore, that o'er his wave-worn basis bow'd,

As stooping to relieve him: I not doubt

He came alive to land.

[ The Tempest, Act II, Scene i ]

Summer. I had forgotten how hot it could get. Born in the North Pole, I had grown up in snow and ice, and although when it got too cold I tended to get kind of tetchy, I wasn't used to the heat. In Republic City we'd always had fans, or at the very least a good breeze, and that had been enough. Once we'd been underground we had gotten central air, and even if it wasn't all that great, it only meant in summer that I would lay around on the floor when nobody was around in just my loose slacks and do my paperwork and speechwriting down there with something cool to drink.

However, things had changed since then. The farmhouse did not have the best circulation, and it got stuffy. There also weren't many windows, and even with the door open it didn't make for a good breeze. I couldn't exactly strip down anymore, not with my burns, so I ended up doing the next best thing.

I could use my Waterbending without fear now. So, I started making ice around the place and holding it together by strength of concentration. The first time Lieu came in and found me sitting in a frosted-over chair at a frosted-over table drinking icy water, he stared at me like I had grown a second head, then decided why not because he was just as hot.

Caring for the farm was surprisingly easy. As the plants started to sprout more Lieu started to teach me about what he remembered from being a child here on this farm—how to grow and tend to crops and a field, and I picked up pointers. I had always been a fast learner. We rose at the same time, early in the morning, and I would work the rice paddy and care for the animals and water the farm plants for the morning while he set up the building for that day and worked on ploughing the large back field, a slow and large job, so that we could grow more food in the late summer and early fall if things went well. We would eat lunch and then keep working in the afternoon, only this time together. There wasn't anything my Waterbending could do for building a house, and with my arm as weak as it was and my loss of motion and muscle mass I couldn't exactly climb up on top of the house like he could, but I could hand him things and hammer nails in left-handed. It only took two weeks of us working together before we had managed to cobble together the back bedroom and another week for him to set up the roof.

We were lucky that it never rained in that time. In fact, it was an unusually dry summer. With Lieu working and my still needing to get down fine motor skills, he would stay at the farm all day and I would walk into town, get to know the people there. The older men and women who had lived there their whole lives remembered him from his childhood, and very easily took to me when I used the skills my mother had taught me as a young man—be kind to your neighbours, always be polite to the women, make good deals, help anybody you can—and we were accepted. Even if people did occasionally comment quietly about how strange it was that we lived together and weren't brothers.

I wasn't certain what we were. Friends, maybe. Lovers, not any more. Companions, yes. Partners, certainly. But nothing I could put a name to, and the one time I asked it of the bedroom late at night, Lieu made a noncommittal noise in the back of his throat to the wall and we never brought it up again.

We hadn't figured that part of our lives out yet. And as comfortable as we were with each other, I couldn't breach his trust, or put myself too close to him. He seemed to feel the same way. That closeness that we had possessed before, that ability to look one another in the eye, or even just read emotion from body language and hand signals and half an expression, was gone. He had forgiven me, but I still hadn't forgiven myself. There was a wall between us, just as solid as the one he had built to make us a bedroom.

It would probably never come down.

The night we moved our personal things into the bedroom, I sat on the mattress where I had come back from the dead and looked at my hands. My fingers were still scarred and they always would be, and the weight on my shoulders was different. A mouse scuttled out of the newly-built woodwork and stared at me, sniffed its nose, tilted it's head on the side.

I hesitated, raised my arm, and tried to reach for it's blood, to pull, to tug, to make it do my bidding. I clenched my hand as tight as I could. Felt the water surging in its veins, and jerked it like I was making it stand on its hind legs.

Nothing happened. The mouse continued sniffing at me, ran over past my feet, and back into the floorboards to burrow out.

I still possessed the knowledge and strength of Bending to Bloodbend—but the ability was gone. And for some reason, I didn't think it was Chiblocking that had done that.

Something told me it had done that all on its own.

Midsummer day dawned bright and painfully hot. Outside the window a cicada screamed at the top of its lungs and Lieu made a quiet noise into his pillow—a groan of pain.

"Shut up," he grumbled at it. The cicada ignored him and just buzzed louder. We got dressed in companionable silence, and as much as I admired the strong muscles of his shoulders and arms, only made more solid by the time he had spent farming and building, he didn't once look at me. I didn't blame him.

Whatever he had been attracted to, any looks or definition or handsomeness I had possessed on top of my twisted soul, was long, long gone. The outside had been made to match the inside. And even as I tried to lighten the weight on my chest, to clear the air, to deal with what I had done and accept my own mistakes, I couldn't fix the outside. I was a broken shell of a man. And I had almost broken him, too. Lieu owed me nothing. He might have still loved me, but it would never be the kind of love we had shared before.

Tossing up my hood and going outside with the morning bowl of rice, eating with the bottom of my mask tapped up, I watched while Lieu limbered up, stretching and getting himself awake before he washed his head off under the pump and shook the water out of his hair and looked past me, up at the clouds.

Running fingers back through the short black strands and shaking off the water, picking up the cloth that he had laying on the bench by the pump to towel it dry, Lieu straightened and draped it around his neck. It was too hot for him to wear clothes, and his skin, although pale, tanned surprisingly well—probably his Earth Kingdom heritage—and he went around in an undershirt and nothing more. I did not have that luxury. I looked up to follow his gaze then.

Sitting at the edge of the horizon over in the direction of the bay was a black band of clouds that stretched all across the sky. Running his hand over his face, he leaned on the pump, and was opening his mouth to say something when—

"Lieu Te!" It was a cracking, older voice, and we both turned to look down at the lane. The man hobbling toward us was named Kane, and he was the man that owned the general store in town. "Noa!" I didn't feel comfortable going by it, but Lieu had a point when he pointed out that the name Amon and a mask, even this far out of Republic City, would turn heads. I needed an alias, even if it was just a fairly thin one. He had explained that as the name that he had given to the woman that had healed me, and so we stuck with it. "I'm glad you two are up." I lowered my rice bowl as Kane climbed up the small hill to our house and walked over to Lieu, pointing at the band of clouds in the sky. "An emergency telegraph just came in from the City. Apparently it's a storm, a big one too! Air Temple Island was so badly hit that they had to evacuate and Councilman Tenzin's family hardly made it off safely. Apparently the Avatar went all shiny and caused the seas to calm long enough to make it off." I took a slow breath.

Just thinking about her made me want to put my face in my hands and question everything that I was.

"Anyway, it's headed right toward us. It should be here around sunset—you'll want to make sure you get everything inside and safe!"

"Thanks." Lieu looked down at Kane and smiled. "We'll be sure to. I'm glad you told us."

"I'm glad I thought to come by!" Kane laughed, a high cackle. "You two are too far out to get the news easy and it's too early in the morning to have the radio on—figured you would rather know now than later in the afternoon. You two be careful out here today!"

"Thank you, Kane." I nodded at him, and he merrily waved his walking stick at both of us.

"Well, you have Noa!" He laughed at Lieu. "You two should be nice and dry! Just divert the rain, eh?" My Waterbending had become known by the townspeople, it was hard to hide it when I was watering our fields with it—and now they came to me for healing, since I was the only person in the area with the knowledge and ability. I had fixed up the rheumatism Kane had in one knee just a week or so prior.

"Something like that." I smiled at him slightly from behind my mask, but he couldn't see it, and Kane went on his way again, one hand on the small of his back, hobbling back in toward town. Lieu watched his retreating back until he vanished and then turned to look toward me.

"I guess we have our work cut out for us."

"Good thing the stable has doors and a roof," I replied, and he nodded.

"We had better get started. If it's as bad as all that, it's probably a typhoon. It could wipe out our entire fields."

"I'll check on the plants and make sure there's a solid enough dam around the fields if you get the animals." Lieu nodded to me, his cool blue eyes hard with resolve, and we finished breakfast quickly and started working.

The morning and afternoon went by in a flash. Lieu cobbled together a better, sturdier roof for the Ostritchhorses and crammed the Goosehens in with them, while I took down to the riverbed. There was no point watering the plants when it was about to pour rain for Spirits knew how long, so instead of wasting my time on that I tugged off my sandals and socks and left them on the riverbank and planted myself about ankle-deep in the stream. I was no Earthbender, but there were plenty of things I could do while improvising.

Using my left arm, my right hanging almost-uselessly at my side, I got a good amount of water out of the river and, using it as a whip, lashed out a trench around the rice paddies (because even rice would drown if you got it wet enough) and around the fields, and then I let the water soak into the dirt, tugging it like the waves of the ocean up out of the river and onto the bank until there was a huge muddy section, and I bent the water in that to make a large dam on the side of the river, blocking off both the rice and our own fields—we could easily break it down after the rains left.

Using that same method, I blocked off all the sides of the front two fields and the garden and most of one side of the paddy and then curved it around the house as well before getting dressed again. By that time, the sun was getting low in the sky and my stomach was growling and there was aching exhaustion in my bones, but we would be safe.

The clouds roiled low and angry in the sky. The rain was visible lashing down out of them all across the landscape as far as the eye could see around the horizon, and it was getting dark. The sun was being eclipsed by them, even as it set.

Lieu and I met back up at the house and glanced over one another's handiwork. "Do you think the roof can take it?" We had patched it several times, but it was still weak.

"I hope so," he said, looking past my head. "I should really nail over the windows so the wind doesn't break them. Let me go get some wood." I nodded, and he went around the side of the house to the half-built room that was currently our shed/storage area/workspace even if it didn't have a roof, and then I heard him swear.

Running was out of my purview, it exhausted me and my legs didn't move nearly well enough, but I walked over quickly and looked around the side of the house. He was holding two slats of wood.

"I used the last of our nails reinforcing the stable," he said quietly, and looked up at me. "We need more."

"I can ice the wood to the windows—"

"If they get broken in, the entire inside of the house will be soaked. Including us. No, I need to go get more." Simultaneously, we both looked toward the clouds.

They were getting closer, and fast. The sun at the edge of the horizon was nearly covered by them completely. It was twenty minutes into town and the general store on an ostritchhorse, and I looked back at him. "Lieu, you can't."

"Cook dinner. I'll be back before you know it. I can beat those clouds." He shot me a smile, and then started jogging down the hill, strong, powerful legs pumping. I knew him—he could sprint a mile in about five minutes. But if those clouds got closer much faster...

He was too far gone already to stop him. I went inside and started to cook. He would get back just fine, I told myself, while I stirred up a bowl of noodles one-handed, my right arm hanging limp and nearly-useless at my side. It took time. Long enough that the clouds had covered the almost-set sun, and I listened as the rain started to patter down, the wind started to blow, and when I heard the first crack of thunder, I jumped and went to the front door and opened it.

The force of the blast of wind that hit me almost made the door close again. Reflexively, I threw up my left arm and covered my face, even if I had a mask to do that. The rain was pounding against the ground, and Rentu the ostritchhorse made a loud squawk of fear. Lightning cracked through the sky, illuminating our fields.

I couldn't see Lieu anywhere. "Lieu!" I shouted into the storm, and it was whipped back at me and nearly silenced. For a moment I hesitated, glanced back at the inside of the house, and then I stepped out, dragged the door shut, and just in case iced the handle and the catch closed to keep it from opening.

I stared up into the sky, the rain pouring down, the ominous clouds completely blacking out the sky. It was dark, and the wind whipped past, and I took a deep breath, and then raised my left hand, and stepped out onto the path from the front door.

The rain above me froze, and it was carefully that I crafted myself a water bubble out of it to keep dry. But, the rain wasn't getting any lighter, and after my first step out of the windbreak of the house, the gusting wind almost knocked me aside and it was reflexes and the muscles of my left leg that kept me upright. "Lieu!" I tried again, but there was still no answer. With the rain coming down as hard as it was, I couldn't risk stopping more of it, so I hesitated there.

If I left and the house came down, what would we do? If I left and got lost out there in the storm, he would be heartbroken. But he was lost out there, and I was damned if I wasn't going to at least find him to be lost with him. The faster the better—the longer we were both out in this weather the worse it would be in the long run.

Walking was one thing. I hadn't yet tried to push my body past that and Bending, with how badly I was burned, also negatively impacting my ability to self-cool with so much of an area to sweat from (my back) totally gone. But this was an emergency. People out in this weather would get killed—and at that moment, people also included the love of my life.

I started running.

"Lieu!" My voice didn't carry far in the force of the storm as it blew me down the path in front of the house, but at the very least I was dry. "Lieu!" It was like I was seven again, and Tarrlok had lost his pet starfishotter and I was calling for it on the tundra while he sat inside and cried with our mother. "Lieu, where are you?" The storm whipped harder in response, the wind howling, the trees of the forest creaking next to me as I dug my heels into the path to keep from being totally blown over. If I lost my footing here I would probably never get it back.

Walking to the edge of the path and ducking into the trees to use them as a windbreak, I kept moving as fast as I could, my sandals catching in the undergrowth. "Lieu!" Still nothing but the moaning wind in response. "Lieu!" A twig snapped beneath my foot and I paused, closed my eyes, and listened.

This wasn't working.

Flattening against one of the trees, the damp bark digging into the remains of what had once been my back, I crossed my arms over my chest. I was dry, but I needed to find Lieu—he wouldn't be dry. I needed an alternative to blindly running around and shouting for him.

So I exhaled a slow breath and extended my senses. I might not be able to Bend blood anymore, but there was still water in blood—I could still sense it. If he had come into the forest for shelter too, he would probably be close enough that I could sense him. At first all I felt was the forms of animals in the undergrowth, then larger ones hiding, and then finally—there. I was no Earthbender with a seismic sense, but I could feel the figure that I knew well enough, and I opened my eyes, started moving again toward him between the trees, keeping my water barrier up one-handed, calling his name until I finally heard him shout in response and I hurried my steps.

He was about fifty feet into the forest, huddled beneath a tree. As soon as I was close enough to him I tossed out the edge of my bubble to hold him too, and then with my right hand, I tugged all the water from his clothes and hair and tossed it aside onto the ground.

He looked up at me, blue eyes pale and the colour of the sky just before dawn, shaking still from being cold and wet, and took a few steps closer. It was humid and warm in spite of the howling wind and lashing rain, but that didn't change anything about what being sopping wet did to you. He grinned at me awkwardly and held up a hand.

He had a bunch of nails.

"Well, at least I got them."

"Who's the idiot now," I said, moving closer and checking him over. He had no serious injuries as far as I could tell, as far as getting blown over or hurt by the typhoon went, he just looked wet and scared and annoyed. "You could have gotten killed or lost out here."

"Lucky for me I had you to come find me, huh." I hesitated and then hugged him, and he was warm in my arms. Still slightly damp even though he wasn't soaking anymore, and he hugged me back one-armed. It was the most intimate contact we'd really had as I pressed my face into his shoulder, breathed in the smell of his skin mixed with the scent of the rain, and pulled back a moment later before either of us started thinking about it. It was still pouring, and still howling with wind.

"We need to get back and nail up those windows."

"Yeah, we do."

"Stay close to me—I don't know how much wider I can make this bubble." The rain was really pounding down, and the wind was making it very hard to protect us. I was no Airbender, able to stop the winds. I could just calm the rains in a small area. Lieu nodded and he took a spot behind my right shoulder, somewhere I was plenty used to him being, and we fought our way back into the wind toward the farm.

It was significantly harder than it had been when I had been walking in the same direction as the wind—now the gusts were against us, and more than once it was only Lieu's uncanny ability to pretend to be a solid wall that kept us both from flying over, because every time the wind threatened to rip me off my feet and break down the bubble I would lose half my concentration and my footing, but he had one strong arm and a strong chest to keep me upright.

Together we battled our way back to the farmhouse, and laboured up the hill. The plants were being lashed by the rain, and the ostritchhorses were still crying into the storm, although their stable stood solid. The door was still closed thanks to my icing of it, and I renewed the freeze after a moment before I followed Lieu, keeping the dry bubble around him as he gathered the slats of wood, me drying them and the walls of our house, to nail them up around all the windows.

"Is this why the door opens outward?" I asked Lieu as we came back inside, me melting and pulling free the iced doorknob to let us in, tossing the rest of the water out behind us.

"Typhoon can push it in, and rip up the inside and blow off the roof." Using the last of the nails and the last strip of wood, Lieu nailed the door shut, Not fully—but we wouldn't be going out until the worst of the storm abated. We couldn't.

As if to reinforce that, the sky outside cracked with a fork of lightning, a clap of thunder so loud my ears hurt and I winced, flinching, half-raising my right arm only for the missing muscle to scream in pain and cause me to drop my arm again, and I looked back at Lieu, standing by the door, frozen, watching me.

"You aren't….since when are you afraid of thunder?" I wasn't a big fan of it, but I certainly wasn't afraid. At least, that was what I told myself.

"I'm not," I replied quietly, moving over to scoop the noodles out of the pot, now rather cool but they had been less important in the long run than Lieu was, into two bowls. I pushed one aside for myself and took the other in my left hand and passed it to Lieu, who leaned against the kitchen counter while I held my bowl in my right hand and ate with my left, pushing up my mask to the top of my head, balancing it on my forehead. "The sound of thunder reminds me of the sound of the boat exploding."

He didn't say anything, but out of the corner of my eye I saw him shift, and Lieu slid closer—just enough that he was a reassuring presence at my side, not touching anywhere, but sharing my personal space. It was all I needed.

Sometimes I just needed to be reminded this wasn't all a dream as my life flashed before my eyes, and I drowned beneath the waves that beat like my heart did, the water that I had always felt so close to, killing me for my betrayal and my misuse of its powers.

Later that night, we changed in silence and got into bed. It had been rearranged in the bedroom so that Lieu was next to the wall but still on my right side, like he was used to being, and I was facing outward to the left.

Years of night terrors had left me with the innate understanding that I would always need extra space. If I had woken up trapped against the wall, it would only have freaked me out more. If I woke up unable to control my own reactions and I was on the edge of the bed, it wasn't too hard to throw myself off of the mattress and onto the floor until I stopped hyperventilating.

It was quiet but for the lashing wind and rain as I rubbed the lotion that kept my burns from cracking or ripping into my hands, and Lieu was laying next to me on the inside of the bed, quiet. I could feel his eyes watching what remained of my face while I flexed my hands and ankles, being sure I got all the inner loops of scar tissue.

"You really are a master, aren't you." He said it quite suddenly and I almost jumped, looking over my shoulder. Lieu was propped on one arm, head on his folded elbow, his other hand resting on his stomach, blue eyes watching me.

"I guess," I looked away and back to my hands, filling my palms with more lotion and starting on my arms and shoulders, especially careful with the remains of my upper right arm. "Ironic, considering how long I spent avoiding using it."

"I don't blame you for not wanting to talk about it." His voice was quiet. "If my parents had been anything like your father, I wouldn't ever want to think about them either. You had your reasons." He smiled at me. "But I have to say—you're quite something. Seeing you do that outside…"

"It's how I made it out of the blizzard," I said, looking up toward the rest of the room, still rubbing my shoulder in some half-futile attempt to keep myself from thinking too much about it, and then starting in my neck and back and thigh. "I would have frozen to death if I wasn't a Bender. I stopped all the snow around me and formed it into a shelter. I survived by finding small animals in the snow for a few days…Bending them to me." I had thrown up when I had eaten the first one of many I had killed with Bloodbending, twisting their blood until their necks snapped. But it had been almost a week in that makeshift igloo. I would have died without it. I very nearly did. I was lucky I had come out without frostbite. But, it had been the full moon those few days. My Bloodbending had been at its strongest.

And, maybe the moon had been looking out for me—who knew, my mother always said that Yue was a sweet spirit, and spoke of the sixteen year old who had once helped her as a child when she had fallen into the river. I was inclined to believe her after my own experiences.

I wonder what my mother was going to think now. Both her sons, as far as she knew…dead. I didn't even know if she was still alive. I had left her alone with my father and my brother. Maybe Tarrlok had protected her. Maybe he had stood up to our father for her. Maybe she was still alive, unharmed by the legacy carried by the man she had married and the sons she had carried.

Or, more likely, she had died of a broken heart. Or my father had driven her to her death. I had been given the chance to ask Tarrlok, and I hadn't. And now…now I couldn't ever go find her, even if I had wanted to. Noatak was dead. So was Amon. I was their ghost, living in a fittingly half-dead shell of a body.

"I never wanted it." I set my hands down in my lap, put the lotion aside for Lieu to do my back. "A fitting curse that because I never wanted it, I would be the best since Katara. In a few years with practice, I probably will be again." I grimaced. Life did things like that sometimes. The Spirits had a cruel sense of humour—they had taken my lies and made them a reality, and taken my most desperate wish as an adult and done the opposite to me as a child.

I picked up the mask from beside me on the pillow and held it in my hands, my thumbs brushing over the cheeks, over the curved sockets for my eyes.

"Sometimes I wish I had been him." The mask stared back. But I wasn't him. I wasn't Amon. I was a broken man using the name that I felt most comfortable with. I wasn't the man Lieu had fallen in love with anymore. I was his spectre, still sticking around, trying and failing to be human. No wonder our bed was so cold at night. No wonder I couldn't bring myself to look at him and find him as attractive as I used to, because he could never see me in that way. I still loved every inch and curve of his body, but I couldn't have touched or reached for him if I wanted to—because I was disgusting.

I had broken him. And now I was broken myself. Who wanted to put back together a shattered vase when it would only look the worse for it? I had to be honest—I was destroyed. Ravaged. Scarred. Half-human.

Letting out a shaking sigh, I dropped the mask to the ground and leaned forward, put my head in my hands, pressed the heels of my palms to my eyes. None of this would ever have happened if I had just told him the truth from the beginning. Or close to the beginning, anyway. We could probably still have been together, and he could have led the Equalists. Maybe we could have made differences through legal means. Maybe I would have never had to use Bloodbending, or betray my own brother, the only blood I had left in the world.

Maybe I never would have ended up sitting here, shattered beyond repair.

The backs of my eyes hurt with unshed tears but it hurt more to push them out, and I let out a shaking sob into my wrists. The mattress shifted—I couldn't see anything with my hands on my eyes, but I could feel Lieu sitting up, shifting on the pillows, and one hand pressed against the small of my back, and he sat up fully, wrapped his arms around my waist.

"I like who you are now better than I ever liked him," Lieu said, leaning forward to whisper it into my skin. "I love you." His lips pressed to the scars over my shoulder, and then to the top of my neck, his arms wrapping around my waist, nose pressing into the joint of my jaw, and that did it.

I fell. He was there to catch me