She still has trouble accepting affection. But so does he. She'll walk up behind him and snake her arms around his waist or even put a hand on his shoulder and he'll startle. To be fair she can be alarmingly quiet. She tries to make noise but instinct and years of training is hard to overcome. Sometimes he'll reach for her mouth with his and she'll turn her cheek to him instead. When their mutual need syncs up they use any available surface to leverage their hips together. Sometimes she only wants him to close his arms around her and keep her until morning. He always wants that.
One very bad night he comes to in the middle of a scream, on his knees on the bed, Katniss with her back pressed against the headboard, the word mutt leaving his mouth without his consent or any explanation. After she and sees the horror seizing his face, she releases a sob that seems like it should shatter her whole body she pulls his head to her chest and hears his apology over and over. She knows he has to say the words. She holds his head and she wipes the tears from his cheeks. "It's alright, sweetheart," she says, and her reflexive use of Haymitch's endearment (the only one she knows, the only one she hears since her father died, he'll have to fix that) destroys what's left of him. Leaves him a pile of raw nerves and bones loosely held together inside his skin with sinew and willpower. He spends the rest of the night in her arms. It happens sometimes. "Peeta," she whispers as she pulls him back from wherever he's been. "Not real, Peeta." He feels her lithe arms wrap around him like steel cable, her frame radiating steady fire as she presses up against his back, not big enough to cover all of him but enough to protect and hold what's important. Slowly he melts back together.
They have worked out a routine, after all the months, for the mutt episodes. She pulls him back, however she can. Sometimes if she's desperate, she sings and he can't help but fly back to her. When it's over, she tells him what he said because he can't stand not knowing, he promises not to apologize again, she promises not to lie or leave things out. They happen less and less. He still hates the pain in her eyes, the looks he finds on her face when his awareness blinks back on. Once he was smashing dishes, shards flying, glass embedded in his feet and legs, blood smearing on the floor. She was perched calmly on the countertop as if she were on a tree limb, waiting for his rage to subside. Watching him as if he were something wild. Then she helped him pick the glass up off the floor and out of his skin, wrapped his cuts and curled into his arms like a child, trusting, unwilling to let the madness win. They fight the madness like they fought the darkness. Together. But he hates that she can forgive him. He knows it's hard for her. But she does it. He hates that she can turn herself off and recount the words he said with administrative accuracy, her voice cold and distant. He understands, he just hates it.