Stellan pulled on my hand, and we headed back to the lobby, toward the elevators. “Was that ridiculously obvious?” I whispered.
“Yes,” he whispered back. He held the candle far enough away that it wouldn’t catch my hair on fire, and kissed me until the elevator doors opened and dumped us out.
The hallway was pitch-black. We came to a stop in front of a window with a view out over the Louvre. It was odd to see the pyramid dark and have none of the lights on the outside of the museum, or the street, lit up. In the moonlight, I could see dozens of police officers in the square. Stellan kissed me again.
My bullet wound ached and the cuts from Russia stung and the cool air on the skin he’d just kissed tingled and his mouth on mine felt so good it was like my whole body was alive. This did feel like jumping off a cliff, and I’d never wanted anything more.
“I love you,” I whispered.
His grin in the half-light was so surprised and sweet that I took his face in my hands and brought his forehead to mine. “I love you,” I repeated. Now that I’d said it out loud, I couldn’t stop. “I love you.”
“You don’t have to sound quite so surprised. It’s slightly offensive,” he teased, because he couldn’t do it, either. We were two people who didn’t know how to feel this for each other, much less how to admit it, feeling it out in the dark.
“I’ve been thinking it . . . a lot,” I admitted. “Since before you said it. It’s different to say it out loud.”
He swept me up in his arms so fast, I squealed. We kissed on a grand sofa in a sitting room, on a windowsill in the hallway.
How had it taken me this long to realize I loved him? I’d thought for so long he was just a detour on my path, but that was ridiculous. This felt like the only possible end to the collision course we’d been on for so long.
Maybe it was because I’d always thought being in love would feel . . . fluffy. Cute. Kitten-bliss kiss type of sweet. But that was not how this felt at all. It wasn’t just that saying those words—I love you—made me grin so big I could barely kiss him. It was that this could be forever, or it could be just tonight, and it didn’t make me feel any differently. It was the pinprick of sorrow that my mom wouldn’t get to see me happy. It was the knowledge that we could never just be two normal people in love, no matter what happened. And the fact that every time I thought I was drowning, he helped me breathe again. Love wasn’t perfect, but that didn’t make it less. Like all of tonight, there was sadness and fear, but beauty and joy, too, brighter because of the contrast.
“I think I’ve been falling in love with you for . . . way longer than makes sense,” I whispered. “I wasn’t going to tell you. That’s why I was so surprised when you said it. I was afraid it’d make everything harder. But—”
He set me on a windowsill so my face was level with his. “It’s so much better.”
“So much better,” I whispered, and wrapped myself around him again.
We left his jacket over the back of a sofa in the Napoleon apartments, a section of the Louvre usually full of tourists. We left his shirt— I wasn’t sure where. Someone would find it eventually.
We ducked into a room with a gilded ceiling that glowed and glittered in the light of our candles, but I barely saw it. Everything was him. After so long pretending I didn’t want to, I couldn’t take my eyes off him. The way his lips parted a little when I stroked the back of his neck, barely ghosting over his scars. His arms, straining in a way that told me he was barely holding back, but so gentle tucked around me. How he watched me openly, letting me look, letting me touch him as much as I wanted, his eyes tracing my every movement like he was as amazed by me as I was by him.
“What’s this scar from?” I whispered. I touched a mark under his arm, hard and translucent against his smooth skin.
“Training fight. I was thirteen.”
I traced the sharply cut lines down his abdomen, the slide of muscle at his hip bones that vanished into the waistband of his trousers. I made my way back up over his arms, arms that had held me after I’d almost drowned, arms that had carried me out of danger in Russia while the stars had spun in my head. Farther up, where the ends of the translucent scars curled over his shoulders.
“This one?” I stroked a thin mark at his collarbone.
“An operation in the Ukraine that was almost a disaster.”
I wanted to ask about it. I wanted to touch every one of his scars and know the story of his whole life. Maybe we’d have time for that later. Maybe we wouldn’t.
I really had changed. I’d been taught over and over that everything good was also temporary, and it was worse to lose something than to never know how it felt at all. Tonight was the opposite of that.
No matter what, though, I didn’t want to think about the future right now. The past was easier. I touched another scar. “What’s the story of this one?” I said, but he could tell something was wrong. He stroked the back of his hand over my cheek with a questioning eyebrow raise.
I circled my finger around the scar on his shoulder and whispered, “I’m just trying not to think that this could be the only—”
He plucked a sweet-smelling white flower from my hair. “I know.”
“We need mint tea to concentrate on,” I whispered.
He took another flower from my hair, and I knew we were both thinking about how he’d taken out my bobby pins that first day on the plane, when we had just met and the intimacy of it was completely inappropriate. “I’m relatively certain,” he said, “that I’ll be able to find other ways to distract you.”
This time, I was the one who took his hand and pulled him out of the room, and for the rest of the night, I didn’t think about the future or the past. The present was enough.
He guided us past the wing that had been closed off after the Dauphin family had been infected. Past the hall where Luc’s bedroom was. He plucked another flower from my hair, and another, tossing them on the floor like a trail of bread crumbs up narrow stairs, to a hallway that was never meant to be for the public. To a bedroom. Small, all white.