trashcan

The maester read the terms of the arrangement over supper, as though he were reading a list of household accounts. Even now at the Red Keep, after quite the travel from your home, your father sat across from you with his hands folded on the table and his eyes fixed on the tablecloth, and you sat very still and still thought of nothing at all, because that was the only way to keep yourself from doing something foolish.

You had the urge, briefly and vividly, to stand up from the table and walk out the room and keep walking, out of the Red Keep entirely, out through the gates and down to the harbour and onto the first ship that was going somewhere your father hadn’t already arranged. But you knew better than that. They would drag you back before tide turned. They always found a way too.

“The betrothal will be formalized within this moon period,” the maester said, glancing up from his scroll to look at you with the mild apologetic expression of a man delivering weather. “The wedding is to follow swiftly after. Prince Baelor has agreed to it, so I do not see why it shouldn’t go forward without trouble.” 

Without trouble. As though trouble were something that lived in logistics. As though the trouble had nothing to do with you sitting in this room and being talked about like a parcel to be sent on.

Prince Baelor. You had heard the name your entire life. Everyone had. You grew up on the stories the way other children grew up on songs. Baelor Targaryen, who had held the line at Ashford when lesser men had broken and run. Baelor Targaryen, who had ridden through a burning village to pull three smallfolk children from a collapsed roof, and emerged the other side with his cloak in flames and not a word of complaint about it. Baelor Targaryen, who had put down the Blackfyre Rebellion with cool efficiency that men still talked about at feasts, their cups raised and their voices hushed with something that sat right at the border of reverence and fear. 

They called him Breakspear. They called him that because no one had ever broken him. 

You thought about that even after the maester excused himself and your father finally looked up from the tablecloth with the expression of a man who believed he was being generous. 

"You'll be a princess," he said. "You understand what that means."

"Yes," you said, and your voice had no happiness in it, no solace, nothing that could be mistaken for either of those things. "I understand."

He took that as agreement, because he always took silence and stillness as agreement, and perhaps that was your fault too.

You lay awake in the guest chambers they had assigned you, the ones you would occupy until the wedding made you someone’s wife, and you turned your father’s ambition over in your mind like stones you already knew the shape of. He wanted children from this union. Heirs who carried Tyrell blood and Targaryen blood. Not giving any mind that Baelor already had two sons by his first wife, the one who had died in her labours years ago, giving birth to Prince Baelor's youngest son. Your father made it clear to you that he wanted his blood in the line of succession. He wanted to be able to look at the Iron Throne one day, and say, somewhere in that, there is something of mine.

You did not want that. You did not want any of it. You did not want to be near the prince, did not want to give him heirs on top of the ones he already had, did not want to spend your life in service of an ambition that had never once asked what you wanted from your own. 

Two sons was enough for any man. 

That night, sleep did not find you. 

You saw him for the first time in the courtyard of the Red Keep, three days after your party had arrived. He was speaking to two knights in riding gear, his back half-turned to you, and your first thought was that he was taller than you had expected. Your second thought was that he looked like a man who had never in his life needed to raise his voice to make a room go quiet. 

He turned when your footsteps scraped the stone, and you caught the full measure of him at once. The grey decorating his beard in patches. The broad set of his shoulders, built for armour even in plain clothes. The mismatched eyes, one brown and one blue, that settled on you with an attention so direct it was almost physical.

"My lady of Highgarden," he said, and there was a small smile on his lips, something measured and polite, as he tilted his head slightly down to look at you.

"Your Grace," you answered, almost too quickly, and kept your eyes down for a beat longer than you needed to, studying the worn stone at your feet like it might offer you something useful.

He waited for you to look up. You got the sense he was patient at waiting. You got the sense he had waited out many things larger than this.

"You've come a long way," he said.

"Indeed," you said, because you had to say something. "The road was kind. We had good weather, by the gods' grace."

"Did you."

"Yes."

A silence settled between you that felt less like discomfort and more like he was simply observing you, cataloguing something at a pace you couldn't rush. You smoothed your skirts with both hands, a nervous habit, and hated yourself for it almost immediately.

"I hope you are pleasant with having to wed me," he said, pausing briefly, watching you twist your fingers together in front of you. "Are you?"

No. The word arrived in your mind before anything else did, clean and immediate. No, I am not pleased, I am frightened and resentful and I have not slept properly in two weeks and every story I have ever heard about you ends with someone not getting back up.

But you could not say any of that. Your father would have your tongue before the sentence was finished.

"Do not do that to your fingers, my lady," Baelor said, interrupting the spiral before it could swallow you whole. "You'll do harm to them."

You stopped instantly. The command was not unkind, but it was a command, and your body obeyed it before your mind had finished deciding whether to. The smile that had been on his face when he first turned was gone now, though the faint softness underneath it remained, held carefully in place.

"I'm starting to wonder if you aren't pleased with the match," he said, his voice entirely calm, the way deep water is calm. "You still haven't answered."

"I apologize, Your Grace." The words came out smooth and easy, rehearsed without meaning to be. "I am pleased. It is my duty to be, and if our union strengthens the bonds between our houses, then I am glad of it."

A lie. A very good one. You had been practicing variations of it for weeks.

He looked at you for a moment longer than felt comfortable, long enough that you wondered if he knew, long enough that you felt the specific heat of being studied by someone who was accustomed to reading situations accurately and quickly. Then he exhaled slowly through his nose and looked out across the courtyard, giving you the small mercy of his profile instead of his full attention.

"A diplomatic answer," he said.

"I've been told I give those."

"I don't doubt it." He glanced back at you, brief and measuring. "I've been told you paint."

The change of subject was abrupt enough to unsettle you, which you suspected might have been the point. "I do," you said carefully. "Sometimes."

"What do you paint?"

The question was so plain and without ceremony that it caught you off guard. You had been braced for something political, something that required a careful answer, and instead you got this. "Flowers, mostly. And the water. We have a lake at home, on the south side of the grounds. I've painted it perhaps a hundred times."

"And it still interests you?" Not sarcastically. Genuinely curious in the way of someone who finds focus in other people interesting rather than puzzling.

"Every season it looks different," you said. "Every hour of the day. I don't think I could exhaust it."

Something shifted in his expression then, small and real, the faint softening of a face that held itself deliberately composed as a matter of long habit.

"I have kept you long enough," he said, and inclined his head to you. "I'll see you at supper, my lady."

He walked past you back into the keep, and you stood in the empty courtyard with your hands still at your sides and tried to decide what you made of that, and found that you couldn't. The wind came through and lifted the loose edge of your sleeve, and somewhere above you a bird crossed the grey sky, and you stood there until the sound of his footsteps had faded entirely.

Then you went inside, and sat with your ladies, and smiled, and said nothing at all. Because that’s the order of the way things were here.

The feast was loud and long and you drank your wine too fast and smiled until your face ached. Baelor sat at the head of the table to your left in the same dark cloth he had been married in, the three-headed dragon embroidered at his chest, and you had been a wife now for approximately six hours and you could feel the full weight of it settling over you like armour you hadn't been measured for.

You had married a man who had killed people.

Not cruelly. Not without cause. But he had, and the stories were very clear on that, and they did not try to soften it, not even for the women who were being handed to him. He had done what needed doing and done it well and the realm had benefited and all of that was true and none of it made a difference to the part of you that was sitting at this feast watching the candlelight move across his hands and thinking about all the things those hands had done before they had touched your jaw this morning.

You did not know how much wine you had drunk. Enough. Not enough. Somewhere in between. You had lost count around the third cup and stopped caring around the fourth, and the noise of the feast pressed in from all sides, laughter and music and the scrape of chairs on stone, and somewhere in the middle of all of it you sat very still and rethought your entire life from the beginning. 

Merry found you eventually, your cousin with her pretty laugh and her gift for making any room feel smaller and warmer. She dropped into the seat beside you and took your hand under the table and squeezed once, and you squeezed back, and neither of you said anything about it.

"He keeps looking over," she said quietly into your ear, after a while.

"Does he?"

"He's been watching you all evening."

"He's probably worried I'll knock something over," you said. Merry laughed. Across the table Baelor said something low to the man beside him and did not look up from his cup, and you watched him for one unguarded moment before you looked away.

You watched him sometimes, after that, in the spaces between conversations. When he wasn't looking. You tried to read him the way you read the lake, the way you looked at a thing from different angles until it gave you something. He did not gesture when he spoke. He did not laugh loudly. He listened more than he talked, which among men of his station was genuinely unusual, and when he did speak the people around him leaned in without seeming to realize they were doing it. Like plants toward light. Like something involuntary.

What surprised you, later, was the bedding ceremony. Or rather, the absence of one.

Baelor had refused it. Quietly, without spectacle, in the way he seemed to do most things, and the court had no choice but to fold around his decision and pretend they had never expected otherwise. You heard it from Merry, who had heard it from one of the Kingsguard, and you stood there absorbing the information with a feeling you didn't immediately have a name for. Relief, you decided. It was relief. Strange and unexpected and slightly humiliating to feel so strongly, but there it was.

Even so, when the door to your new chambers clicked shut behind you both and you heard the latch catch, your chest tightened all the same.

The room was full of candles, dozens of them, casting everything in soft shifting gold. Someone had arranged fresh flowers near the window, roses among them, and turned down the bed with the kind of careful attention that made the whole thing feel more deliberate, more inevitable. You crossed to the window and stood with your arms folded loosely at your waist and looked out at the dark city below and tried to remember what breathing was supposed to feel like.

Then he said your name.

Not my lady. Your name, and it sat differently in his mouth that it did in anyone else’s. Lower, somehow. More considered. 

You turned from the window. He was watching you with that same quality he always had, the direct unhurried attention, but there was something else underneath it now. Something careful. Like a man approaching a problem he didn't want to make worse.

"You don't have to worry so much," he said, and moved to the table across the room, pouring wine with his back half-turned to you. His hands were steady. Of course they were. "We won't consummate it tonight."

The words landed and your stomach dropped, but not from relief. From something closer to dread, the specific crawling dread of a daughter who could already hear her father's voice somewhere in the back of her skull telling her she had failed before she had even begun. It had only been a couple hours of being a wife and you already failed short. You dropped your gaze to the floor. Your fingers found each other, and you started pulling at the skin around your knuckles without meaning to.

"Did I do something, my prince?" The words came out smaller than you intended. Quieter.

He set the goblet down. You heard him turn.

"You don't have to keep calling me that," he said. "We're married now."

"What would you prefer?"

"My name," he said. "Just my name."

You pulled in a slow breath. "Have I done something wrong, Baelor?"

His name in your mouth felt foreign and right at the same time, like a word in a language you had been studying a long time and had only just spoken aloud.

He crossed the room toward you, not quickly, not with any urgency, just steadily, and he stopped when he reached you and put two fingers under your chin and tilted your face up. His touch was warm. Dry. Unhurried.

You were not expecting the kiss he pressed to your forehead. Soft, brief, almost nothing, and yet it stayed on your skin after he pulled back, like the impression of something.

When you looked up at him your lips were parted and you had nothing to say.

"No," he said, simply. "You haven't done anything wrong." He searched your face for a moment, his mismatched eyes moving between yours. "I don't want my wife drunk and anxious the first time. I'd rather you come to it because you trust me enough. Not because the court expects it of you before morning."

A silence opened up between you. Outside, the city murmured on, indifferent.

"That could take a long time," you said, and you meant it lightly but it didn't come out quite that way.

"I know," he said. And then, without any particular weight to it, like a man stating a fact he had already made peace with: "I can wait."

You looked at him standing there in the candlelight, large and steady and entirely serious, and you thought about all the stories, all the things they said about him, the battles and the efficiency and the men who had not gotten back up, and you thought: none of them mentioned this part. None of them thought to.

In the weeks that followed, you learned that baelor woke before dawn, every morning, and could be found in the training yard before the light had fully come. You learned that he ate simply and without fuss and that feasts bored him, that he tolerated them because they were required and endured them the way another man might endure a long sea voyage.

 You were still frightened of him. Not in the way you had been that first night, with your arms crossed and your heart hammering. You didn’t know how he made you feel. 

Baelor noticed your distance, of course. How could he not. You were always in bed before he came to the chambers, feigning sleep or close enough to it that he never tested the difference. You declined his invitations to share supper with excuse after careful excuse, a headache, correspondence from home, fatigue from the afternoon. He accepted each one without comment, and somehow that was worse than if he had pressed you. You were grateful, most of all, that he had not yet commanded the marriage to be consummated. That was the thing you held onto.

You felt guilty about it sometimes. In small quiet moments, when you were honest with yourself. But guilt was a feeling you could set down and pick back up. Fear sat differently in the body.

Every other day there was a new rumour. Your ladies brought them to you the way birds bring things back to a nest, little bright pieces of nothing that accumulated into something. You had no choice but to sit and listen, just as you were doing now, in the small solar off the main hall where the afternoon light came in sideways and made everything look warmer than it was.

"He is a great man," said Elayne Hightower, in the tone of someone conveying information she believed you were too simple to already possess. She was one of the ladies assigned to you upon your arrival, and in the weeks since you had arrived at a quiet and absolute conclusion: you did not like her. Not even a little. She was the kind of woman who delivered cruelty with a smile and then looked confused when anyone minded. "A great man in every sense of the word, if you take my meaning."

She let the last words hang there and looked at you sideways, watching for a reaction.

You took a slow sip from your goblet and gave her nothing.

"Surely you've consummated the marriage by now," she said, leaning forward slightly, dropping her voice in the conspiratorial register of someone who wanted an audience but pretended otherwise. She set her goblet down on the table and smiled at you with all her teeth. "Do tell. How was it?"

The bluntness of it made your eyes go wide before you could stop them. "I do not wish to speak of such matters with you, Lady Hightower."

She rolled her eyes, the gesture practiced and a little bored. "No need to be so shy about it, princess. Virgins always get so delicate when someone brings it up. It's rather sweet, really." The word sweet landed the way a small blade lands, point first. The other ladies around you had gone very still, a few of them hiding their mouths behind their goblets. "It's nothing to be ashamed of, not knowing what you're about."

"Mind your tongue," you said, and you meant it to come out firm and it came out soft, which was worse.

She made a small sound with her teeth, a dismissive little tsk, and waved her hand as though you'd said something tedious. Then she tilted her head at you, her smile going thin and sharp at the edges.

"Well. If you won't share, I suppose I'll simply tell you how he spent the remainder of the evening. Once he was done with you, that is." She paused for effect. Let the silence do its work. "He came to me."

The room went very quiet.

You sat completely still. You were aware of every person in that room, every averted eye, every carefully controlled expression. You could hear the city outside the window. You could hear your own pulse.

You thought about the night of your wedding. Baelor helping you out of your dress without making anything of it. Baelor sitting with you until you had went into a dreamless sleep, after the many wines you had that evening. You had thought, lying there in the dark, that whatever he was, he was at least that. Decent. Trying.

But then. A man of his station and appetites, refused by his new wife night after night. It was not hard to imagine. It was, in fact, very easy to imagine, and you hated how easily the picture assembled itself.

You felt the anger arrive before you'd decided to feel it. It was different from the distant background dread you'd been carrying for weeks. This was sharp. Immediate. Something with edges.

Your brows pulled together without meaning them to.

"I can tell you the particulars if you like," Elayne said, pleasantly. "He talks you through it, I'll say that much. Very thorough. He did write me this morning, actually, to say he'd be visiting again soon." She glanced at the other ladies with a little lift of her chin, a performer acknowledging her audience. "I suppose things between you two haven't quite found their footing yet."

You stood up.

It happened before you had finished deciding to do it. One moment you were sitting and the next you were on your feet, and the room seemed to go even quieter somehow, the way rooms do when something shifts.

"That is my husband you are speaking of," you said. Your voice was very even. You were rather proud of how even it was, given that your hands were trembling slightly at your sides and you could feel the humiliation pressing up behind your eyes like water behind a dam. "Whatever the circumstance, whatever your history with him, you will not speak his name to me in this manner again. If you do, I will take the matter directly to His Grace the King. Do you understand me?"

Elayne looked up at you from her seat with that same thin smile, and said, "I've hurt you. I'm sorry for it, truly," in a voice that contained not one single grain of apology.

The lady beside her pressed her lips together to hide something that was almost certainly a smile.

You did not say another word. You turned and walked out of the room, and you did not wait for your knight to fall into step behind you. You walked until the corridor bent and the solar was out of sight, and then you stopped and pressed your back against the stone wall and breathed and looked at the ceiling and thought about absolutely nothing at all, which was very hard to do, and which you forced yourself to manage anyway.

You stayed there until you trusted your face again. Then you went back to your chambers and sat at your window and watched the world outside until the light faded, and you did not want to think about Elayne Hightower, and you certainly did not want to think about Baelor. 

You didn't hear the door open. Your eyes were distant, fixed on nothing in particular beyond the glass, and your meals had come and gone untouched all day, the chambermaids cycling in and out like tides, and you had let them. Appetite required a kind of presence you did not currently have.

Without meaning to you, as Baelor spoke your name, as you turned to face him you glared at him, a pouty look on your face. 

"Is it true?" The words left your mouth before you had decided to say them. You didn't know where the nerve came from. Only that the jealousy had been sitting in you all day like something swallowed wrong, and underneath it the thing you had been less willing to look at: that somewhere in the weeks of distance and avoidance and careful politeness, you had grown fond of him. Quietly. Without meaning to. You had been seeking him out even as you pulled away. Maybe that was why he had gone elsewhere. Maybe the fault was yours and you hated that thought most of all.

You hated her. You were certain of it now. 

Baelor looked confused. More than confused, actually. Surprised, in the specific way of a man who had learned not to expect much and was recalibrating in real time. You were always the one who waited to be spoken to first, who answered in half-sentences and agreeable nods. You speaking first, and like this, meant something was wrong. His brows drew together. "What's true, princess?" he said quietly, his eyes moving over your face.

"Do not make me say it." Your voice was unsteady and you resented it. "It hurts enough to think about. Let alone say it to your face."

He took a step toward you and you looked down and that was when he noticed your hands, your fingers picking at the skin around your nails the way they always did when you were trying not to cry.

"How many times," he said, and his voice was very calm, "have I told you to stop doing that."

"Do not act as though you care," you said, and your voice cracked on the last word and you hated yourself for it. You looked up at him. "Did you care when you went to Elayne Hightower on the night of our wedding? Did you think of me at all? People call you honourable. They say it like it is the truest thing about you."

Something moved across his face. Something small and quick. He pressed his lips together and the corner of his mouth shifted, barely, the suggestion of something that in any other moment might have been amusement.

"What is funny about this?" You stared at him. "Do you know what it felt like, sitting there while she told me in front of everyone. While they smiled behind their goblets and thought I couldn't see."

He closed the distance between you. "What did she say." Not a question. A quiet command.

"Vile things. Things I don't wish to repeat." Your voice broke properly then and you turned away and walked toward the window because you needed something to look at that wasn't his face. You could feel the tears and you refused them, crossing your arms over your chest.

You startled when his hands found your shoulders. His fingers gathered your hair and moved it aside, and then the scratch of his beard against the slope of your neck, the press of his lips there, warm and deliberate, and his hands settling at your waist, drawing you back against him. You let him, because you were tired and hurt and his hands were warm, and some part of you had been wanting something like this for weeks without knowing how to say so.

"Tell me what she said," he said against your hair.

You told him all of it. The smile on Elayne's face. The details she offered without being asked. The letter she claimed he had sent that very morning. Your voice stayed mostly level and only broke once, near the end. His hands did not move from your waist the entire time.

"She said you'd promised to see her this evening," you finished. "It was humiliating. I never want to see those women again. You have made me friendless in a court that was never mine to begin with."

You pulled away and turned to face him. He looked down at you with an expression so steady and intent it was almost hard to hold.

"Were they laughing," he said.

"Smiling. Murmuring. Close enough."

"Then why would you call them your friends."

You opened your mouth and closed it. He had a point and you hated that he had a point and you were not going to let it distract you. "That is beside the matter. You still haven't answered me." The next words came out low and laced with something that surprised even you. "Whether you truly found comfort between her legs on the night you wed me."

You lifted your chin at him. "If you promised to see her this evening, then go. I won't keep you."

He held your gaze for a long moment. And then, very quietly, "do you think I would do that to you."

You stared at him.

The question sat between you, very quiet, and he did not move while he waited for you to answer it. He just looked at you the way he always looked at things, with that patient undivided attention that had unnerved you from the beginning and unnerved you still, though differently now. Less like standing in the path of something and more like being seen.

"She said you did," you said finally. Your voice came out smaller than you wanted. "She said it very plainly."

"And you believed her."

It was not an accusation. It was not even a question, quite. 

"I didn't want to," you said. "I tried not to. But I sat in that room and I listened to her describe you and I thought about all the nights I've gone to bed before you came in, and all the suppers I've refused, and I thought—" You stopped. The words felt too honest. Too much of something you hadn't meant to say out loud.

"You thought what," he said.

"I thought that you would have every reason to." You lifted your eyes to his. "I have not been easy. I know that. I have not been what a wife is supposed to be to you and I have known it every day and done nothing about it because I was frightened, and I—" Your voice broke on the last word and you pressed your lips together hard and looked at the ceiling and refused to cry in front of him. Absolutely refused.

His hand came up and curved around your jaw, tilting your face back down toward his. His thumb moved once across your cheekbone, slow and deliberate, the way you might steady something fragile.

"Look at me," he said.

You did. You had no choice when he held your face like that.

"I have not touched Elayne Hightower," he said. "Not on our wedding night and not since. I’ve never done so, and I have no intention of doing so ever." He held your gaze, not blinking, not letting you look away. "I don't know what she told you or why she told it, but it was a lie. Every word of it."

You searched his face the way you searched paintings, looking for the thing that was not right, the detail that would give the lie away. There was nothing. There was only Baelor, steady as he always was, telling you something plainly and without performance, the way he told you everything.

"Why would she say it then," you said. "She had details. She said you wrote to her."

"She is a woman who enjoys the particular power that comes from making other women feel small," he said, without heat or drama, as though he were noting the weather. "And you are new here, and a princess, and a considerable threat to people who were comfortable before you arrived. She said it because she could and because she wanted to see what it would do to you."

Your mouth was dry. "And what did it do to me."

Something shifted in his expression. Softened, in that way that still caught you off guard when it happened. 

"It made you speak to me," he said. "First. Without waiting to be spoken to."

You hadn't thought of it that way. You hadn't thought of much of anything clearly today. You became abruptly and uncomfortably aware of how close he was, his hand still at your face, the warmth of him in the cooling room.

"I made a fool of myself," you said quietly.

"You were jealous," he said. "That's not foolish."

You felt heat climb your neck. "I wasn't—"

"You were." And there was that near-smile again, the one that lived at the very corner of his mouth and barely made it further than that. "I'm not saying it to embarrass you. I'm telling you because I'd rather you know that I noticed and that it mattered to me. That you mattered enough to be jealous over."

You didn't have anything to say to that. You had prepared for denial and deflection and a polite dismissal, you had not prepared for this, for him standing in the candlelight holding your face and telling you plainly that you mattered, without ceremony, without asking for anything back.

"You should have told me," you said finally, because you had to say something and it was the truest thing left. "If she had said those things to you about me you would have told me. You wouldn't have let me believe it."

"No," he agreed. "I wouldn't have." He studied you for a moment. Then: "I'll speak to her."

"Don't." The word came out quickly. "It will only make it worse. It will only give her more to say."

He shakes his head in a silent no. “She won’t, I’ll make sure of it.” 

"Baelor, please." You moved after him as he turned, reaching for his arm without thinking. "I'm asking you not to. She will humiliate me further for it. She will talk about me behind my back to anyone who will listen, she'll make my life a living—"

He kissed you.

Not gently. Not the way he had kissed your forehead on the wedding night, careful and brief and almost impersonal. This was something else entirely. His mouth pressed to yours with a kind of fierce certainty, one hand cradling the back of your neck, his thumb tilting your jaw up, and the sheer unexpectedness of it emptied your mind of every word you had been about to say.

For one stunned moment you simply stood there. Then, without deciding to, your eyes closed and you leaned into it. It was not a polite kiss. It was not the kind of kiss a man gives a woman he is merely fond of. It was hungry and deliberate, all heat and pressure and the slide of his tongue against yours, the faint graze of teeth at your bottom lip, his beard rough against your skin, and it tasted like wine and something underneath it that was just him, and it stole the breath from your lungs so thoroughly that when he finally pulled back you had to remind yourself how lungs worked.

You looked up at him. Your mouth was still parted. You had nothing at all to say. He did not step back. He did not look remotely apologetic. He simply watched you absorb what he had done.

A faint thread of warmth lingered between your lips when he pulled away, and his thumb came up to swipe it from your skin almost absently, eyes never leaving yours.

“That is what you were afraid of,” he said quietly.

You swallowed. “Of being kissed?”

“No.” His thumb pressed once against your lower lip. “Of wanting it.”

Heat climbed your neck.

Before you could answer, he leaned in again, but this time the kiss was slower. Not an interruption. Not a silencing. His mouth moved over yours with intent, coaxing instead of claiming, and when you softened beneath him, when your hand tightened at his chest and your body leaned into his without instruction, he made a low sound of approval in his throat.

“Good girl,” he murmured against your mouth. “That is honest.”

His hands slid down from your shoulders to your waist, broad and steady, and then lower, settling at your hips. He pulled you flush against him, slow enough that you felt the full press of him between you, solid and unmistakable even through layers.

Your breath caught.

He noticed.

“You feel that,” he said, not asking.

“Yes.”

“And you thought I had no appetite.”

The corner of his mouth lifted faintly.

“from what you’ve shared about her, she’s a strong minded and very opinionated woman. do you think if you, or your relationship, were bad for her, if she felt like you were weighting her down, she would still be with you? do you think she wouldn’t have at least said something about it?” mariam asked.

“no.” jack chokes out, not daring to look at her.

“so…?” mariam questions, the tone of voice so condescending that jack is questioning his own stupidity.

he liked that about mariam, liked the fact that she was so “in your face” and called out on his bullshit in a second. it was a bit unorthodox at times, jack wondered if she was like this with all of her patients or if that was a trait reserved for him, either way, he liked it. the fact that she doesn’t coddle him and tell him like it is, is what makes him come back every week.

“i don’t know, mariam.” jack sighs and presses the heels of his hand into his eyes so hard he thought they would pop out.

truth is, jack knows where all of this is coming from.

the past two weeks have been truly hellish. first, it started with his prosthesis. the one he had ordered months ago and got tangled in shipment finally arrived.

but with the attachment piece smaller than his normal size.

so he had been using the old one that is making his stump raw. and to further his suffering, jack refuses to take it off when he comes home. he knows it is only bad for him and he is doing it out of spite. out of spite and a second thing he doesn’t dare name it. embarrassment, maybe shame, it is this need to “keep up” with her, to be faster, that he knows it is irrational and that she doesn’t care about it, but he still does.

and jack knows his girl notices it. he has seen her watching him as he winces in pain, he knows she notices it when she leaves his crutches or the soothing balm near him, silently. he knows it when he sees it in her face, how hard she is fighting with herself to keep quiet, to not embarrass him.

and jack is thankful for that.

the second thing that helped ruin jack’s week and self-esteem was learning the age of her parents.

she rarely talks about them, not that there is much jack wanted to know, the little he learned about them that thanksgiving night was enough for him. he hasn’t met them yet, maybe he never will and something inside him kind of hopes it stays like that. and jack knows how horrible that sounds, not wanting to meet the parents of the woman he loves and hopes to have a future with, but he is pretty sure that if that ever happens and they act how they are known to, jack is going to pick up a fight.

he can’t even remember how the conversation came to be, one minute he was talking about how one of the day shift’s r4 got an oopsie baby and next thing he knows, he finds out her parents are eight years older than him only. he can still hear the nonchalance on her voice “yeah, they had emma during med school and me three years later and then avery when their residency was over”.

jack mulls over the fact that he could have a kid the same age as his youngest sister in law daily after that conversation.

his third reason was one that had been brewing since they started dating. actually, being honest, it had been brewing since the first time he saw her and realised he had fallen in love but the bomb only exploded three days ago.

jack and ellis attended an eighty year old man that had been a widowed for the past twenty years. while talking to the patient, jack learned that the wife had died from the same type of cancer as liz, and, since then, the elderly man had been alone, refused to entertain other women for the last twenty years.

“i told her i’d love and honour her all days of my life. i’m keeping my promise. she was the only one for me since elementary school.” the older man said, voice rough from the cold he had.

he still wore his wedding ring. just like jack still wears his.

a few hours later, during that 03:00a.m. lull when everything is too quiet and life feels like a simulation, parker approached him.

“hey, boss. can i ask you something?” ellis asked him. he had heard that cautious tone of voice coming from her only once before, when she asked him if he needed help a few days after his wife’s funeral.

jack nodded. “of course.”

“your girl doesn’t mind that you keep wearing your old wedding ring?”

jack stopped his charting, eyes going between his left hand and parker’s face, silence stretching for way too long to be comfortable.

“sorry, i shouldn’t hav–“

“no, it’s ok.” jack interrupted his resident. “honestly, she has never said anything.”

“oh.” parker nodded.

“do you think she has a problem with it? should i take it off?”

parker excused herself, told jack that this is a conversation he should have with his girlfriend, but from an outsider's view, it seemed like she was ok with it.

“jack, i think you do know what you have to do. you know what is eating you away and have to finally realise that you are a good man that deserve good things. in fact, i think you know you are, the jack that i met a year and a half ago would never allow himself to receive the love you receive, like you do today. what you have to do is come to terms with the fact that you’ve changed. stop thinking about the past, jack. the past made you the man you are today and that’s great, but be forgiving to yourself and allow yourself to see the beautiful future you have ahead.” mariam finally told him.

after therapy, jack sat on his truck crying. the first time ever since liz’s passing.

saturday, february 27th, 2026. 01:38p.m.

jack woke up to the smell of food. that unmistakable smell of cumin, garlic and lamb, the one that brought him some sort of comfort in the madness of the war. he remembers the day they talked about favourite foods, jack wanted to take her out for dinner and she insisted on visiting a lebanese restaurant that had opened downtown. while stuffing themselves with hashweh, jack started talking about how it reminded him of kabuli pulao.

he had tried it during one of his excursions. jack had befriended omar, an interpreter that worked with the troops, helping them communicate with the locals. omar was an older man, around his forties at the time.

on an autumn day, omar invited jack to his house to celebrate his wedding anniversary, to celebrate 20 years together with the love of his life.

the afghan man explained that kabuli pulao was a dish that they usually served during celebrations and, after trying, jack instantly fell in love.

he ate it a couple of times before getting out of the military and since then, he still hasn’t found a place that could top the one omar’s wife made.

the smell got stronger as he made his way down to the kitchen, only to find his love in nothing but a big shirt, singing along to a random song and cooking. theo laid not that far away from her, paying attention to what she was doing. when he saw jack approaching, theo lazily wagged his tail. jack scratched the dog's big head before engulfing her in a hug, making her squeal.

“you’re the best, you know that?” he asked, hands tight around her waist and lips to her temple.

“i’ve been told, but i don’t mind hearing it again.” she said, turning around to kiss his lips. “it’s probably not as good as omar’s, but i hope you like it.”

“i know it’s great, honey. everything you do is.” jack takes his time to kiss her again. “what’s the celebration?”

“no celebration, handsome. but i’ve noticed you’ve been down lately and thought you needed a pick me up.”

“was it that bad?”

she laughed. “you haven’t had a proper conversation with me since your last therapy session, baby. i know something is off because you’re not your yappy self.”

jack snorted and shook his head.

“can you set the table for us, handsome?” she asks and kisses his cheek.

“yes ma’am.”

lunch wasn’t as silent as the past few meals they had together. jack filled her in on the latest gossip of the ptmc, robby had gotten a seven day suspension without a pay because he told the director above gloria to go fuck himself in front of the whole ED. he told her some more stories about his time in afghanistan and how he still think about the families he met there. she told him how she got invited by the MOMA to co-sign on a new exhibit and that she will be flying out to new york in a couple of weeks and would love for him to go with her (which he agreed instantly).

jack sat on the sofa now, sans his prosthesis, crutches sitting by the side of the couch, an act he hadn’t allowed to see the light of day in a while. her head was on his lap and he played with her hair as she read a book about fernando botero. theo laid on the floor in front of them, sound asleep.

“you know i love you, right?” jack broke the silence.

she looked up at him, eyes meeting a distressed looking man. “where’s this coming from, baby?”

“you know that, right?”

she nodded. “yes jack, i know.” she closed the book, not bothering on dog-earing the page she was on. she sat the book on the coffee table and sat up. “i love you too.”

“i know, honey. you show me you do everyday and sometimes i wonder if i deserve it.” jack sighed. “sorry. these past couple of weeks have been fucking weird and mariam told me a bunch of shit last session that i’ve been thinking about, and i closed up. i’m sorry.”

she squeezed his hand. “it’s ok, handsome. you don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to. i know it’s hard.”

“no, i want to. need to.” jack pulled the hand that squeezed drew his to his lips and kissed her knuckles.

“last month was the anniversary of liz’s death. two years since she passed. you’re the first person i’ve been in a relationship with since her, the first person i even dared look at that way if i’m being honest. you’re also the first partner i have that is significantly… younger than me and so much went on these past couple of weeks that i spiralled for a bit. the whole thing with the wrong prosthesis, me realising our age gap and ellis asking about my wedding ring and i–“

she interrupted. “jack, slow down. breathe with me.” she inhaled and exhaled three times and jack followed suit. “let’s go through the topics one by one. the prosthesis we dealt with already. what is it that me being younger bothers you?”

jack sighed and looked at her, taking some time to gather his thoughts. “remember that day i told you about the r4 that got pregnant?” jack asked and she nodded. “you told me about your parents and how they had emma around her age and then you and avery. i did some math and realised how close in age i am to them, how i could have had a daughter the same age as your younger sister. hell, if i had been reckless in high school, i could have had a daughter your age.”

“and that fucked me up, you know? i’m not going to be hypocrite and say i had never thought about it because i had, and it was one of the things that held me back when it came to asking you out. then we got together and, besides the obvious jokes we both made, it was something that was just a minor detail in the grand scheme of things. then you introduced me to your circle, and how supportive of us and how welcoming your friends and sisters were to me helped that.”

she watched jack silently, eyes watery and a lump formed on her throat.

“your parents talk happened, then the next day the fucking prosthesis arrived wrong and it fucked me up.” jack repeated himself. “something in the back of my mind kept whispering, saying how i’m a broken old man and that i was going to hold you back in life and i felt so fucking guilty.” his voice broke and jack took a deep breath. “so my fucking genius idea was to force myself to wear the prosthesis even more, endure more pain then necessary because i’m a fucking idiot and couldn’t talk to you. and you know what’s even worse? it’s that i know that you noticed it, that i knew you saw i was in pain, that you tried to help me silently, setting the crutches and the wheelchair near me, that you’ve scattered bottles of the balm around your apartment so i could give myself some relief and that made me feel even more guilty because you were trying to help without making me feel ashamed. i felt so loved and guilty at the same time because i was making you worry.” jack snorted and ran his hands through his hair frantically.

“oh jack, honey. look at me” she sniffled. “i don’t think you realise what a great man you are. i’ve never felt so cared for by a partner like i do with you. you’re extremely reassuring, you actually listen to what i have to say and take my ideas in consideration. you don’t hold me down, never. if anything, you’ve given me more support the past few months than i’ve ever had from a partner in my whole life. you’re interested in my job, in what i have to say, you give me amazing inputs that actually make me grow and you encourage me to go after bigger things. do you think i’d have gotten the MOMA gig if you hadn’t had that conversation with me about me going after things i thought were too big for me?”

jack nodded, still unable to look at her, words failing him.

“i know that the age thing can be weird at times, but how we make each other feel is more important than anything.” she squeezed his shoulder. “as for your leg, that’s you jack. i love you like this, i want you like this and i wouldn’t choose you any differently. what i want is for you to be comfortable around me, for you to use your crutches or the wheelchair, for you to relax when you get home from an excruciating shift, to ask me to massage your stump or to let me do it without you asking and without feeling guilty about it.”

jack finally looked at her, eyes brimmed red with a couple of shed tears. he moved, allowed himself to be vulnerable and hugged her midsection, tucking his head between her neck and shoulder.

“the other thing that is on my mind is this.” jack showed her his left hand, thumb playing with his wedding band. “parker asked me about it, if it bothers you. then i remembered all the times i’ve seen you staring at it or when you are playing with my hands and how your fingers always lingers there for longer than it does on the others.”

she sighed and jack felt how her chest moved. “talk to me, sweetheart.”

“i–i… it doesn’t bother me, jack. i’m not gonna lie, it made me feel insecure at times, like i had shoes to fill in and i’d never be able to. then one day, talking to robby, i told him that i’d never replace liz and he agreed,” jack lifted his head, anger in his eyes. “let me finish before you plot robby’s murder.” she patted jack’s head, telling him to get back to his previous position. “he agreed and told me that she wouldn’t replace me either, that we had to meet when we met, after going through situations and other people, growth. and that got me thinking, you know? that maybe you are the jack that you are today to me because of liz. i’m thankful you had her in your life, thankful for the man that you are today and that you chose me to be by your side now. so no, it doesn’t bother me.”

jack is silent. he doesn’t know what to say or how to react.

“you ok, handsome?” she asked, poking his side.

jack laughed. “yeah. you’re incredible, you know that?”

“i know. you bagged the biggest baddie in pittsburgh.”

that makes jack laugh and he sits up and pulls her to his lap. jack brings the hands that held her back between them and plays with his wedding ring.

he takes it off.

“jack.” she whispers, shock present in her voice.

“it’s you and i now, right?” she nods. “this has been feeling heavy for a while, and i know why but i just couldn’t face it. i know that me taking this off won’t erase liz from my life, she will always be with me, but i gotta think about the future too, the future i want to build with you. if you’ll have me.”

“of course i’ll have you, old man.” she kisses him.

“good.”

“are you feeling better?” she asks.

“a lot better, actually.”

“great, we have some catching up to do.” she says, getting up and pulling him back to their bedroom.