Sykobaby

Yearning was a sickness, a full-body plague masquerading as romance, and anyone who tried to dress it up as something pretty had clearly never felt it sit in their lungs like smoke; it wasn’t some harmless little pastime that visited when she was bored, something to twirl between her fingers like idle thought—no, it was relentless, obsessive, a quiet kind of madness that turned seconds into hours and hours into an endless loop of him. It was waking up with his name already tightening in her chest before her eyes had even opened, feeling her ribcage ache at the smallest reminder—a song he liked, a hoodie he left, the ghost of his cologne clinging to a pillowcase—and knowing there was no antidote she could take that didn’t begin and end with him. Yearning, she’d decided, was letting one person colonise your mind so completely that everything else faded to background noise; it was the cruelty of having your tormentor and your saviour be the same set of hands, the same mouth, the same boy who could ruin your day with a single silence and then soothe it with a single look. It was the way he haunted the edges of her every thought, slipping into lectures and grocery lists and quiet showers, and yet, when she finally had him near—when his laugh bounced off the walls or his fingers brushed the inside of her wrist—he became the only thing that eased the burn he’d lit inside her in the first place.

Nala was convinced she was going insane—properly, clinically losing it—because yes, she loved Tyriq, she’d made peace with that a long time ago, but whatever this was sat somewhere far beyond love, in a place that felt more volatile, more unhinged, like something Aphrodite and Cupid would have unleashed on their worst enemies when they were feeling particularly cruel; it was the kind of feeling that made her look up at the ceiling in the dark and ask God, the universe, anyone listening what the hell she had done to deserve being plagued like this, to have one man stitched so thoroughly into the fabric of her being that everything she made, everything she touched, seemed to circle back to him.

He wasn’t just someone she loved—he’d slipped into that terrifying position of muse, the reason the rhythm stayed steady in her chest when the world went quiet, the reason her hands moved when she thought she’d forgotten how, conjuring melodies out of thin air that always, always came back to his laugh, his voice, the way he said her name like it was a song he’d heard before he was born. He was the reason she could sit for hours and pour out sonnet after sonnet, page after page, ink bleeding into metaphors until the paper smelled like him in her mind; the reason her paintbrushes moved in those familiar, unthinking strokes, as if her muscles had learned the shape of him by heart—jawline, shoulders, the slope of his back—long before she admitted it to herself.

Tyriq was haunting her—not in the dramatic, cinematic way, but in the quiet, suffocating way a thought returns every time you think you’ve finally outrun it—and she was certain there wasn’t a word big enough, ancient enough, cruel enough to describe what it felt like to be this consumed by someone who was still very much alive and breathing, walking around in the same world as her, completely unaware that somewhere, in the spaces only she could see, he’d become the axis everything inside her spun around.

She looked down at their daughter—their daughter—sweet, soft Honey, their honeybee, bundled against her chest like something spun out of sunlight and sleep, and for a moment Nala swore the air left her lungs entirely; the baby’s lashes rested against cheeks that were all Tyriq, her tiny face already carrying his features like a prophecy fulfilled—the bright blue eyes that would undo people one day, the familiar slope of his nose, that faint little crinkle at the corners of her eyes when she dreamed, and it was like looking at a smaller, purer version of the man who’d ruined her life in the gentlest way possible.

Her chest tightened again, that same old ache blooming under her ribs—too big for the small body she lived in—as her gaze slipped from Honey’s sleeping face to her own hands. They were steady, but stained, fingers smudged with dried streaks of ochre and umber and blue, her wedding ring sitting heavy and certain on her finger, gleaming dully beneath the paint like a promise she’d dipped in colour and worn into the bone. There was something almost obscene, she thought, about how casual it had become to move through the day with a whole life on her left hand—a man, a vow, a future—pressed against the same fingers she used to hold brushes, wipe tears, rock their child to sleep.

When she finally turned back toward the easel, the canvas waited for her in the quiet like a mirror she hadn’t meant to look into.

It wasn’t his face she’d painted this time. It was worse.

His hands stared back at her from the linen—stunning in their ordinariness, rendered with the kind of detail that only came from obsession. She’d painted the faint scars she knew by touch before sight, the small pale line near his thumb from when he’d cut himself opening a box in their first apartment, the barely-there mark on his knuckle from a high school game he never talked about. She’d painted the subtle rise and fall of veins beneath warm brown skin, the tiny follicles of hair along his wrist, the way his fingers seemed both capable and gentle even in stillness—hands that had taped her pads together after birth, hands that had caught Honey’s slippery body when she came screaming into the world, hands that had learned her curves before they ever picked up a football properly.

And there, just above where she’d shaded in the slope of his wrist, she’d painted it—the tattoo.

Her name.

Nalani.

Written in her own handwriting, inked in real life on his actual skin, now painstakingly replicated on the canvas, small but unmistakable, like a whispered secret in the middle of a shout. The tiny curl of the “N,” the slight lean of the letters, the way the last “i” always tilted a little too far right because she’d been nervous when she wrote it for the artist—all of it stared back at her, an accusation and a confession in one.

And standing there, with Honey’s warm weight against her shoulder and the painted version of his hands—those same hands that had built a life with her—reaching out from the canvas, Nala felt it crash over her all at once:

this was what it meant to love him.

To raise his daughter with his face. To wear his ring on paint-stained fingers. To spend her days trying, and failing, to stop her art from becoming a shrine to the man who had somehow become the rhythm, the subject, and the signature of every beautiful thing she made.

Nala felt that familiar, awful tightening in her chest as she climbed the stairs of their home in Atlanta, each step heavier than the last, like her heart had picked up weight and decided to sit squarely behind her ribs; she moved on autopilot—into Honey’s room, into the soft, dim hush that always smelled faintly of baby lotion and milk—laying their daughter down in her crib with the kind of care that bordered on reverence. For a moment she just stood there, bent over the rail, pressing a lingering kiss to the warm curve of Honey’s head, breathing in the comfort of her, the steady rise and fall of that tiny chest soothing something shallow while something deeper inside her still roared. She checked the baby monitor twice, because that’s what she did when her thoughts were loud—double-checked, triple-checked, clinging to routine like it could quiet the storm in her, then eased the door shut until only a thin slice of hallway light remained and finally vanished.

Out in the corridor, the house felt too big and too quiet at the same time, all those walls they’d worked so hard to earn suddenly echoing with the sound of her own breathing. Her fingers were still stained with paint, ring catching the light as she pulled her phone from her pocket like a lifeline and scrolled, not because she didn’t know the number by heart, but because it gave her hands something to do while her pulse tried to climb out of her throat. There was only one person she ever called when her love started to feel like this—too loud, too wild, too much for her body to hold, like it was spilling out of her seams and flooding the floor. Restless in it. Drowning in it. Loving Tyriq so much it almost felt like an allergic reaction.

She pressed the call button and lifted the phone to her ear, pacing a slow, shaky line down the hallway as it rang once, twice, and the second she heard the click on the other end, the breath she’d been holding tumbled out of her in a rush.

Nala didn’t even bother with hello.

She had Honey’s baby monitor tucked under one arm, her phone pressed so hard to her ear it might’ve fused there, and dried paint flaking off her fingers as she paced the length of the upstairs hallway like it was a trench.

“Selah,” she exhaled, voice already frayed, “something’s wrong with me.”

On the other end, there was a soft rustle, the faint click of a TV being turned down, then that sigh—warm, familiar, the kind you let out when you’re already sitting up to catch somebody mid-fall.

“What’s goin’ on, baby?” Selah asked, voice low, as if she’d already put her glasses on and planted her feet. “Start from the top. Don’t rush it.”

Nala slid her back down the wall until she was sitting on the floor, knees bent, ringed hand tangled in the hem of her tank top. Across from her, a framed picture of her and Tyriq at twenty—mid-laugh, eyes already hooked on each other—hung just the slightest bit crooked.

“It’s Valentine’s Day,” she said finally.

Selah hummed. “Okay…”

“And I think I’m insane.”

“There it is,” Selah murmured. “Go on.”

“I’m telling you, Selah,” Nala started, the words tripping over themselves now that the door was open, “Valentine’s Day is literally one big money grab, a whole Hallmark-ass scheme created by white people to take even more of our money and convince us that if we don’t drop a bag on flowers and prix fixe menus, we somehow love each other less.”

The rant was familiar; she clung to it like a floatation device.

She got back up without realising it, pacing again, the empty wine glass in one hand, Honey’s bottle in the other, the red lace she’d bought on a whim earlier draped over her wrist like a joke that didn’t quite land. The formula sloshed faintly. The wine stains at the bottom of the glass caught the hallway light.

“It’s consciousness over cock, dedication over dick, principle over penis—” she declared, words sharp and rolling off her tongue like a sermon she’d had chambered all afternoon.

“Nala—” Selah cut in, voice crackling through with that familiar mix of exasperation and fondness. The tone that said: baby, I hear you, but you are not allowed to give a TED Talk on radical pussy politics while this worked up.

“Facts over fornication,” Nala finished anyway, like she was stamping a seal onto it, then tipped the last bitter drops of wine back in one swallow. It burned. It didn’t help.

“So what I’m hearing,” Selah said dryly, “is that capitalism is evil, white people are to blame, and penis is on the bench. What does that have to do with you being broken?”

Nala let herself drop onto the upstairs landing, back to the wall again, head hitting drywall with a soft thud. “Because,” she muttered, staring at the ceiling, “under all that, I’m still sat here in my house, in my little red lace, mad as hell that it’s Valentine’s Day and my husband ain’t asked me what I’m doin’ tonight.”

Selah went quiet. Not the distracted kind of quiet—Nala knew better by now. This was the kind where you could almost hear her adjusting herself, settling in because this wasn’t going to be quick.

“Say that part again,” Selah said gently.

Nala groaned, covering her face with her paint-stained hand. “He kissed me this morning,” she admitted. “Kissed me, kissed Honey, said he’d be back later. That was it. No ‘be ready at seven,’ no stupid little smirk he gets when he’s lying because he’s planning something. Just… regular. And it’s our first Valentine’s as husband and wife, first as Honey’s parents, and the day feels like any other day.” Her voice thinned. “What if that part’s gone, Sel? What if the… intentional part? The chase, the extra, the butterflies? What if we used it all up?”

Selah hummed, low and thoughtful. “Okay,” she said. “So now we’re at the real problem. You’re not mad at capitalism. You’re scared.”

Nala’s throat tightened. “I just don’t wanna wake up one day and realise we burned through all the fireworks in the early years, and now it’s just routine and diapers and ‘don’t forget the wipes’ and we love each other, yeah, but we’re bored. I don’t want us to be bored. I don’t want him to not be pressed about me anymore.”

“And where does ‘something’s wrong with me’ come in?” Selah asked, voice softer.

Nala looked down at her own hand for a second—the paint under her nails, the ring catching the light, the faint tremor in her fingers. “I put Honey down,” she said, quieter now. “Looked at her face. It’s his, Sel. His eyes, his stupid little frown, even that line between her brows she got from him bein’ dramatic in the womb. And my heart did that cracking thing again. That one where it feels like it’s too small for what’s inside it.” She pressed her palm flat over her sternum, as if to demonstrate. “Then I went to my studio, swearing I was just painting hands—just hands, anybody’s—and I look up and it’s him. It’s always him. His knuckles, his veins, that stupid box-cutter scar, the ‘Nalani’ he got on his wrist like he didn’t have sense.”

Her voice wobbled on her own name.

“I can’t even paint a body part without it turning into a shrine,” she whispered. “I write, and it’s him. I go to the grocery store, see sunflowers, it’s him. I hear a whistle that’s off-key, my brain corrects it to the way he used to do it at practice. I smell detergent, I’m back in college with his hoodies on my dorm bed. It’s like… like he’s a watermark. The page looks blank, but you hold it up to the light and he’s just—there. Everywhere. All the time.”

Selah didn’t laugh. Didn’t tease. Just breathed with her.

“In my head,” Nala went on, staring at the crooked photo on the wall, “it feels like a hallway. Every door open. And he’s standin’ in all of them. Past, future, the ‘what if we never met’ one, the ‘what if something happens to him’ one. I cannot walk a corridor in my own mind without bumpin’ into him.” She let out a half-choked laugh. “Even in the scenarios where he’s gone, he’s still there. I think about my career and it’s, ‘How will this affect him, his schedule, his peace?’ I think about how I mother and it’s, ‘Would he be proud? Did he see that?’ I write a song and I already know which line he’d run back in the car. My soul made room and just kept building.”

She swallowed hard.

“That’s why I called you,” she confessed. “Because on top of all that, it’s Valentine’s, and I’m… aching because he didn’t ask me out like he used to. And then I’m mad at myself for aching, ‘cause I’m like, girl, you’re married. You have his baby. Grow up. And then I get mad at him for makin’ me feel like this, and it’s just—” she gestured helplessly, even though Selah couldn’t see “—too much. It feels like worship, Sel. Like full-blown idolatry. And I don’t know if that’s… allowed.”

There it was. Soft and small and terrified.

Selah was quiet long enough that Nala could hear the faint tick of the hallway clock, the distant hum of the AC, Honey’s little static on the monitor behind her.

“You want the truth,” Selah said finally, “or you want me to pat your hair and tell you you’re being dramatic?”

“I’m always dramatic,” Nala muttered. “Tell me the truth.”

“The truth?” Selah said. “You love that man like he’s a religion. And every time you realise it again, you call me like I’m your pastor to see if you just committed some new kind of sin.”

Nala laughed, wet and weak. “Am I wrong, though?”

Selah let out a soft, knowing sound. “You wanna know what I see? I see a girl who survived enough emptiness to know she never wants to feel hollow again. So when love came, she didn’t sip it. She drowned in it. Bathed in it. Painted with it. Turned it into albums and galleries and a baby with his face. You were always gonna love something too big, Nala. If it wasn’t him, it would’ve been your art, or your work, or some cause. The universe handed you a person instead.”

Nala pressed her fingers harder to her sternum. “It hurts,” she admitted, voice small. “Loving him like this. My heart actually hurts. I get mad sometimes, genuinely mad, just looking at him—for existing. For… walking in the room in a hoodie and makin’ my stomach drop like we’re still nineteen. Why can’t I just love him normal? Why do my hands shake because I decided to paint his hands again? Why does my whole nervous system light up over his ears? His stupid ears.”

“You always did have a thing for his ears,” Selah said, smiling in her voice.

“They’re so cute,” Nala groaned, covering her face. “And he doesn’t even know. He just walks around bein’ considerate and leavin’ his shoes by the door and makin’ me tea when I didn’t ask and every one of those little things is another brick on this pile in my chest. I feel like a hoarder. But with feelings.”

“Okay,” Selah said. “So you’re hoarding love. Congratulations, you’re rich in the only way that matters.”

“That’s not funny,” Nala sniffed.

“It’s a little funny,” Selah countered gently. “Listen. You’re scared that your love is too big to be healthy. That you’ve turned this man into a god. That one day you’ll wake up and realise you built an altar he didn’t deserve, and you’ll have to pack it all up and pretend it was never that deep.” She paused. “And on top of that, you are spiralling because he didn’t say ‘be ready at seven’ on February fourteenth.”

Nala let out a miserable little laugh. “When you say it like that…”

“It’s still valid,” Selah said quickly. “Don’t do that thing where you beat yourself up for wanting anything. You don’t care about Valentine’s itself. You care about proof. That’s all.”

Nala’s eyes stung again. “Is that so crazy?” she whispered. “That after eight years, one baby, one marriage, I still wanna feel… picked? On purpose?”

“It’s not crazy,” Selah said. “It’s human. You don’t want hearts and teddy bears. You want him to say, ‘Out of every version of my life, I still choose this one, with you in it.’ And you’re scared that because today looked a little regular, maybe he’s not pressed anymore.” She exhaled. “Nala, that man is pressed over you like a fresh suit. Y’all could be seventy on oxygen and he’d still be tryin’ to slide his hand up your thigh at breakfast.”

Despite herself, Nala smiled, cheeks wet.

“What you’re scared of,” Selah went on, “isn’t boredom. It’s invisibility. You’re scared he don’t see you as a woman right now ‘cause you also a wife, also a mother, also tired as hell. You’re scared he sees the bonnet and the baby monitor and not the girl in the red lace.”

Nala’s gaze dropped to the lingerie where it pooled beside her on the floor, the fabric a small, accusing puddle of red at her knee. Her chest pinched.

“Maybe,” she murmured.

“And I’m telling you,” Selah said, “you can’t declare romance dead on a day when your hormones are still wildin’, your sleep is fractured, and Instagram is yelling at you about luxury roses. That is not clean data.”

A watery laugh slipped out of Nala.

“As for you being broken,” Selah continued, voice softening again, “you’re not. You’re just… full. Your heart got stretched, that’s all. Muscles ache when they grow. Doesn’t mean you stop using ‘em.”

Nala watched a flake of blue paint crumble off her thumb and fall onto her leggings. “What if it’s suffocating?” she whispered. “For him. For me.”

“If it was suffocating him,” Selah said, “he’d be gasping. He’d be pulling away. Instead, he’s out here learnin’ how to make postpartum pads from YouTube and installing cameras so he can yell at you from across town when you stand on the counter.” She paused. “He is not suffocatin’. He’s participatin’.”

“And for me?” Nala asked.

“For you,” Selah said, “it’s gonna sting sometimes. Because you weren’t taught how to hold something this big without panicking. So your brain goes, we are in danger, and starts pathologizing what is, actually, a very intense blessing.” She let out a little laugh. “Clinically speaking? You’re crazy in love. The rest of us are just trying not to be jealous.”

Nala snorted, wiping at her cheeks. “So there’s nothing wrong with me?” she asked, tentative.

“There is absolutely something wrong with you,” Selah said. “You’re a menace. But not because you love your husband too loudly. Say it.”

Nala rolled her eyes, but obeyed. “There’s… nothing wrong with me,” she said slowly. “I just… love him big.”

“Bigger than most,” Selah corrected. “That’s his cross to bear.”

A real laugh shook out of Nala then, loosening something in her chest.

“You don’t hate Valentine’s,” Selah added, gentler. “You just don’t trust it. You can trust him, though. Maybe not with capitalism. But with you? Yeah. You can.”

Nala let her head tip back against the wall again, the hallway light buzzing softly above. Downstairs, the house hummed. Somewhere far off, a car passed. In the room behind her, Honey sighed in her sleep, the baby monitor letting out a little static crackle like applause.

“Okay,” Nala said at last. “So what do I do?”

“You handle your side,” Selah said. “Clean the damn kitchen. Wash your hands. Shower. If you wanna wear that red lace, wear it. If you wanna greet him in sweats, do that. But whatever you do, stop punishing yourself for how your heart reacts when he walks through that door. Let it jump. Let it ache. You can tell him about it if you want. Or you can paint about it and send me the picture instead. Just… stop telling yourself you’re broken for loving the man you chose and the man who chose you back.”

Nala’s eyes burned again, but the tears this time felt… easier. Warmer. Less like something was splitting open and more like something was finally overflowing the way it was supposed to.

“I love you,” she murmured.

“I know,” Selah replied. “Now go wash that paint off before you get it on Honey’s cheeks again. And send me that painting when you’re ready to admit it’s about his hands.”

“It’s not—” Nala started on reflex.

“Nalani.”

She sighed. “Okay. It is.”

“I know,” Selah said, and Nala could hear the smile. “Love you, menace.”

“Love you more,” Nala breathed, and hung up.

For a second, the hallway was very quiet.

Then she pushed herself up, scooped the red lace off the floor, and headed for the bathroom—heart still aching, still too big for her chest, but no longer something she was trying to cure.

If anything, she thought, wiping at her eyes as she turned on the tap, it might just be the healthiest thing about her.

For a moment she just sat there in the hush that followed, phone in her lap, paint on her fingers, ring gleaming on her hand. Her heart still ached—it probably always would—but the ache had shifted, softened, like a bruise pressed by a familiar hand that knew exactly how much pressure it could take.

She drew in a long breath, let it out slow, then pushed herself up from the floor and headed back toward her studio, where the canvas with his hands waited for her like it knew she was coming back.

Because of course she was.

There were worse things, she decided, than spending your life loving one person so much it leaked out of you in color and sound.

And if yearning was a disease, then maybe—just maybe—Tyriq was the only cure she ever wanted.

Because she wanted to immortalise him. That was the root of it, the quiet, stubborn truth under every brushstroke and every bar of music—Nala wanted to cheat time on his behalf, to take this one man the universe had handed her and pin him to the page, to the canvas, to the staff, so that if the world ever dared to forget him, it would have to step over the evidence of her devotion first.

That was why she painted: not just faces and hands and broad shoulders, but him—the way his mouth curled when he was trying not to smile, the furrow in his brow when he was concentrating, the specific tilt of his head when he listened to her talk like the rest of the room had fallen away. It was why she wrote songs for him she didn’t have the courage to sing herself, songs too raw and too honest to let out of her own throat, so she slipped them into other people’s voices instead, handed them to strangers who didn’t know that every harmony they floated into the world was stitched with his name. It was why she sat up at three in the morning pulling strings of melody together, stacking chords and weaving harmonies like she was braiding his DNA into sound, building little cathedrals of music where his spirit could live long after his body was gone.

Somewhere—she knew, because the contracts said so—in a museum he would never visit, under an alias no one would ever trace back to him, there was a painting of his profile hanging on a white wall, catalogued and insured, his likeness frozen in oil and light; somewhere in a curriculum, in a unit about modern impressionism or Black Southern portraiture, a professor said the name of a piece that was really just him in disguise, and a roomful of students squinted at the projected image, analysing brushwork and colour theory, never knowing they were studying the love of her life repackaged as academia.

She did all of this because she truly did not believe there was a logical reason for his existence. There couldn’t be. There was no equation that accounted for him, no neat little paragraph in any of her old science textbooks that could explain why a boy from Florida with eyes like summer sky and hands built for both catching footballs and holding her together had ended up in her orbit and never left. Loving Tyriq made her bump up against the limits of everything she thought she knew; it made her a believer in something bigger, because in her mind there was simply no rational explanation for the fact that someone like him existed at all—no mechanism, no pathway, no evolutionary advantage to that much gentleness wrapped in that much strength.

So when the logic ran out, when the diagrams and lectures and data failed to tell her why her heart beat different when he walked into a room, she did the only thing that made sense: she turned to scripture. She perused the thin, whispering pages of the holy book the way she’d once flipped through lab manuals, looking for a mention, a metaphor, some ancient footnote that would make it add up—some verse that could explain why a God she’d side-eyed for years had gone and made Tyriq Withers with such unnecessary care.

And when she couldn’t find him in the text, she did what she’d always done.

She wrote her own.

She sighed as she closed the books—scripture and sketchpads and dog-eared journals stacked together in a little altar of their own—palms smoothing over the covers like she was tucking her questions in for the night, then reached for the canvas and lifted it off the easel with the care of someone carrying a relic instead of a rectangle of stretched linen. The hallway to her studio felt longer than usual, the soft Atlanta light slanting in through the windows and catching on the wet strokes of his painted hands, making the veins and scars gleam like something living; she nudged the studio door open with her hip and stepped into the room where the rest of him lived—hundreds of canvases leaning against the walls, stacked in quiet, reverent rows, each one a different version of the same man, her private gallery of devotions that would sit there and gather dust until the day she forced herself to put a price on the pieces of her heart.

She’d just propped the newest one against the others when she heard it: the low, familiar rumble of his car pulling into the driveway, that specific engine note her body recognised faster than her ears. The sound moved through her like a switch being flipped—her pulse jumping, breath stuttering, that ridiculous swarm of butterflies erupting in her chest on cue, as if her cells hadn’t yet learned they were married now and didn’t need to react like he was still the boy she was sneaking around to see. She wiped her paint-stained hands on the thighs of her leggings as she stepped out of the studio, heart beating louder with each stair she descended, and through the front window she caught the first glimpse of him: Tyriq, climbing out of the car with the biggest bouquet of lilies she’d ever seen cradled in his arm, pale petals spilling everywhere like someone had uprooted a piece of heaven just for her.

When the call finally dropped, the apartment felt too quiet.

The “Call ended” notice vanished, and for a second Nala just sat there on the couch, phone slack in her hand, heart doing that uneven stutter like it couldn’t decide whether to sink or sprint. Honey’s monitor hummed softly on the side table, the clock in the kitchen kept ticking, and the red lace lay across her thigh like evidence—of wanting, of hoping, of being softer than she liked to admit.

She stared at it, at the tiny, sinful scrap of fabric bunched in her fist, then blew out a breath.

“Alright,” she muttered, pushing herself upright. “Let’s see what you got, Mr ‘I’ll be back later.’”

The kitchen was still a small disaster.

Bottles crowding the drying rack, a crusty burp cloth draped over the back of a chair, mail scattered across the island, a lone baby sock curled in the fruit bowl like it paid rent there. Formula dusted the counter; Honey’s pacifier lay face-down by the sink, judging.

It was their life—raw, sticky, too bright in places, too loud in others.

Nala dropped the red lace over a barstool like a promise and set about undoing the chaos. She rinsed her wine glass, loaded it into the dishwasher, scooped Honey’s things into a basket, stacked the mail into a single, semi-respectable pile, wiped down counters until the granite shifted from tacky to gleaming. Each swipe of the cloth felt a little like exorcism, a little like preparation. Making space for something she’d convinced herself wasn’t coming.

The whole time, her mind buzzed, full of Selah’s voice and her own worst-case scenarios.

If he really didn’t plan anything? Then what? Then you talk to him like a grown woman, that’s what.

She made herself shower—steam and hot water peeling the day off her: milk, sweat, the faint metallic tang of dried tears. She took a little longer with lotion, massaging coconut-scented circles into the new softness of her hips, the unfamiliar give of her stomach, blessing those places instead of cursing them. When she pulled the red lace on, it sat against her skin like a secret. When she tugged his old FSU T-shirt over it—the one he’d tossed at her freshman year with, “If you gon’ be in my dorm this much, you might as well wear the colors”—it fell to mid-thigh, lived-in cotton hiding something more deliberate.

In the mirror, she looked like exactly what she was: a tired, pretty woman with Sunday-afternoon eyes and stretch marks, someone’s wife, someone’s mother, still somebody’s fantasy if she tilted her head right. The contradiction made her chest ache.

“You still got it,” she told her reflection quietly.

The woman in the glass lifted her chin like she halfway believed it.

Honey was down, monitor light steady and green. The apartment slid into that particular kind of stillness that only happens when babies are sleeping and nobody’s moving too fast.

Then: the low growl of an engine outside, the slam of a car door, footsteps on the path.

Her heart reacted before her brain could scold it, leaping into her throat. She padded to the front door, intending to be casual, totally normal, absolutely not the girl who had just almost cried on the phone about capitalism because her husband hadn’t organised a prix fixe menu.

She reached for the handle just as his key turned on the other side. The door cracked, and she caught sight of him through the narrow gap first: tall frame backlit by the Atlanta evening, one arm cradling a ridiculous spray of lilies, the other hanging loose at his side.

Her chest squeezed.

Of course it was lilies. Her mother’s favourite. Her own quiet weakness by inheritance. Cream petals edged in blush, stems wrapped in brown paper and twine like they were too holy for cellophane. The smell ghosted in before he did—sharp, clean, almost overwhelming.

The happy flutter in her chest twisted a little when her gaze dropped and snagged on the faint bandage wrapped around his left wrist, stark white against his brown skin.

The door swung wider.

For a second, she just stood there on the threshold and watched him come up the path like she hadn’t watched him walk toward her a thousand times already—like they were back on that FSU sidewalk and she was just some girl with a backpack and a plan, pretending she hadn’t timed her route to “accidentally” cross his.

“Hey, baby,” he called, grin tugging at his mouth, that easy, familiar one that always made the world feel like background noise until he stepped into frame.

“Hey,” she managed, softer than she meant it.

Up close, the lilies were absurd—in the way only love makes things absurd. Too many stems, too many open flowers, too much fragrance, like he’d told the florist, I want it to smell like you could drown in them.

He stopped in front of her, eyes skimming over her face, her messy bun, his old T-shirt drowning her frame. The corner of his mouth lifted like he’d clocked the soft shorts underneath and chosen not to say anything yet.

“For you,” he said unnecessarily, holding the lilies out.

She took them, fingers brushing his; the small contact sent that stupid lurch through her chest again. The flowers rustled in her arms, shifting just enough for the bandage on his wrist to catch the light.

“Riq,” she frowned, the crease between her brows deepening. “What happened?”

He followed her gaze, then huffed a small laugh, the kind that said I knew you’d notice that first. “Relax,” he murmured, leaning in to brush a kiss against her temple as he nudged her back inside with his shoulder. “I’m fine. It’s nothin’ crazy.”

“You’re bandaged,” she countered, because stating the obvious felt safer than admitting the flash of panic she’d felt seeing it. “That’s not ‘nothing’.”

He shut the door behind them with a soft click; the house swallowed them, the sigh of the AC kicking on overhead. He set his keys on the console, then turned back to her and held out his left arm, palm up, like an offering.

“Come on,” he said, eyes warm. “You wanna do the honours?”

She set the lilies carefully on the entry table, like they might bruise if she moved too fast, and stepped closer, her heartbeat climbing into her throat. Up close, she could see the edges of the bandage weren’t perfectly straight—like he’d tried to adjust it himself in the car. There was a faint halo of pink around the gauze. And—if she squinted—a hint of fresh ink bleeding through near the edge.

Her stomach flipped.

“Tyriq,” she whispered, looking from his wrist up to his face, “what did you do?”

He gave her that small, crooked half-smile he only wore when he was nervous and trying not to show it. “Just… evened the score a little,” he said. “You out here puttin’ me in museums and curriculums. Figured I should add to the gallery.”

Her breath stuttered.

“Take it off,” he murmured, not commanding so much as offering. “Please.”

Her fingers shook as she found the edge of the tape, paint-stained nails careful not to tug at his skin. She peeled the bandage back slowly, centimetre by centimetre, like she was unwrapping something breakable.

First came irritated skin, flushed and tender. Then the shine of black ink, lines still raised and angry. When the gauze finally came free, she had to blink to focus.

It was her.

Not her name—he already had “Nalani” on his other wrist, curved in her handwriting like a promise. Not just her words—her “Choose me, even when I’m hard to love” running down his bicep in the same script, wrapping his muscle like a vow. Not the fine-line outline over his heart—the tiny profile only she and the tattoo artist knew was supposed to be her.

This was different.

On the inside of his wrist, opposite the old box-cutter scar and just above the fan of veins, was a small, detailed tattoo of a finger—her ring finger, slim and delicate, inked with the exact wedding band and engagement ring she wore right now. Around the base of the finger, tiny script curved like a second ring:

till my last breath.

Her throat closed up so fast she made a helpless little sound.

“Riq,” she breathed. It was all she could manage.

He watched her stare at it, watched the ripple of emotion move across her face, and his own softened, gaze going almost shy. “You always talk about immortalizin’ me,” he said quietly. “Canvas, songs you too scared to sing yourself, all that. And I love it. You know I do. But I needed you to know it’s not one-sided. I been puttin’ you on my body since I had two dollars to my name, ‘cause even if nobody ever saw you in a gallery or heard you in a chorus, I was gon’ make sure you were written somewhere permanent.”

“You already had three,” she managed, voice cracking. “Your wrist. Your chest. Your arm. How much more permanent do you want me to be?”

He gave a breath of a laugh, but there was nothing light in his eyes. “As much as I can get,” he said simply. “You got whole rooms filled with my face, baby. Whole sketchbooks. There’s a college student right now writin’ a paper about my hands and don’t even know it’s me. I got… this—” he flexed his fingers carefully “—and I’m still behind.”

“It’s not a competition,” she whispered, even though the protest was thin.

“Maybe not for you,” he said. “For me, I’m tryin’ to keep up.” He lifted the wrist again, closer to her face. “You think you’re the only one who can’t find a logical reason why the other exists?” His mouth trembled at the corner. “I look at you and Honey in this house we prayed for and there is not a single equation in my head that makes it make sense that I get to come home here. To you. So I do what I can.” He held his arm between them like evidence. “I make altars outta skin.”

Tears spilled over before she could stop them.

“This hurts,” she whispered.

He instantly frowned. “It shouldn’t—did it look infected? The artist said—”

“No,” she shook her head hard, letting out a wet laugh. “Not your wrist. My… heart.”

His face shifted, concern giving way to something softer, deeper. “Why?”

“Because I spent all day thinkin’ I was the crazy one,” she said, words tripping over themselves now. “The one who loved too big, who turned you into a god in my head, who paints your damn hands and calls it ‘study’ when it’s really worship.” Her voice went thinner. “And then you walk through the door with this, and lilies, and that look on your face, and I realise you’ve been doin’ the same thing. Just quieter. On your body instead of my walls.”

He stepped in until the lilies brushed her hip and his free hand could cup her jaw, thumb catching a tear before it slid down.

“Of course I have,” he murmured. “You think you cornered the market on devotion? Nala, I got you on my wrists so every time I lace up, every time I catch a ball, every time I sign my name, I see you. I got you over my heart so even when a jersey covers it, I know what’s underneath. I got your words on my arm so if I ever forget what I promised, I can read what you told me to be.” His thumb stroked her cheek. “And now I got the symbol of you choosin’ me on the hand I use for everything. So even when my mind is loud or the world is wild, my body remembers who I belong to.”

“You belong to me?” she asked, almost like she needed to hear him say it out loud.

“More than you belong to me,” he said, steady. “You think you’re the devout one in this story, but I’ve been buildin’ churches around your name since I was nineteen and too dumb to call it what it was.”

Her chest clenched so hard she had to lean into him, forehead pressing into his collarbone, lilies wedged awkwardly between them like a third heart.

“I’ve been sittin’ in this house all afternoon,” she mumbled into his hoodie, voice muffled and thick, “tryin’ to figure out what’s wrong with me ‘cause I can’t stop paintin’ you, writin’ you, hearin’ you in everything. Selah said I love you like a religion and I’ve been scared that’s… bad. Wrong. Too much. And you were literally somewhere gettin’ ‘till my last breath’ carved into you like a—like a pilgrim.”

He laughed quietly, his hand sliding into her hair, fingers finding the paint-stiff curls at her nape. “Maybe we’re both sick,” he said. “Same disease. Same cure.”

She exhaled, shaky, and then pulled back a little, wiping at her face with the heel of her palm. “Why lilies?” she asked, voice small.

He looked down at the bouquet, then back at her. “Because they’re your mama’s favourite,” he said first. “And because you take after her more than you admit. You act like you’re all thorns and wild roses, but you’re really lilies—soft, and strong, and still standin’ when everybody thought the frost would kill you.” His mouth curved. “And… they’re funeral flowers, sometimes. I wanted you to know that if I gotta let some version of me die to keep lovin’ you right—young, selfish parts of me that don’t know how to show up—I’m good with that. I’ll bury all of ‘em if it means I get to keep comin’ home to this.”

Her breath stuttered.

“You always think you’re the one doin’ the most,” he added, thumb tracing slow circles along her jaw. “But between you and me? I’m worse. You immortalise me on canvas where the world can see. I’m over here turnin’ my own body into a love letter nobody ever has to read but you.”

The house felt very small and very full around them—monitor hum, AC whisper, the soft rustle of lily petals every time she shifted.

She swallowed, sniffed, and let out a little laugh that was mostly a sob. “I thought there was no word for it,” she admitted. “For what I feel for you.”

“There probably isn’t,” he said. “Not one big enough anyway. So we… do this.” He tipped his bandaged wrist toward her, then nodded down the hallway. “Between your paint and my ink, maybe we get close.”

Emotion burned behind her sternum like a slow match.

“Come here,” he said suddenly, voice gentler. “I got somethin’ else to show you.”

She blinked. “There’s more?”

He smiled, nerves flickering at the edges again. “Don’t yell at me ‘til you see it.”

He grabbed the lilies in one hand, laced his inked fingers through her free hand with the other, and led her toward the kitchen.

She’d left the lights on.

Now, as they stepped through the doorway, she realised they weren’t.

He must’ve flicked them off when he came in.

The room was bathed in low, flickering light—battery candles lined up along the island, casting soft halos on the granite like tiny moons. In the centre of the island sat a cheap plastic vase stuffed full of wildflowers—daisies, scraggly purple blooms, a couple of dandelions that had no business looking that pretty—all jammed in together like they’d been grabbed straight out of the ground.

On the floor, between the island and lower cabinets, he’d spread an old, massive FSU blanket, its logo faded from too many washes. Their blanket. The one from the field. The one that had seen more versions of them than any other piece of fabric alive.

Takeout containers from their old spot—wings, fries, lemon pepper everything—lined the counter by the stove, steam still curling from the vents in the lids. A bottle of cheap red wine sat uncorked beside two mismatched plastic cups, the exact kind she used to “borrow” from the dining hall. From the speaker in the corner, their old FSU playlist played low and crackly, the opening bars of some song from sophomore year that refused to die.

And then the part that undid her completely:

A faded campus grocery receipt taped to the edge of the island, her name barely legible where it had once printed “NALANI.” A scuffed spare key lying beside it—his old off-campus spare. And propped against the candles in a crooked drugstore frame, a photo: nineteen-year-old them sprawled on that blanket in the actual field, her head thrown back in laughter, his forearm over his eyes, mouth open mid-sentence, stadium lights behind them like a halo.

Her hand flew to her mouth.

“Tyriq,” she whispered.

He stood near the island, hands back in his pockets now that the lilies were set down, shoulders a touch too straight like he was bracing for whatever verdict she might hand down. His eyes, though, were soft and locked on her.

“What is this?” she managed, her voice thin.

He nodded at the scene, a small shrug of one shoulder. “You said you don’t fuck with capitalism,” he said lightly, though his tone shook just enough to betray nerves, “so I figured I’d give you a Valentine’s they can’t sell on a billboard.”

Her eyes burned, tears threatening again.

“Riq…”

“First Valentine’s married, first with Honey,” he said, the joking falling away, voice going deeper. “I knew takin’ you somewhere with a dress code and tiny plates wasn’t gon’ feel like us. So I thought… let me remind her who we are. Where we started. Before the premieres and the diapers and the cameras in the house. Just blankets and bad wine and big-ass dreams.”

“You kept that picture,” she croaked, nodding toward the frame.

He gave her a look, part offended, part fond. “Of course I kept it. That was the night I knew I wasn’t gettin’ rid of you even if I tried.”

“Knew what?” she pushed, needing the words.

He took a slow step toward her, then another, until there was only one small breath of space between them. His bandaged wrist brushed the back of her hand.

“That I wasn’t gon’ find this with anybody else,” he said simply. “That all that soulmate shit you talk about? You were right. We were dumb, we were broke, we were layin’ on a blanket talkin’ about futures we had no business wantin’, and I still knew. Whatever life looked like later? I wanted you in it. Every version.”

Emotion clawed up her throat.

“We had sex on that field,” she blurted, because her brain was rude in emergencies.

His mouth curved into that slow, dangerous grin. “We did,” he agreed. “Terrible idea. Grass everywhere. I pulled a leaf out your hair like three days later.”

“Shut up,” she laughed, tears spilling over.

“I’m serious,” he chuckled. “Ground was hard. Wine was cheap. I was damn near convinced campus security was gon’ hit us with a spotlight. But you couldn’t tell me I wasn’t the luckiest man alive layin’ there with you, listenin’ to you talk about Paris like it was already booked.”

The memory flickered up—her on her back, hands gesturing wildly at the sky while she plotted trips she couldn’t afford yet, him half-listening, half-staring.

“And when my first movie premiered?” he added, voice roughening with another memory. “You remember that hood?”

Heat shot up her neck. “Why would you bring that up?” she groaned.

“Because it all belongs here,” he said. “The field, the hood, the stupid car alarm that almost went off while we were conceivin’ Honey.” His eyes sparkled. “Don’t act like you don’t know that girl was sittin’ in your womb with her arms crossed like, y’all nasty.”

She laughed so hard she snorted, hand swiping at her eyes. “You’re sick.”

“And you married me,” he reminded her. “Multiple times, technically. So.”

Her laughter faded into something softer as she looked around the kitchen again—the blanket, the wildflowers, the receipts, the playlist, the wings, the way the candles made all of it look more sacred than it had any right to be.

“I really thought you forgot,” she admitted quietly. “All day, I’ve been walkin’ around here like maybe that part of us—” she gestured helplessly “—is over. That maybe we used up all the surprises and now it’s just… bills and wipes and Netflix.”

“And TED Talks about revolutionary pussy politics,” he added, lips twitching.

“Oh my God,” she groaned. “You heard that.”

He nodded, grin widening. “You were on speaker when I came up the stairs. ‘Consciousness over cock’ almost made me drop the flowers.”

She covered her face with both hands.

He laughed, stepping in to gently pull her hands away so he could see her again. His thumb swept fresh tracks under her eyes.

“You’re not wrong about the capitalism,” he said softly. “But I’m not lettin’ a perfectly good excuse to show you off emotionally pass me by.” He nodded toward the blanket. “Those kids on that field? They didn’t know if life would give them more than scraps. But they loved each other like they’d already won. I wanted tonight to be a thank-you to them. For bettin’ on us.”

Her heart throbbed.

“I get scared too,” he added, more quietly. “Scared I’m gon’ fuck it up. Scared you’ll wake up and realise you could’ve had somebody easier. Scared life’s gon’ throw somethin’ we can’t fix.” He squeezed her hand. “But I don’t get scared that we ‘used it up’. Love like this don’t burn out, Nala. It just… changes shape.”

He led her gently onto the blanket; they sank down together, knees touching, shoulders brushing. The FSU logo crinkled under them, familiar and worn. It felt both like sitting in a kitchen and sitting inside a memory.

He handed her a wing; she took a bite, sauce hitting the corner of her mouth. He wiped it off with his thumb, exaggerated, just to make her roll her eyes.

“This is illegal,” she mumbled around the food. “Full circle like this.”

“It’s us,” he said. “I don’t think we know how to do legal.”

The music swelled softly behind them. Somewhere down the hall, Honey shifted in her crib with a little sigh.

“Do you ever get scared we’ll turn into… roommates?” she asked after a while, voice small. “Co-parents. Not…”

“Not soulmates?” he finished.

She nodded.

He set his food down, wiped his fingers on a napkin, then took her hand again, threading their fingers together. The fresh tattoo on his wrist brushed the metal of her rings.

“I’m scared of a lot of things,” he said honestly. “But I’m not scared of that. ‘Cause even on the days when we feel like co-managers of Chaos Withers LLC, I still want you. You walk past me in sweats and my brain short-circuits. You paint my hands for the fiftieth time and I feel like I’m bein’ seen by God. I installed cameras so I could yell at you when you’re being reckless. I did a stakeout in Target so you wouldn’t walk into your birth mom. I let a man carve till my last breath under your ring. I am not built for ‘roommate’ with you.”

Her eyes filled all over again.

“I was so busy bein’ scared of what we lost,” she whispered, “I didn’t see what we gained.”

He leaned in until his forehead rested against hers, their joined hands anchored between them.

“Look at us,” he murmured. “We went from sneakin’ out to a field with a blanket, to makin’ a baby on a car hood, to sittin’ in our kitchen, in our house, on the same blanket, with our actual dream snorin’ down the hall.” His thumb stroked across her knuckles. “If this is ‘borin’,’ I wanna be bored forever—with you.”

She laughed, a broken little sound, and then kissed him—slow, deep, tasting lemon pepper and cheap wine and eight years of every kind of day. He kissed her back like he always did when he remembered all at once that she was here, now, real, and his—careful and greedy at the same time.

When they finally parted, noses still touching, his inked wrist curled over her thigh, the little tattoo of her ring finger brushing warm skin.

“Nalani,” he murmured, and somehow the name didn’t sound like four syllables so much as a whole liturgy, a prayer he’d been saying under his breath since nineteen that had only grown heavier, more sacred, now that she’d given him a daughter and turned all their stupid dorm-room prophecies into a crib down the hall and a mortgage and a life.

Her full name sat low and warm in his chest, pressed to the corner of her mouth like he was tasting it again for the first time, like he was reminding himself that the girl he’d met on FSU grass and kissed on car hoods was the same woman currently breathing against his skin, wearing his hoodie and their ring and the proof of Honey around her waist.

“Look at me,” he said—soft, but threaded with something that felt like necessity, like if you never listen to another thing I say, listen to this.

She lifted her face from the hollow of his shoulder and sat up a little straighter in his lap, thighs bracketing his hips on the old FSU blanket, the faded logo wrinkling under her knees. The kitchen light was off; only the cheap battery candles on the island and the faint green clock on the stove glowed, turning laminate and stainless-steel into something unexpectedly tender, almost altar-like, and for a moment he just… looked.

Not politely. Not quickly.

Looked the way men in old paintings looked at goddesses they weren’t meant to touch—the way Sappho had once written about some man “seeming equal to the gods” just because he got to sit and listen to a woman laugh; only here, somehow, he was both the man and the one made divine.

Her lashes were still damp and clumped from crying, the tip of her nose a soft pink, her mouth slick from wing sauce and his kiss. Her hair, half gathered and half escaping, framed her face in frizzy little tendrils that caught the candlelight like climbing ivy catching the last of the sun on temple stone. His FSU hoodie swallowed her, hanging loose over a body he knew in all its editions—the taut freshman-year version, the soft-around-the-edges touring version, this newest one bearing the faint silver of their daughter’s arrival like scripture written in stretch marks—and in his eyes, every version was just a different stanza of the same poem.

“You know you’re… unreal, right?” he said finally, the words long and dragging and a little clumsy because they were coming from somewhere under his ribs rather than his head. “Like actually, physically implausible; I keep lookin’ at you and thinkin’ there’s no way God didn’t use a cheat code when He made you, like He broke His own system and then just… let me walk around with the evidence.”

She huffed a little, trying to look away, as if the force of his gaze physically warmed her skin. “I look a mess,” she muttered, not really convincing even herself.

“Not to me,” he said, instantly, like the idea offended him on principle. “Never to me—not on your worst day, not bleeding, not swollen, not with baby spit on your shirt, not with paint on your fingers, not with your bonnet bent to hell, not now.”

His thumb shaped the curve of her jaw, slow, reverent, like his hand was tracing a coastline he’d shipwrecked himself on a thousand times and planned to keep crashing into until the end of the world; the simple, steady contact grounded him in her warmth, kept him from floating all the way up into the strange, terrifying gratitude that sat above his heart whenever he thought too hard about the fact that she was his.

“You know what you look like to me?” he went on, voice lowering, the edges smoothing as he found his rhythm. “You look like one of them old stories—the good ones, the ones that lasted—not the mess where Zeus couldn’t keep it in his pants, but the ones they built whole cities and temples around; the ones sailors carved into the sides of their boats ‘cause they thought if they kept a goddess’s face close, the sea might spare ‘em.”

She gave a wet, incredulous laugh, eyes darting back to his. “Please don’t compare me to anyone Zeus was messin’ with,” she said. “I’m beggin’ you.”

“I’m not,” he replied, a smile passing across his mouth but never touching the intensity in his eyes. “I’m talkin’ about the ones they painted on ceilings ‘cause regular walls weren’t big enough. The ones people pilgrimaged for, just to leave flowers and whisper please under their breath. The ones that made men write whole epics just tryin’ to describe what it felt like to stand near ‘em and not combust.”

The wildflowers in the plastic vase on the island—daisies, a few scraggly purple things he’d torn from some poor Atlanta verge, a dandelion stem too long—cast tiny, uneven shadows on the counter as if listening, as if nodding along.

“You gave me a whole daughter,” he said then, leaning enough that their foreheads nearly brushed, so close he could feel her breath pause at the words. “You turned your own body into a doorway and pulled a person through, and then you stayed; you lived when I watched you bleed and shake and go somewhere I couldn’t follow, and then you came back to me—with her. You really think I can watch that, live in the same house as the woman who did that, and see anything less than divine?”

Her inhale shuddered right against his lips, her fingers gathering uselessly in the fabric of his hoodie like she needed something to hold onto besides what he was saying.

“Riq—”

“I’m serious,” he cut in, thumb slipping from her jaw to rest against the pulse at the side of her neck, feeling the little rabbit-fast jump there under his skin like proof of life. “Back at FSU, I thought you were the sun—loud and bright and everywhere, all that heat and life radiatin’ off you, and me just… turnin’ toward you every time you walked in a room like some dumb flower that don’t know anything but light. Now?” He exhaled, a slow, uneven release. “Now I know you’re more than that. You’re a constellation—one of those old ones we used to pretend we knew the names of. A whole story written in stars, and I’m the idiot standin’ underneath, neck hurtin’, thinkin’ how is this even allowed.”

Her eyes shone at that, and he could feel the way the words brushed up against the tender, anxious thought that had been gnawing at her all day: what if motherhood made me invisible to him; what if the girl he wanted disappeared while I wasn’t looking.

His hand left her neck and travelled, slow, over the slope of her shoulder, fingers catching in a wrinkle of hoodie, smoothing it down again; his knuckles traced the fine line of her collarbone, pausing there like a comma before following the trail of fabric as it fell, until the hoodie hit her bare thighs and the blanket rose up, soft and familiar and utterly unromantic beneath the most romantic thing he’d ever seen.

“I watched your body change for Honey,” he said, eyes following the path of his own hand, voice gone quieter but thicker, like there was too much in it now. “Watched you stretch and swell and try to move like you weren’t carryin’ a whole universe balanced on your hip bone. Watched you split yourself open and then spend weeks tryin’ to gather yourself back up, piece by piece, even when you were too tired to remember your own middle name.” His palm settled over the soft of her belly, wide and gentle, fingers spreading like he wanted to cover every insecurity at once. “You keep callin’ this routine, callin’ yourself ‘a mess,’ talkin’ about what you lost. I call this proof. Proof you went to the edge of death for us and walked back in your own shaky little shoes.”

Her hand flew to his, pressing it harder into that softness like she was trying to make him feel the weight of all of it—the changed skin, the lingering ache, the fact she was still here, still his.

“I feel… different,” she whispered, the honesty raw. “Sometimes I look in the mirror and I don’t recognise myself. Like I’m made outta scraps of all the girls I used to be, taped together, and none of them sit right anymore.”

He nodded slowly, as if she’d said something he’d already rehearsed his answer to. “You are different,” he agreed. “And you’re still you. The girl in the field with cheap wine and impossible dreams; the woman on the hood of that rental car while the city lights blinked at us like they knew a secret; the bride at the altar with her hands shakin’ but her eyes steady; the mama in that hospital bed while they said words I don’t even wanna remember.” His gaze locked onto hers again, steady and unblinking. “They’re all right here, sittin’ in my lap on this ugly-ass blanket. And I want all of ‘em. There is not a version of you—past, present or future—that I don’t want the honour of lovin’.”

His hand slid from her belly to her waist, thumb tracing the new dip there in slow, reverent strokes that made her chest ache worse than any overt grab ever could; then his fingers dipped lower, wrapping around the outer curve of her thigh where the hoodie bunched, careful and sure, like he was holding the neck of something priceless and fragile.

Heat coiled low in her, but it didn’t feel like lust in isolation—it felt like recognition, like oh, there you are, I remember this layered on top of all the other ways they’d learned each other since.

He tugged, just a little, guiding her until she was sitting fully astride him, knees pressing deeper into the faded FSU logo. Her fingers dug into his shoulders to steady herself, and his breath caught, quick and sharp, like the simple act of her weight settling over his hips was enough to tilt his whole axis another degree.

“Riq,” she murmured, half warning, half warning herself.

He looked up at her, and the way he did it made her feel, for a split second, like the kitchen had fallen away and it was just them in some old fresco, some myth that would get told and retold until nobody remembered where it started—just that there had once been a woman and a man who looked at her like this.

“You know how those old Greek stories talk about the gods lovin’ somebody so hard the world had to rearrange itself to make room?” he asked, hands resting warm and firm on her thighs now, his thumbs drawing slow arcs on her skin that made it hard to breathe evenly. “Floods, famines, ten-year wars… all behind one person bein’ loved too loud.” He huffed a small, disbelieving laugh. “Every time you look at me like this, I swear somethin’ shifts. Not in some corny little quote-post way—for real. I thought I was a solid thing, you know? A man with his own centre of gravity. Then you came along and every compass in me swung your direction and stayed there.”

He slid one hand up, over her hip, over the worn cotton draped across her ribs, feeling the lace and skin and new curves beneath; his fingers found the side of her neck again, tilting her face down to his, keeping her close but not trapping—always giving her the angle and the exit.

“I don’t know how to love you halfway,” he admitted, the words a bare confession between them. “I don’t know how to touch you like you’re regular. There is no version of my future where you’re not the point of it. You are the map and the destination, and I’m just… movin’ around you, tryin’ to be worthy of it.”

Her breath stuttered; she could feel his, too, rough against her mouth.

“I don’t care how many diapers we change,” he went on, each word slower now, heavier, “how many late nights, how many school runs, how many times we sit right here and argue about bins and bills and calendars. Every timeline I can imagine still comes back to this—me, somewhere on a piece of fabric with you on my lap, stuck between wantin’ to pray to you and wantin’ to worship you with my hands until you forget every reason you ever doubted yourself.”

A half-laugh, half sob escaped her, and she dropped her forehead to his, fingers clutching at his hoodie like she needed something to anchor herself to.

“Tyriq,” she breathed, the name a little broken.

“Yeah, baby.” His thumbs pressed into the soft hollows of her hips, as if he could pour steadiness into her through bone and muscle.

She shifted—barely—but they both felt it, that old familiar spark catching under the skin, threading through this newer, heavier love like a live wire laid on top of deep roots. His jaw tensed; his eyes shut for a second, like he was bracing himself against a wave he’d willingly drown in.

When he opened them, there was heat there, yes, but beyond that there was that same stunned, almost frightened reverence—the look of a man who had found his god very much alive and realised, belatedly, that he would gladly die for the privilege of standing this close.

“I used to think the peak of my life would be people screamin’ my name in stadiums or seein’ it in big letters on screens,” he said, his thumb brushing along the soft curve of her bottom lip as if he was trying to wipe the old dream away. “All that loud, shiny stuff they train boys to chase. But none of that ever rewired me the way you did. None of that fed me when my soul was hungry. The holiest thing I ever did was kiss you that first night on this blanket and not run when I realised what it meant—that I was never gon’ be able to live small again, not with you in my line of sight.”

He kissed her then—slowly, without urgency, the way you’d cup water in your hands when you’re dying of thirst and still too careful not to spill any. She softened into it on instinct because her body knew this as well as it knew walking or breathing; his lips shaped themselves to her like scripture finding its proper cadence.

When they broke apart, their breaths uneven but shared, he stayed close, noses brushing, his hands still at her hips like he was afraid if he let go gravity might fail and she’d float away.

“You feel that?” he asked, voice hoarse but steady. “That’s not romance dyin’. That’s not the fire goin’ out. That’s the same thing that had us in that damn field with cheap wine and grass stains, only now it’s learned how to pay bills and boil bottles and still make room for this. This is not smaller, Nala. It’s deeper.”

She pressed her forehead to his and laughed, wet and shaky. “You really think I’m a goddess?” she asked, half joking, half desperate. “Like this? In your hoodie, with my hair lookin’ crazy and my stomach doin’ the most?”

He leaned back just enough to drag his gaze over her with unhurried attention, from her hairline to her lashes to her mouth, down the column of her throat to the hoodie that had been washed thin and soft, over the curve of her chest, the softness of her belly, the way her thighs held his hips like they had been carved to fit exactly there; then back up again, meeting her eyes with something that made her want to look away and lean in all at once.

“I think you’re the closest thing to a god I’m ever gon’ be allowed to touch,” he said quietly. “And I think if any of them old poets had met you, they’d have thrown half their stories in the fire and started over. Achilles would’ve traded his little war glory for an evening on this kitchen floor with you. Patroclus would’ve wrote essays about the way you frown when you’re concentratin’. Sappho would’ve run outta metaphors tryin’ to describe how my whole body acts up when you walk in a room.”

Her laugh fractured halfway, tears spilling over. “You’re ridiculous,” she said, voice cracking right down the middle.

He kissed the tear as it slid, lips gentle at the corner of her eye, then another at the hollow just beneath, the way you kiss the edge of a wound you can’t fully heal.

“Maybe,” he allowed. “But I’m yours. That’s the only thing I’m tryin’ to be consistent at. Ridiculous, obsessed, sentenced to you for life. You think you’re the one who loves too much, who turns me into myths and melodies and museum pieces—meanwhile I’m over here quietly buildin’ a whole religion around your name and prayin’ I don’t scare you with it.”

She looked at him—at the fresh bandage on his wrist hiding yet another piece of her carved into his skin, at the wildflowers he’d jammed into a plastic vase because meaning mattered more than aesthetics, at the dilapidated blanket on the floor that he’d turned into sacred ground just by dragging it out again, at the way his hands kept circling back to her like no matter where they started they already knew the route home—and something in her that had been braced all day finally, quietly, unclenched.

She believed him.

Believed that somehow, impossibly, for all the songs and paintings and shrines she’d made out of him, his devotion might still outpace hers in sheer, stubborn volume.

Her palm cradled his cheek, thumb stroking along the prickle of his beard, and the candles flickered, and their old FSU playlist mumbled some distant hook about forever, and Honey murmured once in her sleep down the hall and went still again.

“Then stay crazy about me,” she whispered, the words so soft and so serious they almost hurt. “Don’t get tired. Don’t… get used to me like habit. I can’t… I don’t wanna be something you step over on your way to the next thing. I want to be—”

“You are the thing,” he cut in, the interruption gentle but absolute. “There is no ‘next’ beyond you. There’s you, and all the different ways our life branches off from lovin’ you. That’s it. That’s the whole map.”

Her mouth trembled.

“And if you ever feel like it’s too much,” he added, voice softer now but carrying that same fierce thread she recognised from huddled conversations with coaches and agents—only here, aimed fully at her, “you tell me. Not so I can love you less.” His hand slid from her hip to the centre of her back, rubbing slow circles into the muscle there like he was already soothing a future ache. “So I can love you better. Love you in ways that feel like breath instead of flood. Because I’m not here to drown you, Nala. I’m here to do what that Book talk about—love you like Christ loved the church, like lay-myself-down, wash-your-feet even when you’re annoyin’ me, hold-you-up when you’re tired, learn-your-body-and-your-heart like it’s my favourite scripture. I’m here to worship you in a way that gives you room to live.”

Her eyes flooded again; she laughed anyway, a little broken bubble of sound.

“For tonight,” she managed, leaning in so her lips brushed his jaw, words warm against his skin, “I’ll let you.”

“Let me what?” he asked, even though every nerve in him already knew.

“Love me heavy,” she said. “Like consequence. Like gravity. Like one of them myths they carved into stone and still got wrong. Love me like I’m your purpose. ‘Cause I know I am.”

His eyes closed for a moment, like the words hit somewhere vital, somewhere deep.

“Yes, ma’am,” he breathed.

He didn’t yank the hoodie off her or scramble for the lights or try to turn the moment into something performative; he just sat there on that ugly old blanket and kissed her like a man who had finally, fully accepted that his vocation in this lifetime was not fame or record books but this—this woman, this body, this soul, this kitchen on a Thursday night that happened to be Valentine’s Day, with wildflowers leaning in and cheap wine in stolen cups.

His hands moved over her slowly, mapping out the new terrain, relearning the old familiar landmarks, touching the places the world told her to hide with a tenderness that made the back of her eyes burn; each brush of his thumb, each press of his palm, said I see you, and I am staying, and she let herself receive it, let herself feel the way his shoulders curved instinctively around her, the way his chest rose and fell under her palms, the way his heartbeat knocked hard and uneven at his ribs like it was still surprised to find itself in the same room as her.

Later, the candles would burn low and sputter out. They’d tiptoe down the hall to check on Honey, and argue quietly about whose turn it was to do the 3 a.m. feed, and laugh in whispers when their daughter punched the air in her sleep.

But right then, on their old FSU blanket in their grown-up kitchen, surrounded by wildflowers in a plastic vase and lilies on the counter and the ghosts of their nineteen-year-old selves stretched out somewhere just under the fabric, Nala sat in her husband’s lap and finally, finally believed what had been true all along:

that in whatever strange pantheon of love they’d stumbled into—where Greek words for love overlapped (eros in their kisses, agape in their sacrifice, philia in their friendship, storge in the easy way they co-parented), where biblical verses about two becoming one flesh made a terrifying kind of sense, where Sappho’s jealousy and Patroclus’s loyalty and every psalm about devotion lived in the same house—

she might be the deity in Tyriq’s story,

but he was the man who had built his whole life on his knees, absolutely certain that the holiest thing he could ever do was stand back up every morning and choose, again, to spend another day at her altar.

For a while they just breathed together, sitting there in the middle of their little temple of linoleum and wildflowers—her perched on his lap, his hands moving slow and steady over the same paths they’d been memorising for almost a decade—and he could’ve let the night rest like that, let the quiet stand as proof.

But there was something else sitting in his chest, something hotter and heavier and older than the candles, and he knew if he didn’t let it out now it would sit there and rot.

His fingers slid up from her waist to her face again, framing it gently, thumbs pressing into the soft hollows beneath her cheekbones, angling her so she was looking at him and only him.

“Nalani,” he said again, a little rougher, like the name was catching on something on its way out. “I need you to hear this part.”

Her brows pulled together, that familiar, tiny crease; her hands, already resting on his shoulders, tightened just a fraction.

“I joke about worship,” he said, voice low and steady now, like he was reading aloud from some text he’d written in his blood, “about altars and temples and you bein’ a goddess and me the fool at your feet. But I need you to understand—underneath the jokes? That’s just the honest state of things. You own me.”

Her breath stuttered; his thumbs stroked across her skin, calming and exposing at once.

“I don’t mean that in the cute, possessive caption way,” he went on, every word lengthened by the weight behind it. “I mean—you have me. All of me. My head, my hands, my future, my breath. You think I don’t know how much power you got over me? I feel it every time I walk in this house and check your face before I check anything else. My whole nervous system takes roll call on you first.”

Her eyes flickered, shiny, but she didn’t look away.

“You think I don’t want to be better?” he asked, the question raw enough to sting. “You think I don’t lay awake sometimes and think about the man you believed in before I even knew how to spell ‘husband’? You were votin’ for me before there was even a ballot. You thought I could be somethin’ steady, somethin’ honorable, long before the league or the movies or any of that. I wake up every day tryin’ to grow into the version of me you saw. Not my coach. Not fans. You.”

The way he said it—like her belief had been the original campaign and everything else was just a recount—made her chest squeeze.

“I love you,” he said, the words too small for how they landed, so he pushed further. “I’m in love with you. You are the love of my life, and I don’t mean that lightly. I mean: there will not be another. There will not be a part two, a rewrite, a ‘what if.’ If there’s breath in my body and sense in my mind, it’s you.”

He swallowed, throat bobbing, eyes never leaving hers.

“My every feelin’,” he admitted, “is tethered to you. You frown? My whole day caves in. You laugh? My lungs remember how to work. I walk into a room and check the weather on your face before I decide what season I’m in. It’s stupid. It’s dangerous. And I would not trade it. I don’t sleep right when you’re not on my chest. I don’t breathe right when you’re mad at me. I wait for you in every space I’m in, even when you’re not there. I watch doors like you might walk through ‘em.”

The admission cracked something open in him; he let it.

“I exist for you,” he said simply. “Not in the ‘I don’t have my own identity’ way, but in the ‘all my purposes pass through your hands first’ way. Whatever else I do—whatever ball I catch, whatever role I play, whatever cheque I cash—it is only holy to me if I can lay it at your feet and our kids’ feet and say, ‘Here. This serves us.’ Without you?” He shook his head slightly, the smallest, helpless gesture. “Without you, it’s noise. It’s stadium echoes and empty hotel rooms and merch with my name on it that don’t mean nothin’.”

Her hands slid up, fingers curling carefully around his wrists, holding on to him holding on to her.

“If I could,” he said, softer now, “I’d drop all of it. The cameras, the calls, the people sayin’ my name like they know me. I’d walk out, right now, barefoot, and not look back, if that’s what it took to keep this blanket and this kitchen and your head on my shoulder. There is no version of my life that outranks the one where I get to be the man you come home to.”

The room seemed to narrow around his words, the little fake candles throwing their halos wider, as if trying to make space.

“There’s no one else in this,” he added, voice almost a whisper now. “No other name in the margin. No old crush I’m still writin’ poems about. There’s you. Me. The child we made. The ones we ain’t even met yet. That’s it. That’s the whole cast list. You’re not a side story; you’re not a woman I trip over between chapters. You are the book.”

Her chin wobbled; he reached up, one hand leaving her face only long enough to swipe a tear away before it fell, then cupped her cheek again, his palm spanning the side of her head like he could hold her together by will.

“You drive me crazy,” he said, a half-laugh breaking through, though there was nothing light about the way his gaze clung to her. “You know that, right? You are the thorn and the balm. The thing that makes my chest hurt and the only thing that makes it stop. I swear to God, sometimes I think you were designed specifically to ruin my peace and then be the only person who knows how to fix it again.”

Her laugh came out wet, strangled. “So I’m your curse and your cure,” she managed.

“You are the irritation and the cure-all,” he agreed, a shaky smile tugging at his mouth. “Every nerve I got has learned your name. You are the problem I would rather have for the rest of my life than anybody else’s solution.”

He shifted under her, just a little, enough that she felt the way his body responded to her even as his words kept deepening.

“I have loved you,” he said, and something in his tone changed—took on that old, storytelling cadence he’d use when he drove home from late practices, recounting plays and near-misses, only now the subject was them, “from stupid little moments you probably don’t even remember. From the way you beat me to that bus that first week and turned around like you’d won the Olympics. From the way you filled whole hallways with your voice, complainin’ about professors and still somehow talkin’ like the world was gonna be yours anyway. From the night we lay on this same blanket on that field and you talked about Paris like your mama already had her bags packed, and I realised I wanted a lifetime of watchin’ you point at the horizon and dare it to move.”

He drew in a slow breath, like he was paging through all the versions of her he’d loved and trying to pick just a few.

“I loved you every time I watched you walk across campus and pretended I wasn’t adjustin’ my route to bump into you. I loved you every time you fell asleep sittin’ upright with a textbook on your chest and your highlighter on your cheek. I loved you on the nights I was mad at you and the days you were mad at me. I loved you when we were broke and eatin’ noodles out the same pot, and I love you now when there’s more food than we can eat and the plates match.” He huffed a breath that might’ve been a laugh. “I have loved you in every room we shared and every room I had to sleep in alone because of flights or shoots or road games—and I swear, half the time it was worse to be apart ‘cause I kept feelin’ like some part of me had been left in your hands for safekeeping.”

Her eyes overflowed; he let them.

“Together,” he said, leaning in to touch his forehead to hers again, letting the word rest between them, “we are… not perfect. Not clean. Not easy.” His lips quirked. “We’re loud and stubborn and dramatic and so in love people probably get tired of hearin’ about it.”

Her wet laugh puffed against his mouth.

“But together,” he went on, quieter now, “we are whole. Whatever pieces were missin’ from me before you showed up—they’re here now, sittin’ on this floor, in this hoodie, in this body I get to hold. Whatever cracks you got from before me—whatever gaps and ghosts—you know I’m spendin’ my whole life pourin’ myself into ‘em ‘til the light comes through instead of the draft.”

He pulled back just enough that he could see all of her face again, candlelight painting her in gold.

“I read that verse for our vows,” he said softly, “and I don’t think I really understood it then. I just liked how it sounded.” His thumb stroked the line of her lower lip as he spoke, almost as if he was writing the words there. “‘Set me as a seal upon thine heart, as a seal upon thine arm: for love is strong as death…’”

His voice caught; he swallowed and kept going, eyes never leaving hers.

“That’s what this feels like to me,” he said. “Like you pressed your name into my chest and my skin when I was too dumb and young to know what you were doin’, and now it’s just there, permanent, like a brand and a blessing both. Love as strong as death. That’s what us is. Not fragile, not fickle—somethin’ that stands there, unmovin’, while everything else changes clothes.”

One of her hands slid down from his shoulder to his heartbeat, palm flattening over the thud that picked up at his words, as if to test them.

“You say you’re scared of lovin’ me too much,” he said, his voice gone almost tender with the ache of it. “Baby, I wake up every day terrified that I will never be able to prove to you how much I love you. That I will live to be old and grey and still be sittin’ somewhere, rockin’ in a chair, thinkin’, I should’ve said it more. I should’ve shown her more. I should’ve found another way to make sure she knew.”

Her mouth trembled. “I know,” she tried, but the words came out thin.

“Not like I know it,” he said, gentle but firm. “I know it in my bones. In my knees. In the way my body aches when I have to walk away from you to go to work. In the way I check that monitor twice before I close my eyes ‘cause our daughter bein’ okay is part of lovin’ you right. In the way every plan I make has your name scribbled across the margin, even if nobody else can see it.”

He let out a breath that sounded like surrender.

“You are the sentence God wrote,” he finished, voice barely above a whisper now, “and then—somehow—let me walk around bein’ the man in the margins. You are the story, Nala. I’m just the one blessed enough to be written next to you.”

Her face crumpled at that, in that way he knew meant he’d hit the softest part, the one she hid even from herself. She leaned forward, collapsing the small space left between them, pressing her mouth to his like it was the only way to answer, like whatever words she had would fall apart if she tried to say them.

He caught her, hands big and steady at her back, letting her pour the tremor out through the kiss, letting her cling as tight as she needed to. When they broke apart, both of them breathing hard, tears on both faces now, she rested her forehead against his, eyes closed, fingers dug into the back of his neck.

“Tyriq,” she breathed, his name stretched thin.

“Yeah, baby,” he answered, hands steady on her like he was keeping her from floating away.

Her hips shifted without her meaning them to, a small, unconscious movement that made them both inhale, the contact a slow flicker of remembered want layered on top of the newer, deeper thing that had grown between them since Honey.

His jaw clenched, eyes squeezing shut for a second like he was bracing himself against the wave of it. When he looked at her again, there was heat there, yes, but there was something else too—something almost devout.

When they broke apart, both of them breathing harder, her forehead still resting against his, he smiled, a small, crooked thing that made her chest squeeze.

Her hands slid down, over his chest, feeling the steady thump of his heart through the worn cotton, the rise and fall of his breathing. It hit her then, in a way it hadn’t on the couch, hadn’t in her rant, hadn’t even on the phone with Selah—that this wasn’t a man who’d forgotten her. This was a man who had built his whole internal compass around her and was now, patiently, insistently, turning it back into her hands.

“You really think I’m a goddess?” she asked, voice bending around the question like she already knew the answer and still needed to hear it anyway, half-teasing because that was easier, half-serious because that was the part that hurt.

He didn’t even hesitate.

“I think you’re everything,” he whispered, like the word itself was a kind of surrender, his eyes steady on hers, candlelight caught in the wet at the corner of them. “Everything I prayed for before I even knew your name. Everything I was scared to ask for ‘cause it felt greedy. You’re gonna be the death of me, Nala.”

Her heart lurched at that—the way he said it so matter-of-fact, like it was both a prophecy and a promise—and something in her went tight with fear. She tearily looked him in the eye and shook her head hard, fingers tightening on his shoulders like she could anchor him to the future by grip alone.

“Don’t say that,” she choked, the words coming out small and fierce, half plea, half command. “You’re gonna live a long life with me, you hear me? You’re gonna be an old man and still complainin’ about your knees while you yell at our great-grandbabies to get off your lawn. We are not speakin’ death over you.”

His mouth curved, but it wasn’t really a smile; it was that soft, heartbreaking expression he got when she said something that proved she didn’t quite grasp how deep she’d settled into him.

“I don’t mean it like that,” he murmured, voice roughing out around the edges as he lifted one hand to cup the back of her head, cradling her like something holy and breakable all at once. “I don’t mean coffins and funerals and the end of days. I mean—love as strong as death, remember?” His thumb stroked the damp track under her eye, gentle. “That verse you like. ‘Set me as a seal upon your heart… for love is as strong as death.’ That kind of death. The kind you don’t come back from ‘cause you don’t want to. The before-you and the after-you.”

She swallowed, breathing through her nose like she was trying to hold herself together molecule by molecule.

“I’m sayin’,” he went on, slow, careful, “that there was a version of me that existed before you, and he’s gone. Buried. No resurrection. That boy died in a dorm room somewhere the first time you laughed so hard you choked on your drink and let me see you ugly-cry over some stupid show. The man that’s left? He’s yours. Built around you. If anything ever takes you away from me, that’s the part that won’t survive. That’s the ‘death’ I’m talkin’ about.”

Her face crumpled a little at that, but for once it wasn’t fear alone—it was that sharp, almost painful tenderness that came from being loved in a language your body had always secretly spoken and never heard out loud.

“But you’re not leavin’,” he added quickly, like he could see the shadow crossing her thoughts. He pressed his forehead to hers again, their noses brushing, his hand at her nape, firm and warm. “You hear me? You just told me I’m livin’ a long life with you; I’m holdin’ you to that. I’m gonna be old and grey and still tryna pull you in my lap on some ragged-ass blanket while our grandkids roll they eyes in the next room.”

That dragged a wet little laugh out of her, broken but real.

“So yeah,” he said, the words coming quieter now, like a vow slipping loose from somewhere deep, “you’re gon’ be the death of the boy I was without you. You already killed him. Thank God. But as for me?” His hand slid down, palm spreading over her ribcage, feeling the stubborn, steady rise and fall there. “I’m stayin’ alive as long as I can, just to keep provin’ to you that every prayer I ever whispered got answered when you said yes.”

She blinked hard, tears spilling anyway.

“You really think I’m everything?” she whispered, needing to hear it again, smaller this time, like the words might split her open if he said them too loud.

He nodded once, slow and sure, eyes never leaving hers. “I think you’re my before and after,” he said. “I think you’re the seal on my heart and the handwriting on my skin. I think if Patroclus could follow Achilles into the dark, I would follow you into parent-teacher conferences and midnight fevers and every mundane thing this life throws at us ‘cause anywhere you are, that’s where my story makes sense. I think Sappho was writin’ about you without knowin’ your name—callin’ somebody ‘more golden than gold,’ talkin’ about her tongue breakin’, her ears ringin’ when the one she loves walks in—that’s how I feel every time you cross a room I already live in.”

Her lips parted, breath catching.

“And as for God?” he added, a small, stunned laugh escaping him, “if He set you as a seal on me, then I’m not arguin’. I’m wearin’ it. On my heart, on my arm, on my wrist, on my whole damn life. ‘Cause that’s what you are to me, Nalani Joan—with every child you’ve carried and every one we’ll meet, with every song you write and every canvas you ruin with my face—you’re the mark that says, this one is spoken for.”

She made a soft, wordless sound then, somewhere between a sob and a sigh, and leaned in, pressing her mouth to his like she had no other way to hold all of it. His hands came up, closing around her back, around the whole curve of her, drawing her in like he was sheltering something sacred.

When they finally broke for air, foreheads touching, both of them damp-faced and breathless, she whispered, “Then don’t you dare die before me, Tyriq Withers. You hear me? Not in any way that means I gotta learn how to live without you.”

He smiled, wrecked and tender. “Baby,” he murmured, voice low and certain, “if love is as strong as death, then ours is stubborn enough to outlive both. I’ll stay as long as I’m allowed. Long enough to see every version of you, to be the man standing beside you in every painting you don’t show nobody and every song you pretend ain’t about me.”

His thumbs swept away the fresh tears on her cheeks like a benediction.

“And when we old,” he added, a little hoarse, “and the kids grown, and this blanket finally gives up on us? I’ll still be right here. Watchin’ your face, waiting on your laugh, existin’ for you. ‘Cause that’s the only purpose that ever made sense to me.”

Her heart clenched, then loosened, then did that aching, expanding thing it always did around him, like it was trying to make more room.

“Okay,” she whispered, nodding once, sealing it. “Then we stay. Long life. Long love. No dying early, no givin’ up.”

“Long life,” he echoed, lifting her hand to his mouth and kissing her ring, then the inside of her wrist where her pulse fluttered. “Long love.”

He kissed her once more—slow and deep and devastatingly gentle—and the kitchen around them blurred into soft light and familiar shadows: wildflowers leaning in their little plastic vase, wings going lukewarm on the counter, the FSU blanket cradling the weight of two people who had already died to every life that didn’t include the other and chosen, stubbornly, joy in this one.

If love was as strong as death, then whatever sat between Nala and Tyriq on that floor felt, for a moment, like the proof . Her eyes flooded again, the laugh that left her tangled up in a sob. “You’re ridiculous,” she said, but her voice broke right down the middle of it.

He kissed the new tear that slipped down, lips gentle at the corner of her eye, then another at the hollow just beneath it, moving slow like he had all the time in the world.

…

Tyriq lifted the glass slowly, the amber liquid, the familiar burn of the liquid waking him up as it caught the low light of the room. The scotch spread across his tongue, sharp earthy and bitter, blooming across his tongue as he watches her through his hooded gaze, stripping out of her t shirt to reveal the red lace underneath, hundreds of dollars done intricately, with such care that almost made him feel bad for how it was foing to lay on the floor in fragments in a few moments.

She peeled his old shirt off in one smooth, deliberate motion and tossed it aside, the gesture lazy and confident, before tugging at the knot of her silk bonnet. The satin slid away, and her long, thick curls spilt down over her shoulders and back in a dark, heavy cascade, catching the low light as she bit her lip and looked at him from under her lashes. Tyriq leaned back in the lounge chair in their bedroom, the floor-to-ceiling mirror catching the two of them in the same frame—him, stretched out like some king at rest; her, all soft lines and quiet power, standing in front of him like something he’d conjured.

He tipped his head to one side, tongue flicking over his bottom lip as his gaze travelled slowly, unhurriedly, over every inch of her, hunger and awe braided together in his eyes. One hand lifted, fingers curling in a lazy beckon as he nodded for her to turn around—not rushed, not shy—so he could take her in properly, the way a sculptor might circle their finest work, studying each curve and plane with a reverence that had nothing to do with vanity and everything to do with devotion.

He took in the faint silver of her stretch marks, the way her body had settled and thickened in the months since she’d carried their daughter—their miracle, their Honey. It grated on him every time she talked down on that body, like she hadn’t torn herself open to bring life into the world and was somehow supposed to snap back like nothing had happened. He couldn’t understand it, couldn’t reconcile the woman he saw—soft and strong and impossibly beautiful—with the doubt in her voice. How could someone who had done something so holy look at herself and not see what he saw: living proof of a miracle. He watched her curvy body, the new thickness added gave her the grown woman body he’d heard about, her breasts were fuller and sat naturally, her nipples hardened through the thin lacey material, making him briefly think back to when she was pregnant, his lips had attached to that nipple as he brought her to orgasm, again and again and again…like a believer drinking honey from the gods themselves he was insatiable, never satisfied. 

She lifted her head, teeth sinking into her bottom lip, and there was nothing soft or uncertain in her gaze now—only unbridled, unfiltered want, sitting heavy and bright in her eyes as they locked with his, like a dare wrapped in devotion. She looked at him the way a goddess might look at a worshipper who’d been talking about altars and offerings all night: come prove it. It was almost unnerving how in sync they were—how she always seemed to know the shape of his thoughts before he’d formed them, how her slow, knowing smirk curved at the exact same moment his did.

On the wall, the small red light of the mounted camera blinked to life, catching the lines of their bodies in its unblinking eye, turning flesh and shadow into something that could be replayed later, remembered, studied. The rest of the world thinned out at the edges, sounds softening, time loosening its grip, until it felt like there was only this: the charged air between them, the mirrored flicker of want in their eyes, two people suspended in the same relentless longing and quietly, stubbornly delighted to be trapped there together.

He’d seen this body, worshipped it beneath his hands for eight years, known every soft curve and sharp breath by touch and by memory; he had eight years of them archived in pixels, an entire private history of the moments they’d let desire take the wheel—from the clumsy, breathless first time to the practiced reverence of now—and still, somehow, nothing touched this. Nothing compared to the way it felt in this exact heartbeat, their wedding bands catching the soft light as they devoured each other with their eyes like two people seeing their favourite miracle for the very first time and yet he still felt unprepared, his dick heavy along his right thigh, a tight throat and a heavy chest. 

“Damn,”  he whispered as he unzipped his trousers. 

He couldn’t think straight, no, all he could think about was sipping at her sweet nectar and having his dick touch her womb as her thick thighs spread around him because heaven knows he wasn’t done getting her pregnant. 

“Come to me.”

She sauntered toward him, slow and deliberate, plucking his glass from his hand without breaking eye contact; she tipped it to her mouth and took a sip from the exact place his lips had just been, tongue catching the rim like she was tasting him as much as the drink, and by the time he rose to his full 6'5 and towered over her, it meant nothing to the 5'8 woman looking up at him like height was irrelevant, like in this room, in this moment, he was the one standing on holy ground.

His hands reached behind her and cupped her ass with two hands, pressing them together as the familiar flutters came alive in her womb. She gently rested her hands on his forearms as he pulled them flush against each other. As his mouth met hers, she sucked on his tongue, almost as if she was starved, starved of her lover, as if they hadn’t made love that very morning before he left their home. 

His hand descended into her panties as he gently cupped her, dragging one of his thick fingers through her folds, teasing as she ground her hips on his hand, moaning into his mouth from the sheer pleasure of contact, almost as if just this could get her off… and from Tyriq’s expertise on all things Nala… it could. 

“You gon’ take care of me, baby?”  she whispered against his lips as she reached down and wrapped her much smaller hand around him, gently stroking him in perfect rhythm, applying pressure to the area right below his tip and flicking her wrist just right. 

He didn’t bother answering; his response lived in the way his hand slid up, long fingers wrapping around her throat with a careful, possessive gentleness, thumb resting right where her pulse kicked hard against his skin. He gave the faintest squeeze—more reminder than restraint—as he dragged her in and pressed his mouth to hers again, not interested in the neat choreography of a pretty kiss, not tonight. He wanted it messy and breath-stealing, wanted to taste every doubt off her tongue, to take from her the way she took from him, until there was nothing left between them but the shared, airless truth that she had his lungs, his heartbeat, his whole life cupped in the palm of her hand.

“You gon’ take this dick  like a good girl,  Nalani, none of that running shit you hear me?”

“I hear you,” she whispered as she sank to her knees, letting him go as he watched her through a hooded gaze as he stroked himself, from base to tip. 

“I love you,” she whispered as she looked up at him. 

“I love you,” he whispered back as he gently tapped himself against her bottom lip.

His crown was throbbing as he gently eased himself into the warmth that was her mouth, as she welcomed him down her throat easily, her hand gently smacking his away to wrap around what she couldn’t fit in her mouth. She bobbed her head down, the vibration made him twitch in her mouth as she wrapped a secondary hand around him, and twisted her hands in different directions, spreading her saliva as he groaned louder, an incentive for her to go deeper as pride swelled in her chest at the mere fact that she was his undoing, she got him like this, only she knew him well enough to know he liked it messy.

“Fuckk Nala,” Tyriq whimpered as he felt his toes curl as all the blood rushed south, she wasn’t doing it from a place of duty, no she pulled all the tips and tricks she’d gathered from all the years they had together, from the first time when she used too much teeth to the first time she had her head hanging off the bed and he told her how to breathe through it, she did it because she lived for this shit, wrote songs about this, painted pictures about his. 

“You’re gonna make me go crazy, baby, fuck, I taught you all this ain’t I?” he moaned as she hummed around him abd soon enough his crown touched her uvula as she deepthroated him and she ket out the smallest gag.,  he gently held her head down a second longer as she relaxed ther throat for him and breathed through her nose, gently closing her right hand into a fist by her sid as he began thrusting his hips toward her mouth, drawing her back and pulling her in rhythmically. 

His body surged with love and adoration as he watched her, their eyes met and he felt it, all the years they had together, the highest of highs and the lowest of lows, he reached for the hand that held her ring finger with his own ringed hand and entangled them as she hollowed her cheeks and as he pushed her head to the base her tongue gently darted out to lick his balls as she couldn’t bear to leave any bit of flesh untouched by her as she wanted him, all of him down her throat, in her insides as soon as possible. 

She felt herself dampen the lace of her panties as she let go of his hand and began to relieve some of her own arousal as her co ordination faltered, he watched with hooded eyes as he felt his release nearing, and with one, two three more thrusts he released down her throat and she suckled on his tip as she dutifully swallowed, a smile on her lips as she pulled off, letting a bit of his release land on her breasts as she tapped his tip on her tongue and swallowed. He heaved as he gently pulled himself out of her mouth and took a minute to shut his eyes and gather his surroundings; as she went to put him back in her mouth, he gently shook his head. 

“On the bed, if you wanna keep ‘em, take your panties off and face the mirror,” he ordered as she giggled and rose to her feet with a drunken smile and pressed her lips to his, swiping her tongue against his lips so he too could have a bit of the love he’d given her as she turned to do as she was told and took off her panties, bending over on her hands and knees into a perfect arch as she faced the mirror. He gently eased her forward so she could be on camera, and she wiggled her ass for him seductively, almost like a snake entrancing its prey. 

He gently shook his head as he man handled her onto her knees and laid down and brought her over his face, “Changed my mind,” he raspily told her as he darted his tongue out and licked up all of her juices, a content humleaving his lips as Nala’s face instantly screwed up in pure ecstasy “O-Oh baby,” she whimpered as she looked down at him.

She could barely get more than two words out at a time as he ate her like a starved man, her juices dripping into his mouth like raindrops off a leaf, he shook his head against her slightly, getting into every nook and crevice as he held her down against his mouth, and she gently shook her head, “B-baby w-wait,” she cried and she felt everything else around her muffle as she screwed her eyes shut and ground her hips into his mouth, the mirrors around the bed catching the evidence of their love as the mirror above their bed caught Nala's face as she threw her head back. 

Tyriw gently smacked her ass and her eyes fluttered open to meet his again and she whimpered as she felt the hotpressure build up in her lower stomach as she grabbed what she could of hus buzzed hair and dragged her face across his lips, “Eat it daddy, don’t fucking stop, don’t- oh you’re so good, so perfect,” she rambled as she ground dow harder onto him. “I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, Tyriq, I love you so so much baby,” she whimpered as her body shook and she released on his tongue and he lapped at her greedily; she whimpered as he gently lowered her and rose to press his lips to hers and she moaned in ecstasy.

He gently reached down to grab himself and rubbed his dick up and down her entrance, once, twice, thrice, before letting his head catch on her entrance, distracting her with their lip lock as he pushed in, in one single thrust as she let out the whinist “Fuck,” against his lips and he grunted in return.

She could feel him in the deepest parts of her stomach, as her eyes fluttered as her head fell back against the pillow and she looked up at them in the mirror, watching his back muscles contract as her toes curled by his head and she whimpered as he gently licked from the ball of her foot to the tips of her toes and enveloped her manicured toe into his moth as he began thrusting into her making her eyes roll, to the back of her head. 

“Pretty ass pussy, pretty ass feet,” he mumbled as he drew his attention to her other foot.

“You like tha’ baby?” she whimpered, eager for his praise as her body came alight. 

“Love that shit, baby, you know I love that shit,” he told her as he pounded into her harder, bringing his hand down to rub at her clit, and she screamed. He gently smacked her thigh and landed a thick glob of spit at her clit, watching it mix with their juices

“Don’t be waking up my damn daughter Nalani,” he grunted as he rubbed tihhter harsher circles into her, knowing damn well he’d gotten their room soundproofed when they moved in; Nala had always been a loud, she couldn’t help it, not as she felt the familiar yet maddening stretch of him. It had been eight years of this, eight years and she’d still never get used to it, despite the fact that he’d never missed a day to fold her up and pump his love into her, somehow it felt different each and every single time, each and every snap of his limbs against hers always filled her up with a different form of love, each and every time.

“‘M sorry, ‘m sorry daddy, don’t stop, please please don’t stop, I’ll be quiet, I-I swear baby.” Nala whimpered as she looked up at him, her eyes brimming with tears at the thought of him pulling away from her, as if the mere thought of it broke her heart. 

He looked down at her and felt a spark of amusement as he gently pulled out and heard her whines as he gently turned her to her side, facing her toward a mirror, as he lifted her leg and eased himself back inside her, and as he propped himself up on his elbow to ensure she watched them in the mirror. 

“How that dick feel?” he grunted, his voice raspy as the light blue of his eyes was gone, replaced by the familiar dark blue she looked into whenever he got this devoted to her pleasure, her eyes filled with tears; she knew what he was doing, trying to get her louder and she shook her head as she bit down on her lip, drawing blood slightly and he shook his head as he watched and gently pinched her nipple to get her attention and his hand went to slap her pussy as she screamed out once more. "You don't fuckin' hear me?"

“S-so good baby, so fuckin’ good, wanna stay like this forever,” she whimpered as she watched them through the mirror; he met her eyes as he watched her arch her back into him, trying to meet her thrusts with her own, her attempt at fucking him back.

“I ever hear you talking shit about the body that made my daughter you and I finna have a problem do you understand me Nalani?” he grunted as he grabbed her throat, ensuring she looked at the mirror  his thrusts quickening as their combined pre release dripped down his balls and onto the silk sheets below them. 

“Lost your damn mind, thinking I’d get bored of you, stupidest shit i’ve ever heard you say, i’ll never ever get bored of you, you hear me? Never ever get bored of your pretty ass self, of this pretty ass pussy,” he told her as he locked eyes with her in the mirror and she nodded, rambling agreement, anything she had to say for him to get her there she would say, as she the coil build up again in her belly as she looked at him through the mirror, growing hyperfixated at how his cock dissapeared into her and reappeared, slicker, thicker. Tyriq shook his head as he ground into her, "Nah, say that shit, look in the mirror and tell me how fucking beautiful you are, or imma pull out and put my nut on the sheets."

Nala's high-pitched whine left her lips as she dragged her eyes up to the mirror, watching him go in and out of her, watching the thick ring of their release at his base thicken more with every thrust up into her. She'd die if he pulled out, she felt like she'd die. "I'm b-beautiful, s-so fuckin' pretty."

“Say it like you believe it,” he murmured.

She dragged in a shaky breath. “The sexiest body that carried our baby,” she repeated, clearer this time, like a prayer she was finally letting herself mean.

He nodded, just once, like that was right. “Good. Now tell me what this body did.”

Her eyes glossed again, but she didn’t look away. “This body carried our daughter. Kept her safe. Fed her. Held her.”

He leaned in, his mouth a breath from hers, his hand still firm at her throat, thumb stroking slowly like a metronome. “And what do I think of it?”

Her lips trembled. “You… you think I’m the sexiest thing you’ve ever seen.”

“Mm.” He hummed, approval clear but still pushing as he pulled her leg, higher, getting in deeper as he watched her through the mirror. “Try: You worship this body. Every new mark. Every soft place. Every stretch and scar.”

Her breath hitched. “You worship this body,” she echoed, tears clinging to her lashes, “every new mark, every soft place, every stretch and scar.”

“Now say,” he murmured, “I am not an afterthought. I am not a phase. I am the centre.”

Her throat bobbed. “I’m… I’m not an afterthought,” she breathed. “I’m not a phase. I’m… the centre.”

“Of?”

“Of your life,” she whispered. “Of your plans. Of your prayers.”

His eyes went glassy as he watched her eyes flutter shut as pleasure ran through her veins, but he still wasn’t done. "I love you, Nalani, you hear me?" "I-I hear you."

“W-want another baby,” she whimpered as her ringed hand met his that eagerly rubbed her clit. 

“Please daddy, let me have your baby again,” she begged as her eyes brimmed with tears, as he felt his release build up within him.

“Yeah? You want another baby? You want daddy to give you another one?” he asked her as his thrusts grew harsher and harsher, the slapping noisesin the room growing more frequent as Tyriq felt any and all restraint slipping. "Wanna carry you, please Tyriq, let me have your baby again," she whispered as she reached back for his hand and put it on her stomach, right where her womb was, where Honey was.

“You gon’ have to give me that nut though, gotta do that for me first, can you do that, ma?” 

Taking that as permission she sobbed as she felt her release sear through her body, the earth shattering orgasm rushed through her body and took total control; it was as if every cell in her body sung in symphony that made her feel deeply wildly in love as she savoured the sensation of her lover fucking her through it  Their tongues danced as he thrusted once, twice thrice and he grunted into her mouth as he flooded her womb with his semen. Her body jerked a bit at the sheer volume and speed at which his cum filled her senses, and a slow smile spread across her lips as she watched him shut his eyes for a moment. As he thrust into her once, twice, thrice before emptying inside of her and fucking them through it. 

The sound of his and her pants sounded through the room as he looked down at her, bringing her up to meet his lips in a softer kiss that she struggled to return as his hand squeezed her breast, his ringed hand cupping the supple flesh as his eyes darted to the red blinking light and back to the mirror as he licked up the sweat that had gathered on her neck and gently turned her head to face him.

"Open." With that, he landed a glob of spit into her mouth, immediately making her clench around him as she let out a moan. "Thank you daddy," she whispered as she looked up at him, meeting his shallow thrusts into her.

“Happy Valentine's Day, Wifey."

She gently rolled him onto his back, ignoring the overstimulation as she sank down on him once more, grinding, so she could feel him harden inside her once more as the feeling of their mixed release dripped out of her and ran down his balls. He rose up and wrapped his lips around her nipple, suckling on the ambrosia that secreted from her chest as he groped and fondled with the other one.

“Happy Valentine's Day, My Heart.”

“You feel so good, mama.” The tip of his tongue traced the shell of her ear like it held a gift at the end of a maze. A quiet whimper tumbled from his lips before he could stop it. Wrapped around the words trapped in his throat and squeezed until he shuddered. His lips, damp from his exploration in her waters, caressed her jaw, and he whispered, “Could give you a baby right now.”

Mama.

Baby.

With him. Her lover. Her friend. Her husband.

A breath stuttered through her nostrils—heavy and deep as she lay languidly beneath his body, completely open for him. A low gasp followed by a pathetic moan made for perfect lyrics to a song he’d played on repeat. Harmonious and expelled from the deepest parts of her soul—just how he liked it.

Her nails—the bold red forgone and replaced by a classic French tip—pierced the taut skin of his back as she held tightly, like she didn’t want to let go. She wouldn’t. She couldn’t. Not when euphoria was a few strokes and sloppy kisses away. 

A string of curses and incoherent sentence fragments danced under his breath as she continued to drag her nails until they bit into his waist. She fluttered around him—warm, wet, and desperate to milk him for all he had. He groaned into her neck. “Yeah? You gon’ have my babies?”

Selah nodded frantically, overwhelmed with pleasure and drunk on lust so great she hoped it didn’t overpower the love she felt for him. Her head tipped back, exposing her damp neck, slick with sweat and smeared with strands of hair that’d fallen from her ponytail. “Y-yes!” She whimpered through raw, bitten lips. “Maybe they’ll have your eyes…” 

Five words. One reason for his hips to press against hers with a force that scrambled her mind and chopped any word she thought to say in half. He was a man possessed, a man with a mission, as he drove into her with practiced precision and intentionality until her warm essence drowned him.

Selah’s eyes rolled back as her jaw fell slack. Her hands slid up his back, the soft gold on her left finger catching the moon’s gaze through the opened curtains. Her left hand dragged across his jaw, and her thumb settled against his bottom lip—he kissed it gently. “Mhm…look at me, baby.” 

He did. Gosh, he did, and was completely undone. How couldn’t he be? His favorite constellation stitched in flesh, glowing and beaming beneath him, dark eyes twinkling like they were ready to receive a wish from him. She smiled lazily—lopsided and drunk on the feeling of his body pressed against hers—and coaxed, “You make me feel so good…”  Her fingertips dribbled down his lips until they landed around the gold chain that swayed against his chest. She tugged until her lips met his ear. “Do I make you feel good, baby boy?” 

His pace faltered. “F-fuck, baby,” he groaned into her neck. His hands clenched the crumbled sheets by her head as her trembling thighs bracketed his hips tightly. “So good. Always make me feel good.” 

She laughed then. Soft and breathy. Taunting and teasing. It scratched the part of his brain that encouraged him to let go. To give her all he had, until she took it and made something great. “Yeah?” She cooed. “I can tell. You’re so deep; I can feel you in my stomach. Might as well put a baby there, right, baby?” 

The sounds were glorious—his heavy breaths against her neck as he fought to hang onto the last ounce of control he had, her soft, coaxing moans, and his broken groan that came when she licked his ear and whispered, “Be a good boy and come for me. Make me a mama, daddy.”

That did it. 

Tyriq grunted lowly. “Oh, s-shit, wait, fuuuuck.” Selah pressed her lips against his, kissing him sloppily as she felt the warmth of his release course through her. Her tongue caressed his in a battle of dominance; he lost. She smiled against his mouth, tugging his bottom lip between her teeth as she pulled away. 

“You’re a minx,” Tyriq mumbled against her chest as he lay against her. Selah huffed out a laugh and carded her fingers through his damp hair. “Freak.”

“Just for you, baby.” 

-