There’s a little paint in her hair and across the smooth lines of her fingers, and Ivan’s sure to warm their water so it comes off easily. When they’re close like this, time seems to move slowly. The relative gauge he typically uses to understand the world around him turns on its head. When he’s with her, when she’s with him, when their gazes hold steady, he knows that there’s something cosmically different happening. 

Whether that’s a good or a bad thing is for no one but them to decide. Ivan’s stomach turns with thoughts of destiny and where it’s brought them. He’s had a complex relationship–and recent mistrust–in the notion of fate for a long while now. They’ve chosen each other, and that is a power greater than anything the world could have thought to create. He won’t allow any measure of kismet to speak over their love of each other. 

That’s why he smiles when she rounds the bathtub and sinks into his arms. They are tolerating measures of daily destiny almost always –– today, for example. He would have done anything to go along with her to finish one of her recent canvases, but there were a few photographs he still needed to develop from a dark room. All of the time-sensitive things catching up to them is to be expected, but that doesn’t make it any less painful. 

Any time away from her is. 

Perhaps that’s not the most sensible thing in the world–but he doesn’t define himself as sensible, especially not when so much of her skin is exposed, and her hair is so soft at her shoulders. He loves the shape of it as one hand snakes around her waist, pulling her up to his bare chest while the other lifts to caress her jaw. 

His mind doesn’t parse much other than the way the sunset’s light filters into her eyes. He does, however, notice the pain behind his ribs dissipating. Settling. Or quieting, maybe. Whatever it’s doing, it clears his head (or perhaps it’s just making it easier to forget the rest and focus on her, dizzy as that leaves him). 

Mila says, “I could’t stop thinking about you all day,” and Ivan’s heart is carried away in their unending dance.

He lowers his head and she takes one soundless, tiny step closer to him. Onto her tiptoes, they revel in each other’s weight. The halfway-met sensation of her skin on his. The warmth that blooms like smoke from a hearth. He knows he was meant to live in this world when she touches him. It’s been more this way than it’s ever been, despite everything, in the last several months. And truthfully, Ivan is unspeakably grateful. 

He kisses her before he speaks, because he is selfish. And because the taste of her is something he doesn’t know how ever to go without again. 

“For me–it was the same. It was the same, yeah. I was thinking of what you might think while I was deciding which to bring home. I needed your eyes with me. ” 

He feels her leg shift at his side, and Ivan’s hand grazes her side, drawing lower. She tips her head and he feels her hair trickle back, swept away from the pretty apple of her cheek. 

“Pero te necesito conmigo siempre. So... not exactly new. I know.”

Her smile against his skin is his favorite shape. 

He loves her so much that it almost always hurts. But right now, the hurt he knows when they’re apart is worth the warmth of his helping her out of her underclothes and helping them both into the hot water. 

She wasn’t sure how much time has passed, she just knew that her anger has calmed down, and it was more about who caves first and goes to the other at this point rather than who was right or wrong. On average, Val would say they made the first move of going to the other person after a fight equally, but this time it was Marco who gave in first. Val heard soft knocks on the door and then footsteps as Marco came inside.

Val didn’t turn around, though she wanted to. She waited. Part of her knew she was acting like a child, sulking like a five-year-old, but she pushed it aside and didn’t care about it. She was hurt and it brought it out of her. She could hear light footsteps coming towards the bed, and then she felt the bed sinking deeper as he lied down next to her, his palm resting on her shoulder. “I am sorry I hurt you.” That is all he said, quiet and reserved, but he didn’t need to say more. He never needed to say more, nor did Val ever need anything else from him. She really just needed him, period.

She shifted in her position to turn around to face him. He was so close, only a couple of inches away from her, and now his fingers gently started stroking her arm. It was such a small gesture, but it meant so much more than a simple sorry. I love you. I don’t want to lose you either. In the beginning, him being affectionate was one of the biggest surprises for her. He expected her to be just as closed off and careful with every touch as she was, but he was so giving she needed time to get used to it, get adjusted to his ways. Now she couldn’t imagine him any other way. Couldn’t imagine her life without him and funnily that is what keeps causing problems between them too. She was terrified of something happening to him with his line of work, while he couldn’t even imagine his life in any other way.

She wondered for a short second if this would one day drive an unrepairable vedge between the two of them. She really hoped it wouldn’t, she wasn’t sure if she could survive that.

“I don’t wanna fight,“ she said quietly, her arm reaching up to softly touch his cheek. “I hate it when we fight. Can we not do that anymore tonight?”

It wasn’t a solution. They should talk about it. They need to talk about it like two adults who don’t jump at each other’s throat whenever they disagree on something. But that seemed so impossible that night, and she was tired of the yelling and crying and the stupid, pointless accusations flying across the room. She just wanted to rest. They could deal with this another time.

(They kept telling themselves that, and yet that other time never did.)

Ivan dreamt of gelato by the waters in Sicily, where the waves wouldn’t froth on their way in. Where the sun was an apology to the light in Mila’s hair, lesser in its promise to warm the rest of their afternoon. Beautiful where it shone in the photographs he’d take of strange, indulgent angles–of sand and glittering skies–of the way her lips felt when they slid against his knuckles and his jaw. Beautiful against the color of her eyes, where the color refracted, prismatic. 

Beautiful as the sound of her laugh, but lesser. 

Mila is more than his soul: she is his entire life. He exists in his love of her, not the other way around. And for all they’ve endured over the last several months, they return to the harbor of each other’s hands. His heart beats unevenly, urgent, as if to tell her something without words. 

Not even the sun could compare. 

Ivan tilts his head against the cool fabric of his pillow, stirring under the morning’s pull on his consciousness. He blinks the sleep away from his eyes, rested when he opens them to the sight of her. Against the stark white of his sheets, she’s warm and smiling and colorful. Ivan laughs without thinking, rolling onto his side where he can ensnare her with an arm across her shoulders. When he pulls her into his chest, it’s more of a slow tilting, so that she might rest her ear against the slant of his collar. 

“It feels––a long time, right? I thought I would dream forever.” He says it lightly, not minding the hours that spanned out where he could see a world that belonged solely to them. “I thought I would be more tired.” 

They were out all day yesterday, falling in love with the farmer’s market. The seasons have brought new fruits in fresh bloom, and they brought home a few baskets’ worth of things to make smoothies and desserts of all kinds. “I think I dreamt of something peach. We were waiting in line at the paleteria. You were… it was––you were humming something. Someone was playing a güiro, and we took off our shoes in the sand.” 

He goes on for some time, enthusiasm building the longer she lets him go. She asks a few questions about where the dream took them, about what the beach was like and he tells her as many details as he can recall. 

“I must have missed you in my sleep. It cut off… at the end? At the beginning of the end, I think.” Ivan smothers a kiss against her temple, nosing at the hair that falls across her face. “Too much! It must have been too much. Ay, I always have to wake again. I have to hear you laugh de verdad. I wanted this–in the morning, I must have. I wanted this piece of you. Esta chica con sueño.” 

Dreams are beautiful, but they aren’t the wonderful, real life they’ve built together. 

Ivan knows she understands when she smiles. 

“You have all of me.” 

The pads of her fingertips brush the line of his jaw and his heart aches, loving, satisfied. He leans into her, brushes her shoulder with his hand.