The nightmare left no shape behind by morning. Only a distant impression of darkness remained, overlaid by a steady, enduring memory of warmth: an arm around her, a heartbeat beneath her ear, the certainty of not being alone. That had lasted through the night like a ward stronger than any spell.
When she surfaced properly, pale morning light was pressing softly at the edges of the curtains.
For one confused moment, she lay still, her body frozen between the automatic habit of waking and the fading dream. She blinked, her mind catching up as she finally noticed her surroundings.
Not merely in her bed.
Curled against Samantha.
The realisation ought to have brought embarrassment first. Ordinarily, it would. But the remnants of the night still clung too close for that. What she felt was an aching relief, deep, quiet, and disarmingly human. Rest. Safety. The strange, full feeling of being held together by someone else's presence until she could manage it herself.
She was not used to waking like this.
For centuries, waking had meant immediate solitude. Cold rooms. Silence. The old reflex of collecting herself at once because there would be no one there to witness softness, and no one to offer comfort if she failed.
This was different.
Samantha was warm even in sleep, all easy living heat and solid reality. One arm still bracketed Lily, loose now but unmistakably there. Her breathing was slow and even. The faint scent of her - soap, linen, skin, something floral - wrapped around Lily. It made moving away seem almost impossible.
So Lily did not move.
She moved only a little: enough to settle more comfortably against her, to steal a few more inches of closeness under the guise of sleep-heavy instinct. Samantha made no sign of waking. Encouraged, Lily let herself sink further into the borrowed warmth.
She told herself it was practical.
She was still tired. The room was cool beyond the blankets. Samantha had said she would stay, and Lily - after the humiliation of the night - was perhaps allowed one morning of selfishness.
That was all.
It had nothing whatsoever to do with the calm that spread through her every time she breathed in and caught Samantha's scent more fully, or with the way her body unclenched by degrees the nearer she pressed.
Lily opened her eyes properly and, because Samantha still seemed asleep, allowed herself a longer look.
Up close, Samantha was unfair.
Lily had already known as much. But proximity made it intimate - less dazzling, more dangerous. Without motion, wit, or teasing to distract, Samantha's resting face looked softer than daylight revealed. Her mouth, usually curved around impossible remarks, was relaxed and parted with sleep. A few strands of mahogany hair had fallen loose across her temple.
Lily found herself studying tiny details: the clean cut of Samantha's nose, the curve of her lower lip, the way a single dark lash rested crooked against her skin.
At this distance, Samantha's height was irrelevant. Lily did not have to tilt her head. Samantha was simply there - close enough to take in, as if the world had narrowed to blankets and breath and the miracle of another person remaining.
Something in Lily's chest tightened.
Not fear, not quite. Something gentler, and in some ways worse.
She should get up, she knew. She should extricate herself before Samantha woke and found her staring like a fool after having spent half the night in tears. She should preserve what remained of her dignity.
Instead, she tucked herself a fraction nearer and closed her eyes again. She indulged in one more selfish moment. If she stayed very still, maybe she could pretend she was not choosing this. Maybe she could imagine it was only the inertia of sleep, not the greedy, shameful desire to keep this feeling before the day took it away and left her alone.
Samantha stirred.
Not a full waking movement - just the slight shift of someone changing depth in sleep. The arm around Lily tightened for one brief, unconscious second, then loosened again. That was enough to send a flush rising up Lily's throat.
She froze and held her breath.
When Samantha did not wake immediately, Lily risked opening her eyes once more.
This close, she could see the exact moment consciousness began to gather - the subtle change around the mouth, the faint tension of returning awareness. Lily had just enough time to think, with mounting horror, that she would not look away in time.
Green eyes opened, blurred with sleep.
For one instant, suspended, Samantha only looked at her. Not fully alert, as if her mind had not caught up: Lily tucked against her, hair mussed, gaze fixed at indecently close range.
Then recognition settled in.
Samantha's mouth curved, not into her usual sharp smile, but into something softer and sleep-warm and terribly pleased.
"Well," she murmured, voice roughened by morning. "This is a nice thing to wake up to."
Lily's entire body threatened to combust.
"I was not..." she began, and stopped at once because she plainly had been.
Samantha's smile deepened just enough to show she knew it.
"No?" she asked quietly.
Lily could feel the colour in her own face with humiliating clarity. "You were asleep."
"A tragic vulnerability, yes."
Despite herself, despite everything, Lily almost laughed.
The sound didn't quite escape her, but the soft catch of it was enough. Something in Samantha eased.
"How are you?" Samantha asked then, and the question was different from the teasing. Careful. Real.
Lily hesitated.
Embarrassed, certainly. Mortified, profoundly. But beneath that...
"Better," she admitted.
Samantha's gaze searched her face, as if checking whether that answer was true or merely polite. Apparently satisfied, she gave a small nod.
"Good."
Neither of them moved away.
The awareness of that settled at once: Lily still tucked close, Samantha holding her with easy acceptance. She could have let go, but had not. The room was quiet enough that Lily could hear both of their breathing.
After a moment, Samantha's eyes flicked briefly over Lily's face, then back to her eyes.
"You may continue," she said.
Lily blinked. "Continue what?"
"Whatever this was." Samantha's tone was mild, but amusement lit it from within. "The very attentive staring."
Lily shut her eyes in immediate despair. "I hate you."
"No, you don't."
The answer came so gently that Lily opened her eyes again in spite of herself.
Samantha was smiling, but there was no mockery. Only a drowsy fondness Lily could not defend against at all.
"No," Lily muttered, unable to sustain the lie even for a second. "In this moment, inconveniently, I do not."
"Mm." Samantha looked unreasonably satisfied by that. "A relief."
Lily should have pulled away then, making a move to extract herself from Samantha's arms and sit up.
Instead, she stayed for one heartbeat more, then another. Her embarrassment tangled with a growing ease. The safety of the night had not vanished. It had only changed shape.
And if Lily let herself rest there just a little longer before the world resumed - well. Samantha had promised not to go.
For once, Lily meant to believe her.
And then, because peace never seemed allowed to remain simple for long, thought came back.
It hit Lily almost physically.
Ren.
The name moved through her like a fault-line opening under thin ice. One moment, she was warm, held, and content. The next, guilt rose so sharply it twisted her stomach. Her whole body tensed before she could stop it.
What was she doing?
Samantha was still beside her, warm and close, watching with a soft morning expression that made anything feel possible. And Lily, who had clung to her through the night, who now only wanted more of this nearness, this warmth, this impossible safety, suddenly could not decide if she felt comforted or ashamed.
Was she allowed to be here like this?
Allowed to want this?
The thought of Ren did not come as an accusation. That would be easier. Instead, it was grief twisted with loyalty, old love, old absence, and the fear of betrayal by an unclear betrayer. Ren had been singular, beloved with a life that once believed itself finite. What did it mean that Lily could lie in another woman's arms and feel calm? That she wanted to stay?
Was this new?
Was it only loneliness with a prettier face?
Was she reaching for Samantha because Samantha was Samantha - bright, unbearable, real, and dear in ways Lily had not meant to allow? Or was it because, after centuries alone, any warmth could feel sacred?
And if she could not answer that, was it cruel to remain?
The questions came too quickly to sort - and the worst of them were not the sensible ones. Not what they were now, or what this morning had made them; those belonged to people who expected to keep each other, and she had no right to them. What frightened her was older and simpler than that. When did the weight of another person's arm stop meaning danger and start meaning safety? When had she let herself feel anything here at all - comfort, wanting, the sheer ease of not being alone? She had survived centuries by needing no one. Pull away now, the old instinct said. End it before it sets. Ask Samantha to forget that the whole night ever happened.
The idea hurt immediately.
That answer frightened her more than the rest.
Because some part of her did not want to forget. Some part of her, greedy and frightened and starved, wanted this to continue - not only the comfort of the night, but the dangerous tenderness beneath it. She wanted to be allowed to ask again. She wanted Samantha to take what she had said seriously. She wanted, absurdly, impossibly, not to go back to being untouched by anyone who mattered.
And if she surrendered to that...
Would she only lose it again?
Would she survive losing it again?
That, in the end, was the oldest terror in it - not impropriety or confusion or even guilt, but loss. The simple, devastating fact that to care was to place something living into the hands of time, chance, violence, foolishness, distance, death. Lily knew too well how quickly the world could rip the beloved shape out of it and leave only a memory sharp enough to wound for centuries.
For one terrible, lucid instant, she saw herself from outside: clinging too hard, wanting too much, mistaking a night of fear for permission to hope. The morning suddenly seemed thin and fragile around her.
Samantha felt the change at once.
Lily had gone still in the wrong way - no longer restful, but braced, as though some invisible blade had been set against her spine. The arm around her shifted slightly, not tightening enough to feel like a restraint, only enough to say I noticed.
"Lily?"
The softness in Samantha's voice nearly made it worse.
Lily looked away.
She could not seem to manage any of the possible lies. I am fine. It is nothing. Do not mind me. None of them would survive contact with Samantha's face, or with the memory of how she had begged in the night.
So she said nothing.
Samantha was quiet for a moment. Lily could feel her thinking, not pressing, not retreating, trying to judge which would be kinder.
"You do not have to tell me," Samantha said at last, very gently. "But you have just gone halfway back into yourself."
Lily shut her eyes.
Humiliation pricked first, because she hated being legible. Then relief, because Samantha had named it without sounding irritated or wounded by it.
"I do not know what I am doing," Lily said, the words low and uneven.
Samantha did not answer at once.
It helped, oddly: the pause meant she was listening, not preparing something clever.
Lily swallowed. "Last night was..." She faltered. "Different."
"Yes," Samantha said.
"I asked for things."
"You did."
Her ears burned at the calm confirmation. "I do not usually."
"I had gathered that."
Under any other circumstance, Lily might have glared. This morning, she only drew in a careful breath.
"It was easier," she admitted, hating how childishly helpless it sounded. "I was frightened, and there was no room left for pride. I wanted you here, so I asked." Her fingers, still bunched in the fabric of Samantha's shirt, tightened unconsciously. "Now I am awake, and everything is difficult again."
Samantha's thumb moved once in a small stroke against Lily's upper arm. "Difficult how?"
Lily laughed once under her breath, but there was no real amusement in it. "In all the ways that matter."
She forced herself to continue before she could retreat.
"I do not know what this is. I do not know what I want to call it. I do not know whether wanting it at all is..." She stopped, jaw tightening. Wrong, she nearly said, but that was not the word, not really. "Fair."
Samantha only waited.
Lily pressed on because if she stopped now, she would never finish.
"There was someone," she said quietly. "Long ago. Someone I loved." The word felt like opening an old scar with bare hands, but it was true, and Samantha deserved truth if she deserved anything. "I still love her. In the way one loves the dead, perhaps. Which is to say helplessly. Permanently."
Samantha's arm did not withdraw.
That almost undid Lily more than pity would have.
"And now there is you," Lily whispered. "And I cannot tell whether I am dishonouring her, or using you, or only lonely enough to mistake kindness for something it is not. I do not know whether I am allowed to want you near. I do not know whether wanting you near means I have already failed someone." Her throat tightened. "Or whether I am only making myself vulnerable to lose again."
The last words came out smaller than the rest.
There. It was said. Not elegantly, not fully, but enough.
The room held them in stillness.
When Samantha finally spoke, her voice was careful in a way Lily had come to understand as its own form of seriousness.
"I do not think the dead are dishonoured by the living continuing to live."
Lily's eyes stung at once.
Samantha went on before she could interrupt.
"And I would be insulted if you thought I could not tell the difference between being used and being wanted."
That made Lily look at her.
Samantha met her gaze steadily. There was no offence in her face, only quiet conviction.
"You are confused," she said. "And grieving. And frightened. Those are not crimes. Nor do they make every feeling you have false."
Lily searched her expression as if waiting for the hidden sharpness, the line where kindness would turn into self-protection.
It did not.
"I am not asking you to name anything this morning," Samantha said. "I am not asking you to promise me some grand future, or choose between your past and your present like this is a duel and only one survives." Her mouth softened, though the sadness in it was real. "I am certainly not asking to replace anyone."
The word caught at something in Lily's face, and Samantha must have seen it.
"No one has to give up their dead in order to keep going," she said quietly. "That is not how it works. Letting yourself feel something now does not erase the grief - if anything, it makes the old wound ache more sharply for a while."
Lily let out a shaky breath.
It was such a sane answer. So much saner than the tumult in her own head that it almost made her angry from sheer relief.
"But," Samantha added, and now there was the slightest firmness under the gentleness, "if you are asking whether you may want comfort, or closeness, or me, without first solving every question your heart can manufacture - yes. I believe you may."
Lily stared at her.
"It cannot be that simple," she said.
"No," Samantha agreed. "It is not simple. But it can still be allowed."
Allowed.
Not clean, not easy, not free of consequence, but allowed all the same.
Lily's grip loosened just a little, though she did not let go. "And if I am selfish?"
Samantha's expression changed then, not into amusement, exactly, but into something warmer and more exasperated.
"Lily," she said, "you had a nightmare bad enough that I had to order you awake like a stubborn first-year and then hold you together until morning. If you now want ten more minutes in bed and someone to look at as though she had single-handedly saved the kingdom, I think we can survive your selfishness."
Despite everything, Lily very nearly smiled.
Lily looked down, undone by how easily Samantha kept finding the centre of things.
"I am afraid," she admitted.
"I know."
"If I let this matter..."
"I know."
Lily's voice dropped to nearly nothing. "I may not endure losing it."
Samantha was silent long enough that Lily almost thought she would not answer. Then:
"That is always the risk."
The honesty of it made Lily flinch - but only because it was true.
Samantha's hand came up then, slowly, giving Lily plenty of time to refuse. When Lily did not, Samantha touched two fingers lightly beneath her chin and turned her face back toward her.
"You do not have to make sense of all of it now," she said. "You do not owe me a steady face before breakfast. You do not owe your dead a life with nothing good left in it. And you do not owe fear your obedience simply because it is old."
Lily did not feel soothed, not exactly. She felt seen too cleanly for that. Understood in places she had spent centuries keeping dark. There was relief in it, yes - but also a kind of miserable ache, because Samantha was being so reasonable that Lily no longer had anything solid to fight except herself.
"I cannot understand you," Lily said at last, the admission coming out low and tired. "You are either the nearest thing to a saint I have ever met, or the strangest woman in this entire kingdom."
That drew the faintest curve from Samantha's mouth.
"Not a saint," she said.
Lily looked at her helplessly, then away again. "And this is truly all right with you?" Her fingers tightened in the blanket, then loosened. "It feels unfair. To give you so little while I..." She made a frustrated, shapeless motion with one hand, as if that could encompass grief, fear, desire, memory, and the general ruin of her composure. "While I remain like this."
Samantha did not answer at once, and when she did, her voice was steady enough to make Lily's throat hurt.
"It would be unfair if you were lying to me," she said. "Or feeding me promises you did not mean. You are doing neither. You are frightened and trying to be honest anyway. Those are not the same thing."
Lily stared.
Then something in Samantha's phrasing caught up with her all at once.
Her head lifted a fraction, eyes narrowing with startled confusion. "Wait."
Samantha's brows rose.
Lily felt heat rush into her face so quickly it was almost nauseating. "Does that mean you actually...?" she demanded, and then immediately lost command of the sentence. "I mean... that you are not simply being kind. That this is not... that you actually..." The words came apart in her mouth, each attempt more disastrous than the last. "Am I understanding you correctly, or have I invented half of this in my own head? Because that seems likely. More than likely. I have almost certainly made a fool of myself."
By the end, she was speaking too fast, breath thinning, body already preparing for flight before her mind had finished deciding on it. She started trying to untangle herself from the warmth of Samantha's arms and the blankets with abrupt, graceless urgency.
"I should go," she said, with a dry little laugh that sounded nothing like amusement.
Samantha let her. "You may go," she said. "If you need air, or space, or a wall to stare at dramatically for a few minutes, I will not stop you."
Lily turned her head a little, watching her from the corner of her eye.
"But," Samantha added, and now there was colour in her face too, though her gaze did not waver, "if what you are asking is whether you imagined me wanting you - no. You did not imagine it."
Lily went perfectly still.
Samantha drew one slow breath. "I mean I would like to be near you, if that is ever something you want. I mean close. I mean I am drawn to you in a way that is not casual, and not charitable, and certainly not sisterly." One corner of her mouth twitched. "Though I would have thought I had made at least some of that embarrassingly clear by now."
Lily made a strangled noise and covered part of her face with one hand.
"I am not asking you to answer me this morning," she went on. "I am not even asking you to answer soon. I am telling you only that if you feared you had mistaken my intentions, you had not."
Lily lowered her hand by degrees. "Why are you saying that so calmly?"
"Because if I say it any less calmly," Samantha replied, "you will bolt through the window, and then I will have to decide whether to preserve your dignity by not following you."
That startled an actual laugh out of Lily - small, incredulous, and gone almost as soon as it appeared, but real enough that Samantha's expression warmed.
Lily hated that she found herself instantly clinging to that warmth.
"You should not be this patient with me," she muttered.
"That may be true," Samantha said. "But I prefer patience over watching you panic yourself into a corridor."
Lily looked down at her own hands. They were trembling less now, though only by a little.
"I do not know what to do with any of this."
"Then do not do anything with it yet."
Lily frowned.
Samantha tipped her head. "Not deciding is not the same thing as refusing. Sometimes it only means you are not ready. There is a difference, Lily."
"And you are simply content with that."
"I did not say content." A flicker of honesty crossed Samantha's face - wry, open, and a little rueful. "I said willing."
That hit Lily almost as hard as the earlier kindness had.
Willing.
Not untouched, not above wanting, only choosing not to turn that want into pressure.
It made Lily feel suddenly, sharply shy.
"You make no sense," she said weakly.
"I make excellent sense. You merely dislike the implications."
"I dislike you."
Samantha's mouth curved. "Liar."
Lily should have stood up. She should have taken the opening she had been given and escaped before her heart embarrassed her any further.
Instead, after a long and visibly conflicted pause, she sat back down on the mattress.
Not all the way where she had been before. Not folded into Samantha's arms. Just near enough that the retreat had, plainly, been abandoned.
Lily kept her eyes fixed on the blanket. "If I stay another ten minutes," she said, each word sounding as if it had been negotiated at swordpoint, "you are not to become unbearable about it."
"Cruel terms," Samantha murmured.
"I am serious."
"I know."
Lily risked a glance at her. "And you are not to look smug."
"I can attempt heroism."
"That is not reassuring."
"It was not meant to be."
Another tiny laugh escaped Lily, and this time it lingered a little longer.
The silence that followed was easier than the earlier ones had been - not empty, not solved, only inhabited.
After a moment, Samantha held out a hand between them, palm up, easy as an offering and just as easy to ignore.
Lily looked at it for several seconds.
Then, with the air of someone making a decision she would deny under interrogation, she placed her hand in Samantha's.
Samantha's fingers closed around hers with quiet care.
Neither of them spoke for a while after that.
Grief had not left the room, and neither had the fear. Ren's name lived inside Lily like an old wound that would never become unimportant.
And when Samantha's thumb moved once, lightly, across the back of her hand, Lily did not pull away.
Lily kept staring at their joined hands as if they might explain something to her that words had failed to.
Her own looked slight to the point of frailty beside Samantha's - narrow wrist, long pale fingers, the old false impression of delicacy that had misled stronger people than this. Samantha's hand, by contrast, looked capable in every way: warm, steady, athletic, very much belonging to someone young enough that none of this should make sense.
Maybe that was why Samantha could be so calm about it. She saw only Lily as she seemed: a strange, awkward girl in a new uniform, not the thing underneath. Not the centuries. Not the weight. Not all the dead still trailing after her.
The comfort in that possibility was thin. The fear in it was not.
"Sam..." Lily said quietly.
Samantha's attention sharpened at once at the name, though she was merciful enough not to comment on it.
"Yes?"
Lily swallowed. "Since when?"
Samantha blinked once. "Since when what?"
"This." Lily made a faint, miserable gesture with their hands, with the bed, with the entire disaster of the morning. "Since when have you..." She exhaled through her nose, annoyed at herself. "It has been a week."
"An eventful week," Samantha said.
Lily shot her a look.
Samantha's mouth twitched. "Go on."
Lily did, despite knowing perfectly well she would regret it.
"What do you even like about me?" she asked, the words rushing out before Samantha could answer. "Truly. You barely know me. Surely, eventually, you will be bored."
Samantha did not immediately fill the silence. She only looked at Lily with such steady attention that Lily wanted to flinch from it and lean into it at once.
"Do you want the flattering answer or the honest one?"
Lily frowned. "Those should not be different."
"In a perfect world, no. The flattering answer is that you are mysterious and beautiful and unlike anyone I have ever met." Samantha gave her hand a small squeeze. "The honest one is that you are also alarming, stubborn, evasive, occasionally rude when frightened, and so catastrophically bad at pretending not to feel things that I can practically watch your soul cross your face."
Lily stared at her in offended silence for all of two seconds. Then, against her will, the corner of her mouth twitched.
"There," Samantha said softly. "That. Exactly that."
Lily scowled a little more on principle.
Samantha let it settle before going on, quieter. "I know you are lonely. I know you try very hard not to need anyone. And I know that when you are frightened enough to stop guarding yourself, you reach for me." Her thumb moved once against the back of Lily's hand. "That is not boredom. That is someone worth knowing very carefully."
"It has still only been a week," Lily said weakly.
"Yes," Samantha agreed. "A week." Her expression turned wry. "A week in which you frightened half the academy, recreated me in fire for an audience, publicly apologized in a magical butterfly incident that I will never quite recover from, fought me beautifully, stopped in the middle of it for reasons that mattered enough to wound you, fled me twice, called me a stalker once, called me beautiful once, and then cried in my arms before dawn."
She tilted her head.
"I have had quieter weeks."
Despite herself, Lily bit the inside of her cheek.
Samantha smiled then, but only faintly.
"My point," she said, "is not that one week is equal to a year. It is that time is not the only thing that tells us whether something matters. Sometimes it is a pattern. Sometimes instinct. Sometimes the simple fact that another person arrives and, within days, the shape of your thoughts has altered around them."
Lily did not know what to say to that.
"That sounds very sensible," she managed at last.
"It is."
"I dislike sensible answers when they are aimed at me."
"I have noticed."
For a moment, neither spoke.
Then Samantha said, more softly still, "My brave girl."
The endearment was not flirtation now, nothing sharpened to provoke. It was warm, steady, almost practical in its tenderness, and it slid through Lily's defences with humiliating ease.
Lily's eyes stung.
"I am not brave," she muttered.
"Yes, you are," Samantha said. "You are frightened, and you are still here asking instead of running. That counts."
Lily's breath trembled on the way out.
"I do not know how to do this properly."
"You do not have to do it properly." Samantha's expression turned faintly exasperated in that familiar, fond way. "You only have to do it honestly."
Lily was silent for several seconds.
"And yes," Samantha added, gaze going very clear, "if you require it stated plainly, I also think you are very lovely."
Lily made a helpless little noise and tried to look offended, but the effort failed almost immediately. "Do not say things like that when I am trying to have a crisis."
"That was your mistake," Samantha said. "You attempted the crisis in my bed. Naturally, the conditions became less formal."
"It is my bed," Lily said, scandalised. "You are the invader here."
"I distinctly recall you inviting me to stay." Samantha's smile deepened. "If you wish to reclaim your territory, you are welcome to try."
Lily made a sound of outrage that was only half genuine - and then, instead of moving away, settled more firmly against Samantha's side, as if to prove her point by occupation. That undid Samantha at last. A fuller smile broke loose, real and bright and unguarded, and the sight of it did terrible things to Lily's composure.
After a moment, Samantha's smile faded into something quieter. "I am not demanding that you trust the future. Only that you trust what is true this morning." She lifted their joined hands the slightest amount. "And this morning, what is true is that I like you. More than is convenient. Enough to wait, so long as you keep being honest with me."
Lily swallowed. "And if I cannot move as quickly as you?"
"Then I will walk at your pace. I may complain artistically from time to time, but I will do it."
That finally did it. Lily laughed - quietly, shakily, but for real - and covered her eyes with her free hand, as if ashamed of the sound. Samantha felt the heat of her embarrassment even through her fingers, and let the teasing fall out of her voice. "I am not going to use your fear against you. Not now, not later. If you are frightened, I would rather soothe you than win."
One eye appeared between Lily's fingers, wary and bright. "You say that, and yet your definition of soothing is occasionally indistinguishable from making the situation worse."
"Sometimes I make it better first," Samantha said, "and only then make it worse, in a highly controlled and elegant way."
This time the laugh came more easily. Lily dropped her hand, then immediately looked as if she regretted letting her face be seen. "You are insufferable."
"And yet," Samantha said, glancing down meaningfully at the way Lily had remained tucked against her side through the entire exchange, "you continue to cling to me in a manner that badly undermines your case."
Lily followed her gaze and stiffened in outrage.
"I am not clinging."
"No?" Samantha asked.
"No." Lily hesitated because, unfortunately, the evidence was against her. "I am - remaining where I already was."
"Of course."
"That is different."
"Entirely."
Lily narrowed her eyes. "You are enjoying this too much."
"I am enjoying that you are here," Samantha said.
There was no joke in that one.
The air between them changed at once. It softened, deepened, became harder to hide inside. Lily's mouth parted, closed. Her lashes dipped. For one brief instant she looked ready to bolt on instinct - despite the bed, despite that she had asked Samantha to stay, despite everything. But instead of pulling away, she moved closer.
It was not graceful, nor cautious in any believable sense - an abrupt, almost irritated collapse forward, as if Lily had decided that if Samantha insisted on saying things like that, then she could suffer the consequences properly.
Lily wrapped both arms around her and pressed in hard.
"I hate you," she informed Samantha into the side of her shoulder.
Samantha, who had gone motionless, said carefully, "That seems disproportionate."
"You are the worst," Lily muttered, tightening her grip as if to emphasise the accusation.
There was a pause. Then, quieter, almost lost against the fabric between them: "...And the best."
Samantha's breath caught so slightly that someone less close would never have noticed it. Her arms came around Lily with a steadiness that was gentler than triumph and warmer than teasing. She did not make a joke of it. She only held her properly, one hand settling at Lily's back, the other sliding up between her shoulders in a slow, reassuring stroke.
Lily could have stayed there far too long.
That was precisely the problem.
The warmth was dangerous in a way that duels and grief and nightmares were not. Those she knew. This - this soft, waking closeness, this being wanted and soothed and still permitted to want something back - was much worse. It made her feel unsteady in her own skin.
So after a stretch of silence that was already too dear, she made herself loosen her hold and draw back.
"We should get up," she said, with the solemn misery of someone proposing a terrible but unavoidable duty. "If we do not go, breakfast will be gone, and we will have to wait until lunch." A groan escaped her lips.
Samantha, whose expression suggested she considered breakfast a negotiable institution at best, lifted one brow. "A compelling argument for remaining exactly where we are."
"You are impossible," Lily said, though without heat.
"I am comfortable," Samantha corrected.
Lily tried, briefly, to look severe. The attempt failed under the combined weight of the blankets, sleep-soft relief, and the deeply inconvenient fact that Samantha was still holding her as if there were nothing strange at all in it.
The trouble was that Lily did not actually want to move.
The realisation settled into her with uncomfortable clarity. Not only because the bed was warm and the morning outside was cold, though both were true. Not only because her body felt wrung out from fear and tears and too little proper rest. She did not want to move because leaving this would make it ordinary again, or rather not ordinary at all: something bounded by one frightened night and one impossible morning, after which they would rise, dress, go downstairs, and re-enter the bright, public shape of the day.
She was not ready for it to become a memory yet.
Samantha must have seen some version of that cross her face.
"You are negotiating with yourself again," she said. "I can hear it from here."
"I am not."
"You are. So let me make it simpler." She shifted, and somehow Lily ended up tucked more securely against her without either of them appearing to have moved. "This morning stays in this room. It is owed to no one, and it decides nothing. You had a nightmare, you were held, and now you are permitted to be warm a little longer." A pause, dry and certain. "There. Nothing to solve. You may stop bracing."
Lily's throat tightened. "You make it sound like nothing."
"I make it sound survivable. That is better, and rarer." Then, lighter - something pleased and wholly unrepentant moving under the words - "I will make it complicated later. When you are steadier, and it is more entertaining for me. For now, I am asking one thing, and asking it nicely, which you will notice costs me a great deal: let yourself be safe."
And that loosened the last of her resistance - the permission, or the sheer nerve of it, or simply being seen so exactly - more thoroughly than any softer reassurance could have.
She let her eyes close. "Just another minute," she said, and heard how young it sounded.
"Take ten," Samantha said. "I have already decided breakfast is beneath us."
So she stayed where she was.
Not because anything had been solved. Ren had not gone, nor had the fear, nor the uncertainty of what Samantha was becoming to her. But for the first time, Lily let all of that exist beside comfort instead of letting it devour it whole.
Allowed, she thought again, with quiet disbelief. Not simple. Not safe. Just allowed.
For this morning, that would have to be enough.21Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡHzqzf2OBfR
→ Request update
and then Add to home screen.