Three months into the marriage, the lines I'd drawn for myself — this is a contract, this isn't real, don't let yourself feel anything you can't afford to feel — had started blurring in ways I didn't know how to stop.
It happened in small moments, mostly. Law remembering, without being told twice, that I took my coffee with too much sugar and no milk. Law showing up at the club on nights he didn't need to, sitting in his usual corner, not performing anything for anyone, just watching the room the way he had the very first night I met him. Law calling Markus off duty for an evening so he could drive me to Karen's apartment himself once she'd been discharged, the two of us talking the entire way about nothing important and everything that mattered.
"You're staring," he said one night, catching me watching him across his kitchen counter while he made us both tea — an oddly domestic image for a man who owned half the city's nightlife.
"I'm allowed to stare," I said. "We're married."
"On paper," he said, though something in his voice had lost the edge it used to carry around that distinction.
"Does it feel like just paper to you," I asked, surprising myself with how much I actually wanted to know the answer.
He set down both mugs slowly, like he needed the extra second to decide how honest he wanted to be. "No," he admitted. "It stopped feeling like paper a while ago. I just didn't know how to say that without it sounding like I was trying to manipulate you into something you didn't sign up for."
"Maybe I want to be manipulated into it," I said, and watched something flicker across his face — surprise, hope, the kind of vulnerability he usually kept locked down tight enough that I'd never seen it surface this clearly.
"Alex—"
"I'm not saying I'm in love with you," I said quickly, because that felt like too much, too fast, even though some reckless part of me suspected it might already be true. "I'm saying I don't hate this anymore. Any of it. And I didn't expect that, and it scares me a little, and I wanted you to know."
He came around the counter and stood close enough that I could feel the heat of him without either of us touching, and for a long moment neither of us said anything at all.
"I don't hate it either," he said quietly. "I haven't for a while."
We didn't kiss that night — some careful, unspoken agreement keeping both of us from crossing that particular line before either of us was ready — but something settled between us anyway, steadier and more honest than anything the contract had ever promised either of us.
I should have known, looking back, that the steadier things got between Law and me, the more there was for someone else to resent.