Cellie's POV
The kiss was different from every kiss before it.
Not the urgent kind or the competitive kind or the kind that arrived as a consequence of something else. This was the kind that people gave each other when they had been afraid of losing something and had not lost it, the specific quality of relief expressed through the one language that did not require words, and I felt the difference of it in the way I felt most things about him, immediately and in a place that was not entirely rational.
I was crying.
I registered this without particular surprise, the specific warmth of a single tear moving down my face while his hands held my face and his forehead pressed to mine, and I did not try to manage it because managing it would have required an effort I did not currently have and also because he had already seen every version of me that was more composed than this and it had not changed anything.
"Don't," he said quietly, before I had said a word.
