The morning light through Flynn's bedroom window is the color of weak tea, and Ivy's first conscious thought is that his arm is still draped across her hip, heavy and warm and exactly where it was when she fell asleep. She doesn't move. Doesn't want to. His breathing is slow and even against the back of her neck, and somewhere downstairs the furnace kicks on with a low rumble that makes the old house settle around them like a living thing.

They make the calls at the kitchen table, Flynn in a Henley with the sleeves pushed up and Ivy in one of his button-downs that hangs past her thighs. He dials the department chair first, voice sliding into that easy professorial cadence she's heard in a hundred lectures, and she watches his free hand trace circles on the wood grain while he explains the situation in terms so bureaucratic she almost laughs. Almost. She emails Professor Okonkwo from her phone, choosing each word with the precision of someone who knows this email will be forwarded, quoted, archived. Flynn hangs up and exhales like he's been holding it for an hour. "She didn't ask too many questions." Ivy reaches across the table and presses her thumb to the inside of his wrist. His pulse jumps.

His phone buzzes against the table. He reads it, types something back with his thumb, then looks up. "Emma says Tuesday's perfect. She wants to know if you like lasagna." Ivy snorts, the laugh catching her off guard. "Tell her I'm easy." Flynn's eyebrow lifts. "Don't," Ivy says, but she's smiling now, and he's smiling too, and the morning feels like something clean and new, like a page turned to the right chapter.

Then he stands, and something shifts in his face. Not worry exactly—more like anticipation, the look of a man who's about to unwrap something fragile and isn't sure his hands are steady enough. "I need to run an errand," he says, and his voice is too casual, the way he'd say I need to grade these papers or I'm out of milk. But his eyes catch hers and hold, and there's something underneath the words she can't read.

"I'll come with you." She's already pushing her chair back, already reaching for her jeans draped over the other chair. Flynn shakes his head, and the motion is small but definitive. "Stay. Please. I won't be long." Ivy's hand stops halfway to her jeans. "Flynn." His name comes out flatter than she meant it. "What's going on?" He crosses to her, cups her face in both hands, and kisses her forehead. Not her mouth. Her forehead. "Trust me. Twenty minutes. Maybe thirty." And then he's grabbing his keys from the hook by the door and the screen door slaps shut behind him and Ivy is standing in his kitchen in his shirt with her hair a mess and her heart doing something stupid and anxious in her chest.

She wanders. It's what she does when her brain won't settle—she moves through space like she can map her way out of the confusion. The living room first: a brick fireplace with ash still in the grate from last winter, built-in bookshelves stuffed with monographs and museum catalogs and one whole shelf of mass-market paperbacks with cracked spines that make her like him more. She runs her fingers along the spines, reading titles. Clive Cussler. John le Carré. A worn copy of Possession with sticky notes flagging certain pages. She doesn't open it. Some things feel like reading someone else's diary.

His study is at the back of the house, and she pushes the door open with her hip. The leather chair is cracked exactly where she imagined it would be, dark brown and worn pale at the arms. His desk is neater than she expected—papers stacked in three precise piles, a fountain pen laid parallel to a yellow legal pad, a mug holding three highlighters and a pair of reading glasses she's never seen him wear. There's a photograph in a simple silver frame: Flynn maybe ten years younger, arm around a woman with graying braids and a laugh that crinkles her whole face. His mother, she guesses, from the shape of the eyes. She picks it up, studies the younger version of his smile, then sets it back exactly where it was.

She's in the kitchen when she hears his truck pull into the driveway. She doesn't run to the door. She makes herself stand at the counter with a glass of water she hasn't drunk from, waiting. The screen door opens. His footsteps in the hall. And then he's standing in the kitchen doorway, and he's holding a small velvet box. Black. Square. Old enough that the corners are slightly worn. Ivy's hand tightens on the glass. "Flynn." His name again, but this time it comes out thin, a question she can't finish.

He doesn't open it right away. He crosses to her and takes the glass from her hand and sets it on the counter, and then he takes both her hands in his. His are shaking. Flynn's hands—the ones that have handled four-thousand-year-old papyrus without a tremor—are shaking. "I saw it nine months ago," he says, and his voice is rough at the edges, gravel and something softer underneath. "In that antique shop on Sycamore. The one with the clocks in the window." Ivy knows the shop. She's walked past it a hundred times on her way to campus, never once gone in. "It was in the back cabinet. Art Nouveau. 1905. The woman at the counter told me it was made by a silversmith in Paris who only ever made wedding rings for women he thought deserved something that would outlive him." He swallows. His thumb moves across her knuckles. "And I looked at it, and I thought—that would look beautiful on her. That's what I thought. That would look beautiful on her. And then I left, because I was your professor and you were my student and I had no right to even think it."

He opens the box. The ring is silver, but not the cold silver of a jewelry counter. This silver is warm, almost golden in the kitchen light, worked into a band that curves like a vine around a central opal the color of a storm cloud—gray and green and blue all at once, with flecks of gold that catch the light when Ivy's hand moves. The setting is asymmetrical, organic, like something grown rather than made. Delicate leaves curl around the stone, and the band itself is textured with a pattern so fine she has to bring it closer to see it: tiny hieroglyphs, she realizes, rendered in miniature. Her field. His field. Theirs.

Ivy's chest does something she can't name. It's not a sob exactly—it's bigger than that, a kind of seismic shift, the ground beneath her rearranging itself. Her vision blurs. Her hand is over her mouth and she doesn't remember putting it there. Flynn is still holding the box, still watching her with those green eyes that have been looking at her for three years and just now, just this moment, she understands how long he's been looking. "I never thought I'd get to buy it for you," he says, barely above a whisper. "I never thought—" But he doesn't finish, because Ivy's knees give and she sits down hard on the kitchen floor, right there on the linoleum, and the tears come in a flood she can't stop and doesn't want to. She's laughing and crying at the same time, the laugh that starts as a snort and turns into something raw and ugly and real. Flynn drops to his knees in front of her. The box is still open in his hand. "Ivy." Her name. Just her name. "Is that—is this—" She can't get the words out. She reaches for him instead, grabs a fistful of his Henley and pulls him close, her forehead against his chest, the box pressed between them. "Yes," she says into the fabric. "Yes. Yes. Yes."

He doesn't ask if she means the ring or him or the life they're building. He knows. He's always known. He takes the ring from the box with fingers that have finally stopped shaking, and he takes her left hand from his chest, and he slides the opal onto her finger. It fits like it was made for her. Like he knew, nine months ago, exactly who she would be.

She doesn't know how long they stay like that—her on the floor, him on his knees, the ring heavy and strange and perfect on her finger. Long enough that the furnace kicks off and the silence rushes back in. Long enough that her tears soak through the cotton of his Henley and his hand finds the back of her neck and just holds there, steady, like she's something precious he's afraid to break.

When she finally pulls back, her face is a mess and she doesn't care. "How did you know?" Her voice comes out scraped raw. "The hieroglyphs. On the band." She twists the ring so the light catches the miniature carvings. Her field. His field. The language of a dead civilization rendered in silver. "You saw this nine months ago. Before anything. Before we—" She can't finish. The sentence is too big.

Flynn's thumb catches a tear still sliding down her cheek. He doesn't wipe it away so much as press it into her skin, like the salt means something. "I told myself it was academic interest." His voice is low, rough at the bottom. "An Egyptology professor notices hieroglyphic jewelry. That's what I said to myself in the shop. I even believed it for about three blocks." His mouth twists—not quite a smile. "And then I got home and I couldn't stop thinking about the way the opal would catch the light when you pushed your glasses up your nose. The way it would look against your skin when you gestured during seminar, the way you do when you're about to make a point no one else has thought of."

Ivy's breath shudders out of her. She remembers those seminars. Remembers sitting in the third row, convinced he never saw her at all, while he was apparently memorizing the way she moved her hands. "Three blocks," she repeats. The number lands in her chest and stays there.

"Three blocks of lying to myself. And then three years." He shifts his weight, still on his knees on the linoleum, and takes her left hand again. His thumb traces the band, the tiny hieroglyphs she still hasn't fully deciphered. "I went back five times. Five times, Ivy. I'd stand in front of that cabinet and stare at it and tell myself I was being ridiculous. That you'd never—that I had no right to even imagine—" He stops. Swallows. His jaw works. "I almost bought it in December. Right before winter break. I had my wallet out. The woman was wrapping it in tissue paper. And I panicked and said I'd changed my mind and I walked out into the snow and stood there for twenty minutes like an idiot."

Ivy pictures him—big shoulders hunched against the cold, snow catching in that silver-touched hair, alone on a sidewalk while Christmas lights blinked in the antique shop window. She's spent three years thinking she was the only one aching. "Flynn." His name, but different this time. Tender. "You really thought I wouldn't want this?"

"I thought it didn't matter what I wanted." His eyes meet hers, and they're wet—not crying, but close, the green gone glassy and raw. "You were my student. You were twenty-two when you walked into my class. I was thirty-six and divorced and living in a house that felt like a museum of my own failures. Wanting you felt like the most selfish thing I'd ever done. And I did it anyway. Every day. For three years."

She reaches up and presses her palm to his jaw, feels the muscle jump under her touch. "I don't have anyone," she says, and the words come out before she can stop them, before she can dress them up in sarcasm or deflection. "My mom died. My dad left before that. There's no one to call. No one to tell about the ring except you and Emma." Her voice cracks on her mother's name. She hasn't said it out loud in months. "I've been alone since I was nineteen. And I stopped believing anyone would—" She stops. Breathes. "You see me. You've been seeing me. And I didn't even know."

Flynn's hand covers hers on his jaw. His palm is warm and callused and entirely steady now. "You have me. You have Emma. You have this ridiculous house with its creaky furnace and its bookshelves that need organizing and its kitchen floor that is objectively terrible for kneeling on." Ivy laughs—a wet, broken snort—and he smiles, that boyish thing that undoes her every time. "You're not alone anymore. Neither of us are."

She kisses him. Not the way she's kissed him before—not hungry or desperate or trying to prove something. This is slow, almost reverent, her lips learning the shape of his like she's memorizing a text she'll need to translate later. His hand slides into her hair, loosening the messy bun, and she feels the cool metal of her ring against his jaw and thinks: mine. The word settles somewhere deep, a hieroglyph carved into bone.

When she finally pulls back, her forehead rests against his. "What do the hieroglyphs say?" She holds up her hand between them, the opal shifting colors in the kitchen light—gray to green to a blue so deep it looks like the bottom of the ocean. "I can't read them at this angle and it's driving me crazy."

Flynn takes her hand and turns it, tilting the band toward the light. His thumb traces each tiny carved symbol in sequence, the same way he'd trace a line of text on a papyrus fragment. "It's from the Book of the Dead. Spell 69. Not the full text—just the opening. I am yesterday, today, and tomorrow." His voice drops, roughens. "The silversmith didn't know what it meant. He just liked the shapes. But I knew. The first time I read it, I knew."

Ivy stares at the ring, at the symbols she couldn't read and now can't un-read. Yesterday, today, tomorrow. A love letter from a dead woman to her dead husband, rewritten in silver and wrapped around her finger. "You bought me a four-thousand-year-old love letter." Her voice is barely a whisper. "Before you even knew I loved you back."

"I hoped," Flynn says. "That was the worst part. I hoped so hard it felt like stupidity. And then you stood in my office and told me you wanted me to be the one to make you come, and I thought—" He laughs, a single exhale that's almost a sob. "I thought maybe hope wasn't so stupid after all."

She looks at him—at this man who has been alone as long as she has, who bought her a ring before he had any right to, who memorized the way she moved her hands in seminar and couldn't bring himself to walk away. "I'm going to marry you," she says, and the words feel like a vow even though they're not the ones they'll say at whatever courthouse or chapel or backyard they end up in. "And I'm going to spend the rest of my life making sure you know it wasn't stupid. The hope. The ring. Any of it."

She says it before she can stop herself, the words tumbling out in a rush that's half-laugh, half-sob, her voice still scraped raw from crying. "I don't know what I want to do right now. Cuddle. Fuck you. Run out into the yard and scream it at the top of my lungs. Book the first flight to Vegas and find an Elvis impersonator to marry us." She pulls back enough to look at him, her hand still pressed to his jaw, the opal catching the kitchen light and throwing blue-green sparks across his cheek. "I'm serious. All four. Simultaneously. I don't know how to hold all of this in one body."

Flynn blinks. Then his mouth twitches—the corner first, then the whole thing, that boyish grin breaking across his face like sunrise. "I didn't know you liked Elvis." His voice is still rough at the edges, still tender from everything they just said, but there's a teasing note underneath, the professor who can't resist a tangent. "You've been holding out on me, Castellano."

Ivy snorts—the real one, the one she used to catch behind her hand in seminar—and drops her hand from his jaw to fan herself dramatically. "Oh, fifties Elvis was hot. Those hips. That sneer. The way he—" She does a little shimmy with her shoulders, still sitting on the linoleum in his oversized button-down, her hair half-falling out of its bun, her face still blotchy from crying. "I would have rioted. Absolutely rioted."

Flynn laughs, and it's the laugh she fell in love with—surprised and unguarded and a little too loud for the quiet kitchen. "I'm going to need you to elaborate on that. Extensively. Possibly with citations." He shifts his weight on his knees, wincing slightly. "But first I need to get off this floor before my kneecaps stage a formal protest."

"Weak," Ivy says, but she's grinning now, the tears drying tacky on her cheeks. "You're weak, Ashworth. I've been sitting on this floor for ten minutes and I weigh—" She stops. Catches herself. The old instinct rises—deflect, self-deprecate, make the joke before someone else can. But Flynn is looking at her with those green eyes, and his hand is still holding hers, and the ring is still heavy and perfect on her finger. She takes a breath. "I've been sitting here just as long. You don't see me complaining."

"You're twenty-five," he says dryly, levering himself up with a hand on the counter. "Talk to me in fourteen years." He offers her both hands, palms up, and she takes them and lets him pull her to her feet. She stumbles a little—her legs have gone prickly from sitting so long—and he catches her, one arm around her waist, her chest against his. The Henley is soft under her cheek. She can hear his heartbeat, steady and slow, not the frantic thing it was when he walked through the door with the velvet box.

"For the record," he says into her hair, "I'm amenable to all four options. Though we might need to sequence them. Logistics." She feels the rumble of his voice through his chest. "Vegas requires a flight. The yard requires pants, which I'm not convinced either of us currently owns." He pauses. "The other two we could manage right now."

Ivy tilts her head back to look up at him. His jaw is stubbled, his hair disheveled from her fingers, his eyes still a little glassy from the crying neither of them is going to mention again. She loves him so much it feels like a physical weight, a pressure behind her sternum that has nothing to do with sadness. "You'd really let me drag you to Vegas," she says. "To an Elvis chapel. With the bad suits and the polyester and the—"

"Ivy." He says her name the way he says it in bed—low, certain, like it's the only word that matters. "I'd let you drag me anywhere. I've been waiting three years to be dragged anywhere by you." His hand comes up to cup her face, thumb tracing the curve of her cheekbone, still damp. "But maybe we start smaller. Cuddling seems like a reasonable opening gambit. Then we reassess."

He doesn't wait for her to answer. His hands find her waist—warm, sure, the calluses rough through the thin cotton of her borrowed shirt—and he lifts her like she weighs nothing, like two hundred and thirty pounds is a number that exists in some other universe where he isn't already settling her onto the cold edge of the kitchen counter. The linoleum is still imprinted on her knees. The ring catches the overhead light and throws a scatter of green across the cabinets. Ivy's hands fly to his shoulders—instinct, balance—and then she's looking down at him, which is new. She's never looked down at Flynn before.

"Hi," she says. Stupid. Inadequate. But his face is right there, level with hers now, and the boyish grin is doing something complicated to her pulse.

"Hi." His hands haven't left her waist. His thumbs are drawing slow arcs against her hipbones through the shirt. "You said you didn't know what you wanted. Figured a change of venue might help with the reassessment."

Ivy snorts, but it's softer than usual, the sound catching in her throat. "The kitchen counter is your idea of a strategic advantage?" She hooks her ankles behind his thighs—not pulling him closer, just anchoring. Making sure he stays. "Very professor of you. Change the seating arrangement, change the discussion."

"Mm." Flynn's eyes drop to her mouth, then back up. Deliberate. Unhurried. "I've found that some discussions benefit from a less traditional format." His voice is still rough from everything they said on the floor, but there's a warmth creeping in, a slow kind of heat. "You were overwhelmed. I thought maybe smaller choices would help."

Ivy's fingers find the collar of his Henley, trace the edge where the cotton meets his throat. She can feel his pulse there—steady, not frantic. "Smaller choices," she repeats. "Like what."

"Like whether you want me to keep my hands where they are." He flexes his fingers once against her hips, a gentle pressure. "Or move them higher. Or lower. Or stop touching you altogether and go stand by the refrigerator while you think."

She laughs—a real one, the one that starts in her belly. "The refrigerator feels like a significant downgrade." She tightens her ankles behind his thighs. "You can stay. Hands included."

"Noted." He doesn't move them. Just keeps those slow arcs going, the fabric of her shirt bunching slightly under his thumbs. "And kissing. Is kissing on the table. Couch. Counter." A pause. "We should probably establish whether any furniture is off-limits before we proceed."

Ivy reaches up and removes her glasses—slowly, deliberately—and sets them on the counter beside her hip. The kitchen goes soft at the edges, but Flynn's face stays sharp because he's close enough now that she can count the flecks of gold in his green eyes. "All furniture is currently in play," she says. "But I reserve the right to revise that policy if you start quoting academic policy mid-makeout."

"No policy," he says. "No citations. No footnotes." His hand leaves her hip and finds her jaw, the same way it did on the floor, thumb tracing the curve of her cheekbone. "Just you. Just this." And then he kisses her—not the reverent kiss from the linoleum, but something slower, deeper, his mouth opening against hers like he's got all the time in the world and intends to use every second.

She doesn't answer right away. Can't. His mouth is still on hers, and her brain—usually so good with words, with the quick deflection, the sharper comeback—has gone quiet. There's only the warmth of his palm on her jaw, the rough callus of his thumb tracing her cheekbone, the way he kisses like he's reading something ancient and precious and half-destroyed by time.

Her hands are still on his collar. She doesn't remember putting them there. The cotton of his Henley is soft and worn under her fingers, and beneath it his pulse is doing something steady and fast at the same time, like a drumbeat she can feel in her own chest. She could pull him closer—her ankles are already locked behind his thighs, it would take nothing, just a flex of her calves and he'd be pressed against the counter, against her—but something stops her. Not fear. Not hesitation. Something quieter. The knowledge that this moment, right here, with the opal still throwing green light across the cabinets and his lips still learning the shape of hers, is the kind of moment she's going to remember for the rest of her life. And she doesn't want to rush it.

So she kisses him back, slowly. Deliberately. Her tongue finds the seam of his lips and he opens for her, a low sound catching in his throat—not quite a groan, not quite a sigh, something in between that she feels in the hinge of her jaw where his thumb is still stroking. She tastes coffee and the faint salt of the tears they both shed on the linoleum. She tastes him, the way she's been wanting to taste him for three years without ever admitting it, and it's better than the fantasies. It's real. His stubble rasps against her chin. His breath is warm and uneven. His other hand is still on her hip, fingers flexing once, twice, like he's reminding himself she's solid.

When she finally pulls back—just far enough to breathe, just far enough to see his face—his eyes are still closed. His lashes are dark against his cheeks, and there's a crease between his brows like he's concentrating, like he's trying to memorize something. "Flynn." She says it softly, a question wrapped in a name.

His eyes open. Green and glassy and so close she can see the lines at the corners, the ones that deepen when he laughs. "I'm reassessing," he says, and his voice is rough in a way that has nothing to do with the crying. "Give me a minute."

Ivy snorts—the real one, the one she used to catch behind her hand—and drops her forehead to his. "That's my line. You stole my line."

"I'm a professor. Stealing ideas is an occupational hazard." His thumb traces her cheekbone again, slower this time, like he's mapping the terrain. "You asked what reassessment looks like. This is it. I'm standing in my kitchen with my fiancée on the counter and a four-thousand-year-old love letter on her finger, and I'm trying to figure out how I got here without losing my mind." He pauses. "I think I did lose my mind. Somewhere around year two. Possibly year one."

She kisses the corner of his mouth. Just a press of lips, quick and soft. "Year one was the lecture on Ptolemaic funerary texts. You spent twelve minutes on a tangent about coffin inscriptions and I took four pages of notes even though none of it was going to be on the exam." She pulls back, meets his eyes. "I think that's when I lost mine."

"Twelve minutes," he repeats, and the boyish grin is back, the one that makes him look younger and more breakable. "I remember that tangent. It was a terrible tangent. Completely unsupported by the scholarship."

"I took notes, Flynn. Color-coded notes." She's grinning now too, the kind of grin that makes her cheeks ache. "I drew a diagram. There were arrows."

He laughs—the surprised one, the one that fills the kitchen—and then his hands are moving, sliding from her jaw and her hip to cup her face in both palms, holding her like she's something precious and breakable and also entirely his. "I love you," he says, and it's not the first time he's said it but it lands the same way, a weight and a warmth settling somewhere behind her ribs. "I love you and your color-coded notes and your terrible snort-laugh and the way you argue with me about Middle Kingdom grammar like it's a blood sport. I love all of it. All of you." His thumbs brush the dampness from her cheeks—when did she start crying again?—and his eyes are wet too, but he's smiling. "That's the reassessment. That's what it looks like. I'm not scared anymore."

Ivy's throat closes. She opens her mouth and nothing comes out—no sarcasm, no deflection, no joke to break the tension. Just her breath, catching on everything she's felt for three years and never said. She reaches up and wraps her fingers around his wrists, feels the bones and the tendons and the pulse beating steady under her thumbs. "Me neither," she whispers. "I'm not scared either." And it's true. She's been scared her whole life—scared of being too much, too big, too loud, too needy—but right now, on this counter, with this man, she isn't. She's just his. And he's hers.

She pulls him closer by the wrists—gently, insistently—and he comes without resistance, stepping into the V of her thighs until his chest presses against hers and she can feel the heat of him through both their shirts. "So," she says, and her voice is steadier now, the tremor replaced by something warmer and lower, "the reassessment says cuddling. Then we reassess again."

"That's what it says." His lips brush her forehead, her temple, the hinge of her jaw. "Though I should note—" Kiss to the corner of her mouth. "—that the reassessment committee—" Kiss to the other corner. "—is open to revisions."

Ivy pulls back—just enough to see his face, just enough to let the question form in the space between them. The opal on her finger catches the light and scatters green across his jaw. "What time is it?"

Flynn blinks, the boyish grin still clinging to the corners of his mouth. He turns his head toward the microwave clock—the one appliance in the kitchen that still works reliably—and squints. "Six forty-three. Why?"

"Because." She releases his collar, lets her hands fall to her lap, and she's very aware that her bare thighs are still pressed against the outside of his, that her ankles are still hooked behind his knees, that she's sitting on his kitchen counter in nothing but his borrowed Henley and a pair of underwear she put on this morning when the world still made a different kind of sense. "I want to start with cuddling. Then move to making out. Then move to fucking." She says it plainly, no coyness, no hesitation. The word fucking lands in the kitchen like a stone dropped into still water. "And I want to take our time with all three. So I need to know if we have somewhere to be."

Flynn stares at her for a long moment. The green of his eyes deepens—not darker, exactly, but more focused, like he's translating a text and just found the key glyph. His hands are still on her face. She can feel the slight tremor in his fingers. "We have nowhere to be," he says, and his voice has dropped into that lower register, the one she first heard in his office with a shelf digging into her back. "Emma's Tuesday. The department chair's closed on Sunday. No one's expecting us. No one's looking for us." He pauses, and the corner of his mouth twitches. "The world can wait."

"Good." Ivy reaches up and takes his wrists again, but this time she's not pulling him closer. She's guiding him—his hands from her face to her waist, her legs unhooking from behind his, her body shifting forward on the counter. "Then help me down. Counter cuddling was your strategic play, but the actual cuddling part works better on the couch. Horizontal. Blankets involved. Possibly snacks."

Flynn doesn't move right away. His hands settle on her waist—warm, steady—and he looks at her like she's just handed him the Rosetta Stone. "You have a plan," he says. "A sequence."

"I'm a scholar," Ivy says, and she can't quite keep the smile out of her voice. "I research. I outline. I establish clear methodological parameters." She pokes his chest with one finger. "Phase one: cuddling. Phase two: making out. Phase three—" She pauses, lets the pause stretch, watches his eyes flicker. "Phase three is classified until we've successfully completed phases one and two."

"Classified." The boyish grin is back, the one that makes him look thirty-nine going on twenty-five. "You're filing a classified document on our sex life."

"Our future sex life. Present tense is still under review." She pokes him again, harder this time. "Now help me down. My legs are still prickly from the linoleum and I refuse to begin phase one with compromised circulation."

Flynn laughs—the surprised one, the one that fills the kitchen—and then his hands tighten on her waist and he lifts her off the counter like she weighs nothing at all, setting her down on the cold linoleum with a gentleness that makes her chest ache. Her bare feet touch the floor. His hands don't leave her waist. "The couch," he says, "has approximately seven blankets on it right now because Emma built a fort on Tuesday and I never took it down. Also there are Cheez-Its in the pantry. Will that meet the methodological requirements?"

"Cheez-Its are an excellent foundation for phase one." Ivy reaches up and straightens his collar—the collar she was gripping five minutes ago, the collar she's probably stretched out of shape. The cotton is warm from his skin. She can feel his pulse under her knuckles. "Lead the way, Professor. But fair warning: phase one might take a while. I'm very thorough."

His eyes find hers and hold. The kitchen is quiet around them—the refrigerator humming, the last of the afternoon light going gray outside the window, the ring still heavy and perfect on her finger. "Take as long as you want," he says, and his voice is rough in that way she's learning to recognize, the way that means he's not joking anymore. "I'm not going anywhere."