POV: Jasmine
The sun on the deck was the kind that did not ask anything of you. It just sat on your skin and asked you to let it.
I was on the lounger with my legs stretched out, sunglasses on, the book I had brought open on my stomach unread. Nora was beside me with a glass of something cold and pink, one knee drawn up, watching the water.
From the side of the boat: Aurora, screaming with joy, the kind of scream that meant her father had just done something exactly right.
I tilted my head and watched.
Liam was up to his chest in the water, holding Aurora above a small swell. She was kicking with her whole body, laughing in the open-mouthed way she only laughed in water. Leo was a few feet away, arms folded on the swim platform, pretending not to be charmed.
The peace I felt in that second was not a soft peace. It was a sharp one. I noticed it because I noticed everything. This is happiness, and I am inside it, and I am awake for it.
Nora lowered her glass. "He's so good with her."
"He really is," I said, not taking my eyes off the water. "Liam was built for it. I have watched him long enough to know."
She laughed softly. I heard her shift on the lounger.
"So — tomorrow," she said. "Salon at ten?"
"Closer to eleven." I adjusted my sunglasses. "I asked them to push it. I do not want to be standing on a pedestal at the same hour we landed."
Nora ticked the plan off on her fingers. "Salon, then walk through the town, then lunch?"
"That was the plan," I said. "If you can pull me out of the salon. I have been told I get strange when fitted."
Nora raised an eyebrow. "Strange how?"
"Quiet. Then sharp. Liam does not let me shop for serious things alone for a reason."
She laughed again, then went quiet for a beat. I felt the shift before she said anything.
"Can I tell you something weird?" she asked, turning the glass between her palms.
"Always," I told her, and meant it.
"Leo is nervous," she said. "And that is the weird part. I cannot find it. He has been — I do not know. Distracted. He keeps checking his bag. He went into town the second we docked and would not say what for. He is not lying. I would catch a lie. He just is not telling me."
I let myself smile under the sunglasses. He is going to ask her. Of course he is going to ask her. The pleasure of knowing it warmed me from the inside out, and underneath the pleasure was a small, soft pride. Look at him. Look at who he is now.
"Leo is sometimes nervous for no reason at all," I said. "It is one of his oldest features. When we were little he would refuse to go into a swimming pool until he had walked the perimeter. Twice. Slowly. Looking down."
Nora turned toward me. "Looking for what?"
"He never said." I shrugged one shoulder. "I think he wanted to be sure the pool was a pool."
Nora set her glass down, amused. "You are telling me he has not changed."
"I am telling you he has gotten better at hiding it," I said. "Do not poke the bag."
She pressed a hand to her chest in mock offense. "I was not going to poke the bag."
"You were absolutely going to poke the bag," I told her.
She grinned. "I was thinking about poking the bag."
We laughed. From the water Aurora shrieked again — pure delight, all lung — and Liam's voice came up underneath it, low and amused, telling her the wave was small and she was very brave. Aurora informed him with full authority that the wave was, in fact, enormous.
I let my head fall back against the lounger.
By the time the sun went down, Aurora was a small warm weight against my collarbone, asleep mid-sentence about a fish she claimed she had seen and definitely had not. I carried her to her bunk and laid her out gently. She did not stir.
Leo and Nora said their goodnights at the galley. Nora kissed my cheek. Leo squeezed my shoulder. Their cabin door clicked shut.
Then it was just us.
Our cabin was small. The bed took most of it. The water moved the boat in a slow rhythm you only noticed when everything else was quiet, and the light from the porthole laid pale stripes on the wall and slid them sideways and back.
Liam closed the door and leaned on it. "Hi," he said, and the single word carried the whole day in it.
I crossed my arms and smiled. "Hi yourself."
He tilted his head, reading me. "Tired?"
"Yes," I said, holding his gaze. "Not the kind that sleeps."
He crossed the room and sat on the edge of the bed. The expression on his face was the one he only wore when he was not father, not CEO, not brother. Just mine.
"Come here," he said quietly.
I came.
What happened next I will not put into words for anyone, because it was not the kind of thing words sit well on. It was slow. It was him. The water moved the boat and the light slid on the wall and his hands were the hands I had been learning by heart for years, careful and unhurried, asking small questions with his palms and his mouth and waiting for the answers.
What I felt was layered. Love, plain and overwhelming. Gratitude, which I rarely allowed myself, because gratitude in my life had a way of being followed by loss. Trust — full, complete, the kind I had given to no one else. And underneath all of it, almost too quiet to register: fear. The small, familiar voice that had ridden under every good thing in my life and would not be evicted no matter how often I told it to go.
I let him in past it.
After, he stayed close. His arm across my waist, his face against the side of my neck, his breath slowing into the rhythm I had memorized.
"What are you thinking about?" he asked, his thumb tracing a slow line along my hip.
"Tomorrow," I said. "The dress. Aurora's hair."
He pressed his mouth against my shoulder. "Be honest."
"I am being honest," I told him. "Mostly."
He waited. "And the rest?"
I was quiet for a beat.
"After," I said. "After tomorrow. After the wedding. The first ordinary morning where it is just done. Where I wake up and you are there and it is not a milestone, it is a Tuesday."
Liam pulled me closer. "That is what I want too."
"I know," I said, and the knowing was its own kind of love.
He murmured it against my hair. "Years and years of Tuesdays."
"And one Wednesday, eventually," I answered, "even if Aurora disapproves."
He laughed into my neck. Then his breathing started to slow.
I waited until I was sure he was gone. He always went first.
I stayed where I was. I did not move out from under his arm. I looked up at the ceiling, at the slow pale stripes of light still sliding sideways and back.
The fear was still there.
Everything is going to be fine, I told myself, very carefully, the way I used to tell Leo when we were small and the dark in the room was bigger than he was. Everything is going to be fine.
I said it until I almost believed it.