In the most honest parts of me, I am able to admit that it was a relief to hear Caleb volunteer.
Suddenly I can’t think about it anymore. I reach the hotel entrance and walk to the dormitory, hoping that I can just collapse into my bed and sleep, but Tobias is waiting in the hallway for me.
“You okay?” he says.
“Yes,” I say. “But I shouldn’t be.” I touch a hand, briefly, to my forehead. “I feel like I’ve already been mourning him. Like he died the second I saw him in Erudite headquarters while I was there. You know?”
I confessed to Tobias, soon after that, that I had lost my entire family. And he assured me that he was my family now.
That is how it feels. Like everything between us is twisted together, friendship and love and family, so I can’t tell the difference between any of them.
“The Abnegation have teachings about this, you know,” he says. “About when to let others sacrifice themselves for you, even if it’s selfish. They say that if the sacrifice is the ultimate way for that person to show you that they love you, you should let them do it.” He leans one shoulder into the wall. “That, in that situation, it’s the greatest gift you can give them. Just as it was when both of your parents died for you.”
“I’m not sure it’s love that’s motivating him, though.” I close my eyes. “It seems more like guilt.”
“Maybe,” Tobias admits. “But why would he feel guilty for betraying you if he didn’t love you?”
I nod. I know that Caleb loves me, and always has, even when he was hurting me. I know that I love him, too. But this feels wrong anyway.
Still, I am able to be momentarily placated, knowing that this is something my parents might have understood, if they were here right now.
“This may be a bad time,” he says, “but there’s something I want to say to you.”
I tense immediately, afraid that he’s going to name some crime of mine that went unacknowledged, or a confession that’s eating away at him, or something equally difficult. His expression is unreadable.
“I just want to thank you,” he says, his voice low. “A group of scientists told you that my genes were damaged, that there was something wrong with me—they showed you test results that proved it. And even I started to believe it.”
He touches my face, his thumb skimming my cheekbone, and his eyes are on mine, intense and insistent.
“You never believed it,” he says. “Not for a second. You always insisted that I was . . . I don’t know, whole.”
I cover his hand with my own. “Well, you are.”
“No one has ever told me that before,” he says softly.
“It’s what you deserve to hear,” I say firmly, my eyes going cloudy with tears. “That you’re whole, that you’re worth loving, that you’re the best person I’ve ever known.”
Just as the last word leaves my mouth, he kisses me.
I kiss him back so hard it hurts, and twist my fingers into his shirt. I push him down the hallway and through one of the doors to a sparsely furnished room near the dormitory. I kick the door shut with my heel.
Just as I have insisted on his worth, he has always insisted on my strength, insisted that my capacity is greater than I believe. And I know, without being told, that’s what love does, when it’s right—it makes you more than you were, more than you thought you could be.
This is right.
His fingers slide over my hair and curl into it. My hands shake, but I don’t care if he notices, I don’t care if he knows that I’m afraid of how intense this feels. I draw his shirt into my fists, tugging him closer, and sigh his name against his mouth.
I forget that he is another person; instead it feels like he is another part of me, just as essential as a heart or an eye or an arm. I pull his shirt up and over his head. I run my hands over the skin I expose like it is my own.
His hands clutch at my shirt and I am removing it and then I remember, I remember that I am small and flat-chested and sickly pale, and I pull back.
He looks at me, not like he’s waiting for an explanation, but like I am the only thing in the room worth looking at.
I look at him, too, but everything I see makes me feel worse—he is so handsome, and even the black ink curling over his skin makes him into a piece of art. A moment ago I was convinced that we were perfectly matched, and maybe we still are—but only with our clothes on.
But he is still looking at me that way.
He smiles, a small, shy smile. Then he puts his hands on my waist and draws me toward him. He bends down and kisses between his fingers and whispers “beautiful” against my stomach.
And I believe him.
He stands and presses his lips to mine, his mouth open, his hands on my bare hips, his thumbs slipping under the top of my jeans. I touch his chest, lean into him, feel his sigh singing in my bones.
“I love you, you know,” I say.
“I know,” he replies.
With a quirk of his eyebrows, he bends and wraps an arm around my legs, throwing me over his shoulder. A laugh bursts from my mouth, half joy and half nerves, and he carries me across the room, dropping me unceremoniously on the couch.
He lies down next to me, and I run my fingers over the flames wrapping around his rib cage. He is strong, and lithe, and certain.
And he is mine.
I fit my mouth to his.
I was so afraid that we would just keep colliding over and over again if we stayed together, and that eventually the impact would break me. But now I know I am like the blade and he is like the whetstone—
I am too strong to break so easily, and I become better, sharper, every time I touch him.
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
TOBIAS
THE FIRST THING I see when I wake, still on the couch in the hotel room, are the birds flying over her collarbone. Her shirt, retrieved from the floor in the middle of the night because of the cold, is pulled down on one side from where she’s lying on it.
We have slept close to each other before, but this time feels different. Every other time we were there to comfort each other or to protect each other; this time we’re here just because we want to be—and because we fell asleep before we could go back to the dormitory.
I stretch out my hand and touch my fingertips to her tattoos, and she opens her eyes.
She wraps an arm around me and pulls herself across the cushions so she’s right up against me, warm and soft and pliable.
“Morning,” I say.
“Shh,” she says. “If you don’t acknowledge it, maybe it will go away.”