Page 160 of Top Shelf

I come with my mouth against his shoulder, and his hand interlocked with mine against the mattress. He follows me with a low sound against my neck, fucking me through every pulse until his own rhythm breaks. Then he buries himself deep with a wrecked groan, his whole body shuddering over mine.

We lay there for a while afterward, not moving. I listen to his breathing slow and feel his weight settle carefully over me, then he rolls us without letting go. My hair is damp against the pillow, and his hand rests at my waist.

I look at the shadowed shape of him in the dusky light. The man who brought me home. Who tattooed a flower for me into his skin. The man whose family left me a chair and wants me to sit.

For a long time, when I imagined forever, I didn’t picture myself with a man. Maybe because too many men came with assumptions about what women should want, what women should forgive, which parts of us were interesting until they became inconvenient.

Women felt easier to imagine. Softer sometimes, and safer in ways I didn’t have to explain. Those futures were real when I wanted them, and they still belong to me. But Viktor belongs to me, too. My bisexuality doesn’t disappear because the person holding me in this bed is my husband. I am still all of myself. All my want and my history, all my hunger and my chaos.

“Viktor,” I whisper.

His thumb moves against my skin. “Mm?”

I love you.

The words press against my tongue and against the fear that says if I finally give those words away, I won’t survive being handed them back.

My throat closes. “Nothing.”

His arm moves tighter around me, and he leans in to gently kiss my forehead. I think he knows, but he only holds me. And it breaks me a little, because if Viktor can hear the cowardice in my silence, he’s still not trying to pull the words from me unwillingly. He’s just letting me choose and waiting for me to be brave enough to do it.

So I do. I close my eyes, and the breath that leaves me shakes all the way out.

“I love you.”

His body goes still, and for an awful, fucking terrible second, nothing happens. But then Viktor’s shaking hand slides up my spine and into my damp hair at the back of my head, pulling my face to him. His mouth presses to my temple, my cheekbone, the corner of my lips.

“Heidi.”

My name breaks in his mouth, and he tilts my chin to his in the dim light.

“Jag älskar dig också,” he says, voice scraping out. “I love you, too.”

My chest cracks open so wide, I don’t know how I stay inside my own skin. “You do?”

He nods. “So much I do not know where to put it all.”

A sobbing laugh slips out of me. “That sounds inconvenient.”

“Yes.” His thumb brushes the tear off my cheek. “I have been suffering.”

“Poor baby.”

“Terrible wife.”

“Beloved wife.”

“Yes.” His eyes close on a contented sigh. “My terribly beloved wife.”

Then he kisses me, and it’s deep and shaking and nothing like the heat from before. This is a kiss that feels sacred and gentle and vulnerable, the beginning of something entirely new.

Outside, Solvik glows beneath a sky that never fully darkens, and I lie against my husband with seven flowers drying beneath a pillow in the old house, my tattoo in his skin, and the terrifying, impossible truth finally loose between us.

I love Viktor Karlsson.

And he loves me right back.

Chapter twenty-four