Prague, Czech Republic
 

Bleep

Willa had seen the haircut already.

That was the annoying part.

She had seen it in photos, in videos, in blurry backstage clips fans had posted before he’d even had the chance to send her anything decent himself. She had seen it over FaceTime from three different angles while he complained about hotel lighting and made her rate it like she was judging a competition he had not technically entered. She had seen it beneath stage lights, under a hood, half-hidden behind his hand, damp after a shower, grainy from bad reception somewhere between one festival and the next.

So it should not have done anything to her when she saw him in person at the airport in Prague.

It should not have stopped her for half a second in the middle of arrivals with her suitcase dragging behind her, sunglasses pushed up into her hair, coffee going cold in her hand, and her heart behaving like a stupid teenage thing.

But there he was.

Bleached nearly white, buzzed close to his skull, charcoal jacket hanging open over washed-black layers, tattoos climbing out from his collar and over his hands like they had been waiting for the contrast. He looked different. Not less like himself exactly, but more exposed somehow. Like someone had taken away the dark, messy frame she was used to and left all his sharpness visible.

He saw the moment it hit her too, because of course he did.

Blake’s mouth curved like he was trying not to be smug.

Willa pointed at him with her coffee cup before he could enjoy himself too much.

“Don’t.”

He lifted both hands, innocent and useless, wedding ring catching in the airport light.

She reached him before either of them could pretend to be normal about it.

The hug was awkward at first because of the luggage between them, her tote sliding down her arm, his backpack knocking against her hip, the hard shell of her suitcase trying to roll away like it had somewhere better to be. Then Blake got one arm around her properly and pulled her in, and all the airport noise went cottony at the edges.

For three seconds, maybe four, she let herself close her eyes.

He smelled like travel and clean laundry and the smoky-sweet cologne he used when he wanted to pretend he had not packed in seven minutes. His hand settled at the back of her blazer. Her cheek pressed against the worn black fabric of his hoodie. The bleached hair brushed briefly against her temple when he ducked his head, and God, she was going to be insufferable about it. Quietly. Privately. With dignity.

Probably.

By the time they got outside, Prague had that pale spring brightness that looked warmer than it was. The sky was washed blue behind slow-moving clouds, and the air had a damp green bite to it, like rain had passed through earlier and left the city polished. Their driver held open the door while Blake wrestled their luggage into the back with the kind of focused competence that made Willa want to either kiss him or tell him he was being dramatic.

She did both, more or less. She kissed his cheek as he straightened, then told him he looked like airport security had personally wronged him.

He only smiled, slung an arm around her shoulders, and guided her into the car.

The hotel was tucked onto a narrow street near Old Town, all cream stone, black iron balconies, and tall windows that reflected the city in soft, distorted gold. It looked like the sort of place where people drank expensive wine and had long, devastating affairs in silk robes. Willa decided immediately that she approved, which meant she pretended to be skeptical.

Blake got her suitcase before she could reach for it.

She watched him from the curb while he pulled both bags from the trunk, his bleached head bowed, tattoos flexing over his hands as he caught the handles. Her own reflection stared back at her from the hotel glass: pale hair messy around her face, gray blazer a little creased from travel, lipstick mostly gone, eyeliner softened under her eyes. She looked like a woman who had crossed a border to spend forty-eight hours with her husband and was trying very hard not to think about how ridiculous that sentence was.

Inside, the lobby smelled like lilies, old wood, and something expensive burning in a candle. There were velvet chairs in a dark plum color, brass lamps with warm shades, a marble desk veined gray and rose, and a huge arrangement of white tulips opening beneath a chandelier.

Willa leaned toward Blake as they walked in.

“This is suspiciously romantic.”

His mouth twitched, but he said nothing.

At the desk, everything was very polite and very smooth and very clearly already arranged.

The receptionist greeted them by name, congratulated them with the careful brightness of someone who had been warned not to make it weird, and then explained that their original booking had been changed. Not by accident. Not by the hotel. Their reservation had been quietly upgraded at the request of Willa’s manager and several members of Blake’s band, who had apparently decided that two touring newlyweds with conflicting European schedules deserved something better than a standard room and a minibar Toblerone.

There was mention of their limited time, of a small surprise, of privacy being arranged, of breakfast whenever they wanted it, of a side entrance they could use if the front became too visible.

Willa did not say a word during any of it.

This was rare enough that Blake looked down at her.

She stared at the receptionist with a fixed smile, then at the two black key cards being slid across the counter in a little cream envelope, then at Blake, then at the ceiling as if the chandelier might explain why everyone in their lives had suddenly become emotionally coordinated.

By the time they were moving toward the elevators, luggage wheels whispering over the polished floor, Willa had recovered enough for both of them.

“I knew something was wrong. I said it in the car. I said the hotel looked too romantic. That was my first clue. Nobody gives us this much velvet without an agenda. And your bandmates being involved is worse, actually, because now I have to wonder what their definition of romantic is, and I don’t trust that at all. I love them, obviously, in a threatening extended-family sort of way, but I do not trust men who think a six-hour drive is a bonding activity and who have willingly eaten gas station sushi.”

Blake pressed the elevator button.

Still silent.

Still smiling.

Willa pointed at him.

“And you. You knew something.”

He shook his head once.

“No, don’t do that. Don’t do the face. The face doesn’t work when you’ve got criminally bleached hair and look like you’re about to either start a cult or apologize beautifully. I know your face. That’s my legal right now. I married into face knowledge.”

The elevator doors opened.

Blake gestured for her to go first.

She swept in with as much dignity as someone dragging a suitcase with a stuck wheel could manage.

“And another thing,” she continued as he stepped in beside her, “if this room has rose petals, I’m leaving. Not really leaving, because I’m tired and these boots are not emotionally prepared for cobblestones, but spiritually I’ll leave. I’ll stand in the corner and judge everyone involved. Quietly. Maybe not quietly. Depends on the petals.”

Blake leaned back against the elevator wall, one hand on the handle of his suitcase, the other tucked into the pocket of his jacket. His eyes stayed on her, soft with amusement, softer with something else.

The elevator climbed.

Willa glanced at his hair again.

She tried not to.

Failed.

“Also, for the record, it’s very annoying that the haircut works in person. I had a whole speech prepared about humility and consequences, and now I can’t use it because you look—” She stopped herself, narrowed her eyes, and corrected course. “You look like trouble with better lighting.”

The doors opened onto the top floor.

Their hallway was quiet, carpeted in deep green, with brass sconces glowing along cream walls. There were framed black-and-white photographs of Prague in spring: wet bridges, open windows, flower carts, musicians in doorways. Somewhere behind one of the doors, faint piano music played, or maybe it was only drifting up from the lobby.

Willa kept talking because if she stopped, the feeling in her chest would have too much room.

“This is insane. This is actually insane. We are adults. Technically. We have jobs. Loud jobs, but jobs. We should be capable of booking one normal hotel room and taking one normal nap without an entire conspiracy forming around us. But no. Apparently we looked too married and pathetic, so now everyone’s like, poor little rock stars, they never got a honeymoon, give them a suite and possibly some emotionally manipulative champagne.”

Blake found their room at the end of the hall.

Double doors.

Of course.

Willa stared at them.

“Oh, that’s obnoxious.”

He slid the key card against the lock.

The light turned green.

The doors opened.

And Willa forgot every single word she had been collecting.

The suite was enormous, but not in a cold way. It opened into a warm, golden sitting room with herringbone floors, tall arched windows, and sheer curtains moving faintly in the spring air from a cracked balcony door. Beyond the glass, Prague unfolded in soft evening light: red rooftops, church spires, the dark ribbon of the river, the city glowing as if someone had turned the saturation down just enough to make it ache.

There were flowers everywhere, but not rose petals.

Tulips. Wild-looking white and yellow tulips in heavy glass vases. Branches of cherry blossom leaning over the mantel. Tiny spring flowers scattered in ceramic bowls, not on the bed, thank God, but arranged with such care that Willa immediately knew someone had asked what she would actually like.

A bottle of champagne waited in a silver bucket beside two glasses. There was a small cake under a glass dome on the table, white icing, messy black ribbon around the base, two silver forks laid beside it. A record player sat near the window with a small stack of vinyl. The bedroom beyond was visible through open French doors: a huge bed with rumpled linen instead of stiff hotel perfection, more flowers on the nightstands, a freestanding bathtub near another window, and a folded note propped against a bowl of strawberries.

It was ridiculous.

It was beautiful.

It was not Vegas. It was not a chapel sidewalk at midnight or a dress hacked shorter with bad scissors or neon caught in wet pavement.

But somehow, it felt like the same reckless promise, translated into spring.

Blake stood beside her without moving.

Their suitcases sat abandoned behind them.

For once, he had no smirk ready.

For once, Willa had no immediate defense either.

Her throat tightened so quickly it annoyed her.

She looked at the flowers, the cake, the champagne, the view, the bed, then finally at him — at the bleached hair, the quiet face, the wedding ring on his hand.

“Well,” she said softly, “I guess this is our honeymoon.”

Blake felt the words land before he had any chance to answer them.

I guess this is our honeymoon.

For a second he just stood there beside her, shoulder almost brushing hers, staring out at the city spread beyond those tall windows. The room was absurd. Beautiful, yes, but also absurd. The flowers. The champagne. The cake. The fact that somewhere behind them their suitcases were still sitting exactly where they’d abandoned them because neither of them had been prepared for this.

Then he looked at her.

Really looked.

At the creased blazer she’d traveled in. The coffee stain near the cuff she’d probably forgotten about hours ago. The way her lipstick had faded until only traces remained. The pale hair falling loose around her face from a day spent crossing borders and airports and cities just to find him.

And God.

His chest tightened so hard it almost hurt.

Because she’d spent the entire afternoon talking.

About his hair.

About his bandmates.

About suspiciously romantic hotels.

About gas station sushi and rose petals and emotionally manipulative champagne.

Talking because that was what Willa did when she was overwhelmed. When something got too close to the center of her.

And now she was quiet.

That hit him harder than the room ever could.

A slow breath left him as his eyes moved back over the suite. The tulips. The balcony. The river cutting through Prague beyond the rooftops. The note sitting untouched beside the strawberries.

Then back to her again.

His wife.

Not Vegas-wife.

Not backstage-wife.

Not airport-wife.

Just… wife.

The word still felt unreal some days. Like he’d stolen it from somebody luckier and was waiting for the universe to notice.

His hand found hers automatically.

Not dramatic.

Not intentional.

Just instinct.

His thumb brushed across her knuckles once as he looked down at their joined hands, both wedding rings catching the late afternoon light.

A laugh escaped him then. Quiet. Disbelieving.

“Do you realize,” he said, voice rough from travel and emotion and everything he wasn’t particularly interested in hiding from her, “that we got married in Vegas, spent half the night terrorizing the Strip, and somehow ended up here?”

His eyes lifted back to hers.

The flowers.

The city.

The suite.

None of it compared.

Not really.

Because the thing making his chest feel too full wasn’t the room.

It was her standing in it.

“I think this might be the first time in history anybody’s honeymoon has been organized by a manager and a group of idiots who think gas station sushi builds character.”

The corner of his mouth lifted.

A little smile.

A familiar one.

But softer than the ones she’d been accusing him of wearing all day.

Then he squeezed her hand and stepped closer until there wasn’t any space left between them at all.

The city glowed beyond the windows.

The flowers scented the air.

Somewhere below them Prague kept moving.

But Blake couldn’t seem to look anywhere except her.

“Good thing, too,” he said quietly, reaching up to tuck a loose strand of hair behind her ear. “Because if we’d planned it ourselves, we’d probably be eating vending machine chips in a train station right now.”

His fingers lingered against her cheek.

And there it was again.

That feeling.

Not the rush.

Not the fire.

Something steadier.

Something that kept catching him off guard.

The simple, impossible fact that after all the airports and tours and missed flights and different time zones and almosts, she was actually here.

With him.

For forty-eight hours.

In Prague.

In a suite full of tulips.

On a honeymoon neither of them had expected.

And Blake suddenly found himself smiling like an idiot.

A completely helpless one.

“Come here,” he murmured, already pulling her gently toward him. “Before one of us starts crying and ruins the cool rock-star image we’ve worked very hard to cultivate.”

Willa went because pretending not to was suddenly more effort than she had left in her body.

All afternoon, movement had been easy. Dragging her suitcase through arrivals. Talking too fast in the back of the car. Filling every elevator silence before it could become anything softer. Keeping her hands busy with coffee cups and bag straps and key cards because the alternative was touching him too soon and too much and making it obvious that two days with him felt like being handed oxygen in a room she had not realized she was suffocating in.

But now there was nowhere useful to put all of that noise.

Not with the city glowing in the windows.

Not with tulips everywhere.

Not with the ridiculous little cake waiting under glass like some sweet, conspiratorial witness.

Not with him close enough that the heat of him cut through the faint spring chill drifting in from the cracked balcony door.

She folded into him with a breath that came out shakier than she wanted. Not a sob. Absolutely not a sob. She would deny it under oath. But something close enough to humiliating moved up through her chest and caught behind her ribs, and for one startled second, Willa had the ridiculous thought that this was what all her talking had been holding back.

This.

The quiet.

The room.

The fact that he was here.

The fact that he had looked at her like that—like every creased, tired, overcaffeinated inch of her was the whole point of the view.

Her forehead came to rest against him first. Then her cheek. Then the rest of her, less graceful than surrender and more honest than she was usually comfortable being. Her hands found the front of his jacket and stayed there, fingers curling into fabric that smelled faintly like airports and cold air and him. Beneath it, she could feel the solid shape of him, the familiar rise and fall of his breathing, the little held tension that said he had been joking because he had been close to the edge too.

That nearly undid her.

Willa closed her eyes.

For months, marriage had been a thing they proved in fragments. A ring glimpsed in a stage photo. A name mentioned too casually by someone on a podcast. A text sent from one country while the other one was waking up in another. Grainy screenshots. Missed calls. Half-finished conversations. Digital versions of intimacy compressed into blue bubbles and voice notes and hotel room FaceTimes where one of them was always too tired and the other was trying not to resent time zones like they were a personal enemy.

She had not let herself think about what they skipped.

Not properly.

She liked the story they had. Loved it, actually. Vegas at midnight. Neon and impulse. The kind of terrible decision that turned out to be the truest thing either of them had ever done. She liked that there had been no committee, no seating chart, no curated emotion for public consumption. Just them, reckless and shaking with laughter, choosing each other with all the elegance of a lit match dropped into gasoline.

But standing here now, in a suite arranged by people who had apparently seen through them with unbearable accuracy, Willa felt the shape of the missing thing.

A honeymoon.

A pause.

A door closing behind them with the world on the other side.

Not forever. They were not built for forever in one place. At least, not yet. Maybe not ever in any traditional way. But for a while. For one night. For forty-eight stolen hours in Prague with spring air in the curtains and champagne sweating in a bucket and a cake neither of them had asked for but both of them apparently needed more than they could have admitted.

Her fingers tightened in his jacket.

“Just to be clear,” she said into him, voice muffled and thinner than her pride would have preferred, “I’m not crying.”

The lie hung there between them, flimsy and useless.

She swallowed.

“I’m having an allergic reaction to emotional hospitality.”

That helped. Barely.

A laugh tried to come up, but it broke soft in the middle, and she pressed her mouth shut before it could become anything worse. Her nose brushed the side of his throat. She could feel his pulse there, steady and alive beneath inked skin, and the closeness made something inside her ache with an almost childish relief. The kind she would never have known how to ask for. The kind that made her want to be annoying immediately, just to prove she was fine.

Instead, she stayed.

That was harder.

Her body kept noticing stupid things. The scrape of his chain where it had shifted against his collar. The warmth of his hand through the back of her blazer. The faint roughness of travel in his clothes. The difference in him where her temple grazed close to his head, the strange softness of that new, pale buzz beneath her fingertips when she finally let one hand leave his jacket and rise.

She did not say anything about it.

She could have. God, she could have made a whole production out of it. She had enough material stored up to last through dinner. Something cutting. Something bright. Something that would let them both step back into familiar rhythm.

But the second her palm settled lightly against him, her heart did that awful, traitorous thing again.

He was warm. Real. Different and not different. Changed in a way she had witnessed from afar but could only understand now through touch.

Her thumb moved once, careful, almost wondering.

All those little versions of him she had been collecting through screens collapsed into this one: the husband in front of her, breathing against her, standing in a room someone else had made romantic because apparently the two of them could not be trusted to do it without accidentally ending up in a train station eating crisps for dinner.

She pulled back just enough to look at him.

Mistake.

His face was too close. His eyes too open. The smile still lingering around his mouth had gone gentler now, as if he could see every single defense failing in real time and was choosing, mercifully, not to point it out. The bleached hair made the expression worse somehow. Sharper. More naked. There was nowhere for softness to hide on him now, and Willa hated how much it made her want to touch his face too.

So she did.

Just the edge of her fingers along his cheek, light enough to pretend she could stop whenever she wanted. His skin was cool from the hotel air, warmer near his jaw. The contrast made her chest ache.

She had spent so long being the loud one because it was useful. Because noise could be armor. Because if she kept talking, she could guide the scene before it guided her. She could make herself the absurd one, the difficult one, the woman with commentary and timing and a dramatic objection to everything, and nobody had to notice that she was overwhelmed by being loved with this much attention.

But he noticed.

He always noticed.

Even when he said nothing.

Especially then.

Willa drew in a breath and looked past him, because looking directly at him while trying to say something sincere felt medically inadvisable.

The room was still there, absurdly beautiful. The cherry blossom branches. The tulips. The champagne. The cake. The record player by the window. The bed through the open doors, soft and waiting in a way that made her stomach flip not with hunger or want exactly, but with the sudden understanding that they did not have to leave right away. They did not have to be anywhere for the next hour. They did not have to answer a single question, pose for a single photo, become useful to anyone else’s schedule.

For once, the world had been held at the door.

Her eyes stung again.

She blinked hard.

“I don’t know what to do with this,” she admitted, and the honesty slipped out before she could dress it up. “Which is deeply irritating, because I’m very good at having opinions.”

Her mouth curved a little, fragile but real.

She looked back at him.

“I had opinions about the elevator. I had opinions about the lobby. I had several excellent opinions about your bandmates’ survival instincts. But this—”

Her voice caught, and she stopped.

This was not an opinion.

This was being seen too kindly by people who knew they were tired. This was being given permission to be newly married months after the paperwork had already made it true. This was someone understanding that the romance they had made for themselves had been wild and perfect, but it had not been restful.

This was rest.

Wrapped in velvet and spring flowers and a stupid little cake.

Willa let out a soft, helpless laugh and wiped quickly beneath one eye with the side of her finger, annoyed by the evidence.

“Okay,” she said, regaining a sliver of herself through sheer force of will. “Maybe I’m crying a little. But only because the cake is wearing a ribbon, and that’s manipulative.”

She stepped out of her boots without looking down, using one foot to shove at the heel of the other, still refusing to move too far from him. Her suitcase remained abandoned by the door, one wheel turned crookedly like it too had been emotionally defeated. She shrugged her blazer halfway off, then got tangled in one sleeve because of course she did, and the absurdity of it finally made her laugh properly.

Small at first.

Then warmer.

Then real.

The sound loosened something in the room.

She freed herself eventually and dropped the blazer over the back of the nearest chair, leaving her shoulders bare beneath the white dress, goosebumps rising where the air touched her skin. The city light slid across the floorboards. Somewhere below, a car passed over wet stone. The whole suite seemed to hold its breath around them.

Willa turned back to him and reached for his hand.

Not because she needed help.

Because she wanted the contact.

Their rings touched first, a tiny cool click of metal against metal, and the sound went straight through her.

She looked down at it. At the proof. At the impossible little circle on her finger that had somehow survived airports, showers, shows, sleep, panic, laughter, and the deeply surreal experience of having strangers debate whether her marriage was romantic, impulsive, doomed, iconic, or some combination of all four.

None of them had been there for this.

None of them got this part.

Her thumb passed over his knuckles, slow, grounding herself on the shape of his hand.

“I’m glad they did it,” she said, quieter now. “Which is horrible, obviously. I’ll never be able to admit that to them directly. We need to establish that now. Publicly, I’m offended. Privately…”

She glanced around again, taking in the flowers, the balcony, the cake, the bed, the view of Prague softening into evening.

Privately, it felt like being given back a piece of the wedding they had not known they were allowed to miss.

Her throat tightened, but this time she let it.

“Privately, I think they might have gotten it right.”

She drew him with her farther into the room, past the abandoned suitcases and into the golden spill of window light. Each step made the suite feel more real. Less like something they had accidentally walked into. More like something they could claim.

Near the table, she paused in front of the cake and bent slightly to inspect it under the glass dome. The icing was imperfect in a way she liked, not hotel-slick or sterile, with the dark ribbon tied just off-center. Two forks. No plates. Whoever had arranged it had either understood them perfectly or given up halfway through formalities.

Willa smiled.

“That,” she said, pointing at it with great solemnity, “is a cake made for people who got married in Vegas and then forgot to have dessert.”

Her eyes flicked back to him.

There was still too much feeling in her body, but now it had somewhere to go. Into the room. Into the joke. Into the hand still holding his. Into the way she could stand barefoot in a suite in Prague with her husband and feel, for once, like time had widened instead of tightening around them.

She moved closer again, close enough to tip her face up toward his, close enough that her voice did not need to be more than a breath.

“I want the champagne,” she said. “And the cake. And maybe ten minutes where nobody knows where we are except the people who love us enough to be extremely annoying about it.”

Her hand rose once more, fingertips brushing lightly over the pale, newly shorn softness of his hair before settling at the back of his neck.

This time, she did not hide the tenderness of it.

She let herself look at him fully. Let herself be quiet. Let herself have the honeymoon, even if it was late, improvised, secondhand arranged, and slightly ridiculous.

Especially because it was.

“And then,” Willa said, soft but steady, “you can kiss your wife properly.”

The second she came to him, Blake felt something in his chest give way.

Not dramatically.

Not like a collapse.

Like a knot finally loosening.

He felt the shaky breath that escaped her before she ever said a word. Felt the weight of her forehead against him. Then her cheek. Then all of her, folding into him with a trust that hit harder than any declaration ever could.

His arm tightened around her automatically.

Not because he thought she might fall.

Because he knew exactly how much it cost her to stay still when she was overwhelmed.

He felt her fingers bunch in the front of his jacket, and God, that nearly finished him right there.

Because Willa talked when things mattered.

She joked.

Deflected.

Started arguments with inanimate objects if necessary.

But this version of her?

The one standing in a room full of flowers trying not to cry because somebody had done something kind?

That version was rare enough to feel sacred.

So when she insisted she wasn’t crying, Blake’s mouth curved against the top of her head.

The allergic reaction explanation followed, and the laugh that escaped him was quiet, warm, impossible to stop.

Of course.

Even standing on the edge of tears, she was still Willa.

Especially then.

He felt the way her laughter broke halfway through. Felt her press closer instead of stepping away from it. Felt her choose not to retreat.

And that made him hold her a little tighter.

Not enough to call attention to it.

Just enough for her to feel.

His eyes closed briefly when her hand left his jacket.

The first brush of her palm against his hair sent a strange warmth through him. He’d gotten used to the jokes. The comments. The relentless harassment.

But this?

This wasn’t teasing.

This was curiosity.

Affection.

The careful sweep of her thumb made something low in his chest ache.

By the time she pulled back enough to look at him, Blake already knew he was in trouble.

Because her eyes were shiny.

And because she was looking at him like she hadn’t decided which feeling to hide first.

Then her fingers touched his cheek.

God.

The gesture was so light it almost wasn’t there.

But Blake felt it anyway.

Felt every inch of it.

He didn’t move.

Didn’t joke.

Didn’t save her from the moment.

He just let her touch him.

Let her see whatever softness she’d managed to corner.

When she looked away toward the room, he followed her gaze automatically.

The flowers.

The champagne.

The city beyond the windows.

The ridiculous cake.

And suddenly he understood.

Not the room.

Not the gesture.

Her.

The thing underneath all of it.

The thing she’d been outrunning since the airport.

Then she admitted she didn’t know what to do with it.

The confession hit him with enough force that his throat tightened.

Because Willa always had something to do.

An opinion.

A joke.

A plan.

Watching her stand there honestly uncertain felt more vulnerable than any tears could have.

The small smile that followed made his chest hurt.

Then came the explanation.

The elevator.

The lobby.

His bandmates.

A laugh escaped him before he could stop it.

Not loud.

Just helpless.

Because she wasn’t wrong.

Not about any of it.

When her voice caught, his eyes dropped briefly.

Not to avoid looking at her.

To survive looking at her.

And when she finally admitted she was crying a little because the cake had a ribbon, Blake lost the fight entirely.

The laugh that broke out of him was full and genuine.

The best kind.

The kind she always managed to drag out of him.

Then she kicked off her boots.

One.

Then the other.

He watched the entire struggle with growing amusement.

Watched her get tangled in her blazer.

Watched her fight a sleeve.

Watched her finally win.

And when she started laughing properly, something in the room shifted exactly the way she felt it.

The tension loosened.

The air warmed.

Everything settled.

His eyes drifted over her bare shoulders.

The goosebumps.

The city light catching in her hair.

The way she looked more beautiful now than she had walking red carpets in custom couture.

Then she reached for his hand.

The small click of their rings touching made his gaze drop immediately.

For a second neither Prague nor the suite existed.

Just that.

Two bands of metal.

A decision made in neon.

A promise that somehow kept becoming more real instead of less.

Her thumb moved over his knuckles.

Slow.

Thoughtful.

And when she admitted she was glad they’d done it, Blake felt a smile start before she was even finished.

The public outrage.

The private gratitude.

That felt exactly right.

That felt exactly like her.

His thumb brushed the back of her hand once.

Soft.

Wordless.

Then she looked around again.

The flowers.

The balcony.

The view.

The bed.

And when she finally admitted they might have gotten it right, Blake felt something settle inside him.

Not excitement.

Not relief.

Something deeper.

Recognition.

Because they had.

God help him, they had.

She started pulling him farther into the room, and he went immediately.

No resistance.

No hesitation.

Just followed.

Like he always did.

When she stopped beside the cake, he watched her inspect it with all the seriousness of an international investigator examining evidence.

The declaration about forgotten wedding dessert made him laugh again.

This time he shook his head.

Slowly.

Helplessly.

Then she moved back toward him.

Close enough that he could feel her warmth again.

Close enough that her voice barely needed sound.

Champagne.

Cake.

Ten minutes hidden from the world.

The request landed somewhere dangerously close to his heart.

Then her fingers found his hair again.

Not teasing.

Not testing.

Just gentle.

And Blake felt his eyes close for the briefest second beneath the touch.

When he opened them, she was looking directly at him.

No defenses.

No jokes.

No escape routes.

Just her.

And then she told him he could kiss his wife properly.

For a moment Blake simply stared at her.

At the woman barefoot in a Prague hotel suite.

At the woman who’d spent twenty minutes insisting she wasn’t crying.

At the woman who’d crossed countries to get here.

At the woman he’d married in Vegas because waiting suddenly seemed impossible.

His free hand rose slowly.

Settled against her jaw.

Warm.

Steady.

His thumb brushed beneath the corner of one eye where she’d wiped away evidence a few minutes ago.

Then he smiled.

Small.

Crooked.

Entirely hers.

“Good,” he said softly, voice rough around the edges. “Because I’ve been trying very hard to behave since the airport.”

And then he leaned down and kissed her.

Not rushed.

Not hungry.

Not because they were alone.

Because she was standing in front of him.

Because she’d laughed.

Because she’d cried.

Because she’d admitted she needed this.

Because she’d taken his hand and brought him into the room with her.

Because somewhere along the way, between Vegas and Prague and a hundred airports in between, she’d become the easiest choice he’d ever made.

So he kissed her slowly.

Like the city could wait.

Like the champagne could wait.

Like the cake with the manipulative ribbon could wait.

Like for the first time in months, absolutely nothing was asking either of them to hurry.

Willa had meant to be clever about it.

That had been the plan, anyway. Some sharp little comeback pressed between their mouths. Some smug observation about how brave he was for admitting he had been trying to behave, as if she had not spent the entire airport transfer mentally climbing him like architecture. Something bright and ridiculous and distinctly hers, because that was the easiest way to survive tenderness when it came too close.

But then he kissed her.

Slowly.

And the comeback dissolved before it ever became language.

Her eyes closed on instinct, but everything else in her opened so fast it almost frightened her. The room, the flowers, the city beyond the windows — all of it fell away in layers, not gone exactly, just softened around the edges until the only solid thing left was the warm press of his mouth and the hand at her jaw and the terrible, impossible relief of being touched by the person she had been missing in pieces for months.

God, she had missed him.

Not in the dramatic way people wrote about when they wanted longing to look pretty. Not some polished, cinematic ache that could be set to strings and cut into a montage. Willa had missed him stupidly. Irrationally. In inconvenient flashes that made her angry at her own life. She had missed him while brushing her teeth in hotel bathrooms that all looked the same. Missed him in green rooms when someone said something he would have hated. Missed him in the strange little dead pocket after a show, when her ears were still ringing and her body still felt full of noise, but her phone was too quiet in her hand.

She had missed him in airports.

In beds too big for one person.

In the pause after laughter, when she turned her head to share it and found only whatever city she was supposed to belong to that night.

And now he was here.

Actually here.

His lips were warm against hers, unhurried in a way that made her chest tighten. He was not kissing her like they had forty-eight hours and a schedule waiting to steal him back. He was kissing her like time had been caught by the collar and told to sit still. Like the whole world could make itself useful by shutting up for once.

Willa made a small sound into his mouth.

It was not graceful.

It was not cool.

It was exactly the sort of sound that would have embarrassed her if she had not been too busy moving closer, rising onto her toes without thinking, one hand sliding from the back of his neck to the side of his head. Her fingers brushed over the short, pale softness there again, and the unfamiliar texture sent a fresh little shock through her, not because it felt strange, but because it made him so unbearably present. Different from the version she had been carrying through screens. Different from the one she had kept tucked into memory between tour stops.

This one was under her hands.

This one was breathing against her.

This one was hers.

The thought hit with such force that she pulled him closer by the front of his hoodie, bunching the fabric in her fist. Her wedding ring pressed cold against her own palm, and that small pressure sent another ache through her — proof on proof on proof. Metal. Mouth. Skin. The soft rasp of his breath. The fact that she could touch him and not have the call lag, not have someone knocking on a dressing-room door, not have to count backward from whatever time zone he was in and wonder if loving someone this much across distance was romantic or just a very elaborate form of self-harm.

She kissed him harder for one second.

Only one.

Enough to tell the truth before she lost her nerve.

Then she softened again, because the gentleness was worse. The gentleness found things. It slipped past all her bright, noisy defenses and put its hands directly on the parts of her she pretended were not tender.

Her fingers loosened in his hoodie.

Her mouth lingered against his.

For a moment, she did not move away. She stayed there, close enough to feel the shape of his smile or breath or whatever fragile thing passed between them when they were both too full to perform being normal. Her nose brushed his. Her eyelashes lifted slowly, and there he was, too close and too real and looking at her in a way that made her immediately want to start a small argument with the nearest lamp.

Instead, she swallowed.

Bad idea.

It made her aware of her throat. Of the sting still behind her eyes. Of the fact that she had gone quiet again, which was starting to feel like a personal betrayal.

“So,” she breathed, because apparently her mouth had decided to rejoin civilization without permission, “terrible news.”

Her voice came out softer than intended.

She hated that.

She also loved that he was the only person alive who could make her not care.

“I think you might be good at that.”

The understatement was insulting to reality, but it steadied her. A little. Enough for her mouth to curve. Enough for the wild, buzzing version of herself to come flickering back through the haze of feeling, carrying sparklers and emotional liability paperwork.

She kept her hand at the back of his neck, thumb moving once, slow and fond, not quite ready to surrender the contact.

“I mean, obviously, I’ll need more data before I make any official statements. Very rigorous process. Peer reviewed. Possibly champagne assisted.”

She glanced toward the bottle, then the cake beneath its glass dome, then back at him. The room came back in pieces: the tulips leaning open in their vases, the pale blossoms on the mantel, the river beyond the windows turning darker under the spring evening. Everything looked exactly as overwhelming as it had before, but now she was not standing on the edge of it alone.

That changed everything.

Her chest still hurt, but in a fuller way.

A better way.

Like her heart had been crammed into too small a space for months and had only now remembered what it felt like to stretch.

She let out a breath that nearly became a laugh and tipped her forehead lightly against his chin for half a second, hiding because she could, because he would let her, because she was so tired of being visible to everyone except the person she actually wanted seeing her.

“I missed you,” she said.

Three words. Simple enough. Embarrassingly inadequate.

They did not cover the nights she had slept curled around a pillow because her body had gotten used to him too quickly and then been abandoned by geography. They did not cover the way she watched little clips of him onstage with the volume turned low, pretending she was only checking in when really she was trying to catch his face between flashes of light. They did not cover the way she had wanted to send him a hundred tiny, useless thoughts every day and had stopped herself at fifty because marriage was apparently not a cure for not wanting to be annoying.

Her fingers flexed once against his neck.

“No, actually, that was badly phrased,” she corrected immediately, because precision mattered when her heart was acting like a dramatic Victorian invalid. “I missed you in a way that made me extremely unpleasant to be around. Like, professionally concerning. My band deserves compensation. My manager deserves hazard pay. I once almost cried because room service forgot mustard, and I’m choosing to blame that on you.”

The words came faster now, but they did not feel like armor this time. They felt like ribbons tied to something too big to hold barehanded. Colorful little streamers around the bomb.

She pulled back just enough to look at him properly, and there it was again — the sharpness of the new hair, the softness of his eyes, the lines of travel and fatigue that made him seem more human than the version everyone else screamed for. Her thumb moved from his neck to the edge of his jaw.

Her voice dropped.

“I missed my husband.”

That one landed differently.

She felt it as soon as she said it, the room seeming to still around the word. Husband. Not a joke, not a headline, not something said with a wink in front of other people because it was still new enough to feel dangerous. Just the truth. Heavy and warm and terrifyingly natural.

Willa’s mouth parted, but for once nothing clever came immediately.

Good.

Maybe some things deserved the space.

She looked down at his hand, at the ring, at the way the late light caught on it. Then she looked at her own. Her throat tightened again, but she was getting better at letting that happen without launching herself into comedy as an emergency evacuation route.

“I thought I was fine with it,” she admitted. “The way we did everything. Vegas. The chaos. The no-plan plan. And I am. I love it. I love that we did it like that. I love that the whole thing looked like a crime scene directed by Cupid with a Monster Energy sponsorship.”

Her smile flickered, fond and a little watery.

“But I think…” She paused, searching, hating the searching, doing it anyway. “I think I didn’t realize there was a part after. A part where you’re married but you don’t actually get to be married because you’re in one country and I’m in another, and everyone keeps congratulating us like we’re living inside some romantic fairy tale, but mostly I’m just trying to figure out when I get to see your stupid face again.”

She looked up at him.

The face in question was not stupid.

That was deeply inconvenient.

Especially now, with the almost-white buzzcut making every expression too clear. He looked tired. Beautiful. A little wrecked. Hers in a way that still knocked the breath out of her if she let herself think about it for too long.

Which she was.

Unfortunately.

“I love you,” she said, and this time there was no joke attached to soften the impact. No flourish. No theatrical recovery. Just her voice, small but steady, cutting through the warm air between them. “Truly, madly, deeply, disgustingly. Like, if anyone knew the full extent, I’d have to go into witness protection. I’d never survive the branding.”

Her eyes shone again, but she was smiling now.

“I love you so much it’s embarrassing.”

The confession made her feel exposed enough that she immediately reached for the cake dome with her free hand, because apparently dessert had become a structural support beam in her emotional life.

“And on that note, we need sugar before I become sincere again and someone has to sedate me.”

She lifted the glass dome with exaggerated care, as if disarming a bomb. The cake smelled faintly of vanilla and lemon, sweet but not cloying, and the black ribbon around the base really was manipulative. She stared at it with narrowed eyes.

“I still think this ribbon is hostile.”

She set the dome aside and picked up one of the forks. No plate. No ceremony. Just cake on a table in a suite they had not booked, in a city they barely had time to belong to.

Perfect.

Willa dug the fork into the icing, took the first bite, and immediately pointed the tines at him with the severity of a judge handing down a sentence.

“Oh, that’s annoying.”

She swallowed, eyes widening.

“It’s good. Of course it’s good. Why wouldn’t the emotionally devastating honeymoon cake also be good? That would be too merciful.”

Then Willa scooped up another bite with the solemnity of someone performing a sacred ritual, lifted it toward him, and narrowed her eyes.

“Okay. Your turn. As my husband, emotional support person, and co-victim of this aggressively romantic pastry, you are required to participate.”

Her smile broke through before she could stop it, too fond to be threatening.

“Don’t make me eat feelings by myself.”

Blake felt the first crack in his composure the moment she admitted she’d planned to be clever.

Not because she said it.

Because he knew it was true.

He knew exactly how many jokes had died between the kiss and now.

He knew exactly how much effort it had cost her not to run for cover behind them.

So when she described the way everything else had disappeared around them, his eyes stayed fixed on her face, watching every tiny shift of expression as she talked herself through it.

The room.

The flowers.

The city.

None of it surprised him.

The thing that got him was hearing how much she’d missed him.

Not the romantic version.

The real one.

The stupid one.

The human one.

The version that lived in hotel bathrooms and airports and empty beds.

As she listed them, one by one, he felt memories answering from his own side.

A backstage hallway in Berlin.

A hotel lobby in Glasgow.

A train platform in Milan.

Entire days punctuated by thoughts that began with Willa would’ve hated this or Willa would’ve loved this.

The realization settled heavier with every example she gave.

Because he’d been living inside the same absence.

Then she said he was here.

Actually here.

Something in his chest tightened.

He watched her rise onto her toes.

Watched her hand slide higher into his hair.

The touch itself wasn’t what got him.

It was the look on her face.

The wonder.

The disbelief.

The relief.

As if she was still catching up to the fact that he was tangible.

As if she’d spent months carrying a version of him made of screens and phone calls and now suddenly had to reconcile it with the one standing in front of her.

When her fist tightened in his hoodie and she pulled him closer, Blake’s breath left him quietly.

Not because of the movement.

Because of the desperation hidden inside it.

The need.

The certainty.

The simple fact that she wanted him closer.

Then came the harder kiss.

Brief.

Gone almost immediately.

But he felt it.

Felt everything she hadn’t said inside it.

By the time she softened again, his forehead was nearly resting against hers.

His eyes closed briefly when her fingers loosened.

Not to escape the moment.

To survive it.

Then she stayed.

Close enough to share breath.

Close enough that neither of them could pretend distance existed.

And when she looked at him like she was considering starting an argument with a lamp just to protect herself from sincerity, Blake nearly laughed.

Nearly.

Because he was too busy loving her.

The terrible news arrived next.

He listened.

Watched.

Felt warmth spread through his chest when she admitted he might be good at kissing her.

The understatement was so absurd that his mouth twitched immediately.

Especially when she started talking about peer review.

And champagne-assisted research.

And official findings.

There she was.

Coming back piece by piece.

Not hiding.

Just breathing again.

Then her forehead touched his chin.

The gesture was so small it should not have affected him.

It did anyway.

His hand settled against the back of her neck automatically.

Gentle.

Protective.

Keeping her there as long as she wanted to stay.

Then she said it.

I missed you.

Three words.

Simple.

Devastating.

His throat tightened immediately.

Not because of the words themselves.

Because of the way she said them.

Like she’d finally stopped negotiating with the truth.

Then she corrected herself.

Of course she did.

The explanation about hazard pay and mustard and professional concern pulled a laugh from him despite everything.

A real one.

Low and helpless.

But underneath it, his chest hurt.

Because he’d spent months doing exactly the same thing.

Pretending he was functioning normally.

Failing spectacularly.

Then her thumb moved to his jaw.

And she said it.

I missed my husband.

Everything inside him went still.

The room.

The city.

The flowers.

Gone.

Just that word.

Husband.

His wife saying it like she’d been saying it forever.

His gaze dropped briefly.

Not away from her.

Toward their hands.

Toward the rings.

Toward proof.

Then back up again.

Just in time to catch the vulnerability in her face as she talked about Vegas.

The chaos.

The way they’d done everything.

The way she’d loved it.

The way she’d still loved it.

But missed something anyway.

Blake listened to every word.

Felt every mile hidden underneath them.

Every flight.

Every missed morning.

Every goodbye that came too quickly.

When she admitted that everyone kept congratulating them while she was mostly trying to figure out when she’d see him again, something deep in his chest twisted.

Because he’d spent half the year doing exactly the same thing.

Then she looked at him.

And told him she loved him.

No joke.

No shield.

No escape hatch.

Just truth.

His breath caught.

Actually caught.

The force of it hit harder because she wasn’t performing.

She wasn’t trying to make it beautiful.

She was just telling him.

And somehow that made it devastating.

When she added that she loved him enough to require witness protection, a shaky laugh escaped him.

His eyes burned.

Which felt deeply unfair.

Then she reached for the cake.

And Blake immediately knew she was overwhelmed again.

The dome.

The ribbon.

The suspicious hostility of decorative choices.

He watched every second.

Let her have it.

Let her find her footing.

The cake inspection.

The judgment.

The outrage.

The first bite.

The betrayal when it turned out to be good.

God.

He loved her.

He loved her so much.

By the time she offered him the fork and accused the pastry of emotional manipulation, Blake’s smile had become completely uncontrollable.

Then came the final request.

Don’t make me eat feelings by myself.

That one landed softly.

But it landed.

He looked at her.

Really looked.

At the tear-bright eyes.

At the fond smile.

At the fork suspended between them.

At the woman who had just handed him every vulnerable piece of herself and then disguised the whole thing as cake commentary.

Slowly, Blake stepped closer.

Close enough that their shoulders nearly touched.

His hand came up and settled over hers around the fork.

Warm.

Steady.

His thumb brushed once across her knuckles.

Then he leaned down and took the offered bite.

Chewed.

Swallowed.

Considered with exaggerated seriousness.

The silence stretched.

Just enough.

Then he nodded.

Once.

Gravely.

“As your husband,” he said, voice rough with amusement and affection and about ten other things he couldn’t separate anymore, “I can confirm this cake is emotionally manipulative.”

His eyes held hers.

“And as your emotional support person, I think the ribbon knew exactly what it was doing.”

The smile she loved tugged at the corner of his mouth.

Small.

Crooked.

Entirely genuine.

Then his hand slid fully into hers and he gave it a gentle squeeze.

The city glowed beyond the windows.

The flowers scented the room.

Prague darkened outside.

But Blake couldn’t seem to look anywhere except her.

“I missed my wife too.”

The words came quietly.

No performance.

No joke attached.

Just truth.

He felt it settle between them.

Warm.

Certain.

Then he lifted their joined hands and pressed a kiss against her knuckles, right beside the ring.

His gaze never left hers.

“And for the record,” he said softly, “I don’t think you’re allowed to accuse me of being good at kissing when you’ve spent the last twenty minutes making me forget how conversations work.”

The smile widened.

A little helpless now.

A little wrecked.

A lot in love.

Then he reached for the second fork.

“Now move over.”

His shoulder bumped hers gently.

“We’ve got forty-eight hours, a suspicious amount of flowers, and a honeymoon cake that’s apparently weaponized.”

Another small bump.

Another smile.

“And absolutely nobody is eating feelings alone tonight.”

Blake watched her for a second longer after the last joke left his mouth.

Watched the way her smile lingered.

Watched the shine still tucked behind her eyes.

Watched the way she stood there barefoot in the middle of a Prague hotel suite, one hand wrapped around a fork, looking simultaneously like the woman who could command a stage and the woman who had nearly cried over a ribbon tied around a cake.

God.

He loved her.

The realization wasn’t new.

It just kept arriving in different clothes.

Tonight it happened to be wearing spring light and hotel flowers.

His fingers tightened lightly around hers before he finally released her hand and picked up the second fork.

“Right,” he said, nodding toward the cake with mock seriousness. “Let’s see what other emotional damage this thing is capable of.”

He cut himself a piece.

Not a delicate piece.

Not a civilized piece.

A completely unreasonable piece.

Then he took a bite.

The lemon hit first.

Then vanilla.

Then whatever dark magic had convinced a professional baker that a honeymoon cake needed to taste like comfort and nostalgia and bad decisions all at once.

Blake closed his eyes briefly.

“That’s offensive.”

His expression hardened.

“I don’t like being emotionally manipulated by dessert.”

Another bite disappeared immediately.

Which completely ruined the point.

He heard himself huff a laugh.

Then looked over at her.

Still there.

Still watching him.

Still beautiful in a way that made him feel vaguely ambushed.

Without thinking too much about it, he scooped up another forkful and held it toward her.

His eyes narrowed slightly.

Suspicious.

“This feels like a trap.”

The corner of his mouth lifted.

“But apparently we’re committed now.”

When she leaned closer, he waited until she took the bite before lowering the fork.

A tiny smear of icing remained at the corner of her mouth.

Not much.

Just enough.

Blake’s gaze caught on it immediately.

His smile softened.

The teasing slipped away.

He stepped closer.

Close enough to reach up and brush his thumb lightly against her cheek.

Close enough to feel the warmth coming off her skin.

Close enough that the city beyond the windows disappeared again.

“There,” he murmured.

But the icing was still there.

Or maybe he just wasn’t in a hurry to move away.

Either way, his eyes flicked briefly to her mouth before returning to hers.

Then he leaned down.

The kiss landed soft.

Brief.

Sweet with cake and champagne and relief.

Nothing urgent.

Nothing demanding.

Just affection.

The kind that seemed to fit the room.

The kind that fit them.

When he pulled back, his forehead rested lightly against hers.

A smile tugged at his mouth again.

Small.

Content.

Dangerously happy.

“See?” he said quietly. “This is exactly why the ribbon won.”

For half a second, Willa just stared at him.

Not because she didn’t have anything to say. She had, conservatively, six different responses lined up and throwing elbows for first place. One about ribbons being historically untrustworthy. One about how he had clearly been corrupted by pastry propaganda. One about how if the ribbon won, they needed to interrogate the baker immediately, because nobody that good with buttercream could be innocent.

But he was looking at her with that small, content, dangerously happy smile, and the joke got stuck somewhere behind her ribs.

That was rude of him, honestly.

To stand there looking like that.

All blond buzzcut and tired eyes and black clothes, sweet from cake and stupidly pleased with himself, as if he hadn’t just kissed her in a way that made the entire idea of language feel optional. As if he hadn’t walked into this room with her and rearranged every molecule of air just by being there. As if he hadn’t become the safest and most inconvenient place in the world for her heart to go.

Willa narrowed her eyes at him because she needed to do something with her face before it betrayed her.

“You’re siding with the ribbon,” she said, low and accusing. “Wow. Six months of marriage and already we’re dealing with textile betrayal. I should’ve seen this coming.”

The words came out light, but her voice still had that softness underneath it. The one she couldn’t quite scrape off. The one he kept pulling out of her no matter how many jokes she stacked on top of it like chairs against a door.

She turned back to the cake and took another bite directly from the fork, because plates were for people with emotional stability and better planning. The lemon and vanilla hit her tongue again, bright and impossible and annoyingly perfect. Her eyes closed for half a second despite herself.

“God, I hate when things are delicious and meaningful. Pick a lane.”

She opened her eyes and caught him watching her.

Of course he was.

He watched her like he was trying to memorize the version of her that existed between spectacle and sleep. The barefoot version. The slightly teary, cake-armed version. The version with faded lipstick and bare shoulders and a heart too loud for her body. It should have made her feel exposed. It did make her feel exposed. But it also made something warm settle low in her chest, because she didn’t have to compete for that look. She didn’t have to sing for it, glitter for it, bleed for it, earn it by being interesting enough.

It was just hers.

He was just hers.

The thought still had teeth.

Not in a frightening way. In a real way. Like biting down on something solid after months of trying to live on echoes.

Willa set the fork down before she did something embarrassing with it, like continue eating cake with the focus of a Victorian widow receiving news. Her gaze slid to the chilled bottle waiting nearby. Not the kind of thing she would have ordered for herself, which somehow made it funnier — tall glass, pale gold liquid, foil at the top, elegant enough to look like trouble and innocent enough to go with cake before dinner like they were making excellent life choices.

She picked it up by the neck and held it out to him.

“Here. Husband task.”

Her smile kicked up at one corner.

“Open this before I start gnawing through the ribbon like a raccoon with unresolved attachment issues.”

The bottle was cool enough that condensation slicked against her fingers before he took it from her. She let go only after his hand closed around it, not because she thought he’d drop it, but because she liked the brief overlap. His tattooed fingers against hers. Their rings catching, touching, separating. Tiny little domestic collisions that felt more intimate than they had any right to feel.

She drifted away before she could get dramatic about hand contact.

Not far.

Never far.

Just to the record player.

The stack of vinyl looked curated in a way that made her immediately suspicious of everyone involved. There were a few obvious romantic choices, some dramatic, some painfully tasteful, and one or two that made her laugh under her breath because somebody clearly thought they knew them better than they did. She flipped through them with one finger, reading spines, letting the little ritual slow her down.

Her pulse was still up from his mouth.

From his hands.

From him saying wife like it belonged to him and still somehow giving it back to her every time.

She found The Cure’s Disintegration halfway through the stack and stopped.

Of course.

Of course that was here.

Melodramatic, gorgeous, a little haunted, deeply sincere under all the black eyeliner. It was almost too on the nose. Which meant it was perfect. Willa pulled it free and held it up without looking at him yet.

“Don’t judge me,” she said, already knowing he would not. “This is a very serious artistic decision.”

She slipped the record from its sleeve carefully, because for all her chaos, she treated vinyl like it had bones. The needle crackled when she lowered it. For a second there was only that soft, living static — the little breath before music — and Willa felt something in her loosen again.

Then the album began.

Not loudly. Just enough to fill the space between them without crowding it.

She turned back as the first notes spread through the air and found him with the bottle, with the cake, with that face she had crossed borders for without allowing herself to think of it that plainly. The sight did something awful and lovely to her. It made her want to run at him. It made her want to crawl into his lap. It made her want to make fun of his shoes. It made her want to tell him every terrifyingly earnest thing in her body and then immediately fake her own death from embarrassment.

Instead, she walked back to him.

Barefoot. Slower than usual. Still Willa, but softened at the edges by music and sugar and the fact that, for once, nobody was asking them to leave.

“Okay,” she said, reclaiming her fork and pointing it at him. “New ruling. The ribbon won the battle. We won the war.”

Her eyes lifted to his.

There it was again, the feeling that kept arriving too big for the moment. Too big for cake. Too big for sarcasm. Too big for the ache of every week they had spent apart. It was not the reckless lightning of Vegas, although that was still there, flashing hot under her skin whenever he came too close. It was something steadier now, something stubborn enough to survive bad service and missed calls and entire continents being inconvenient.

They had won because he was here.

Because she was here.

Because whatever else kept taking pieces of their time, it did not get the final say.

Her smile faltered into something painfully fond.

“Look at us,” she said, quieter, the sarcasm gentling instead of disappearing. “Barefoot, emotionally compromised, eating cake like unsupervised children, listening to The Cure in Prague.” She shook her head a little, like the evidence was damning. “Disgusting. We’re disgusting people.”

She stepped closer until her hip brushed his, then leaned into him as if her body had decided he was the only sensible piece of furniture in the room. One arm slipped around his waist. Easy. Natural. Like no time had passed at all, and also like all the time had passed and left them hungrier for this exact shape of closeness.

Her cheek found his shoulder.

For one rare second, she didn’t fill the silence.

She let the music do it.

The song moved around them in dark, shimmering layers. The cake sat open on the table. The bottle waited in his hand. His warmth pressed along her side, steady and real, and Willa felt the impossible split of her life again — the stage version of her, loud and kinetic and bright enough to burn through exhaustion, and this version, the one who wanted to stand barefoot beside her husband while he opened something fizzy and ridiculous to drink with cake because they could.

Because they were allowed.

Because he had chosen her in neon, and kept choosing her in airports, and somehow still looked at her like the choice had never once become complicated.

Her fingers curled lightly at his side.

“I love this,” she admitted, and the words surprised her by being simple. Not dramatic. Not dressed up. Just true.

Then, because that was far too naked a thing to leave undefended, she lifted her head and added, “Not the ribbon. I want that on record. The ribbon is smug and I don’t respect it.”

Her gaze moved over his face again, touching without touching. The bleached hair. The tired softness around his eyes. The mouth that kept ruining her ability to be normal. She reached up, thumb brushing the corner of his lips as if checking for icing, though there was nothing there now.

A lie, technically.

She just wanted to touch him.

“Also,” she murmured, “you’re not allowed to look this pleased with yourself unless you plan to keep earning it.”

The teasing was there. Bright. Familiar. But it landed gently, warmed through with affection so obvious she couldn’t have hidden it if she tried.

She rose onto her toes and kissed him once.

Not like before.

This one was quick, sweet, almost laughing. A punctuation mark. A promise tucked into a small thing. When she dropped back onto her heels, she didn’t move away.

“Open the bottle,” she said, bumping him lightly with her hip. “Feed your wife more cake. Pretend we are classy for maybe twelve seconds.”

Her grin widened.

“And then we can ruin that illusion together.”

Blake felt the smile coming before she even finished accusing him of siding with the ribbon. The fact that she managed to sound genuinely betrayed by decorative fabric while still carrying the softness of everything she’d admitted moments earlier was so uniquely Willa that he didn’t even bother trying to hide his amusement. He watched the narrowing of her eyes, the mock severity in her voice, and the vulnerability she kept attempting to bury beneath sarcasm, and the combination settled somewhere warm inside his chest. Most people only ever saw one version of her at a time. They got the performer or the wit, the confidence or the chaos, the woman with a comeback ready before the conversation had even finished. He got all of it. He got the version standing barefoot in a Prague hotel suite, still emotional enough that her eyes shone when she wasn’t paying attention, trying to wage war against a ribbon because the alternative was acknowledging how much the evening meant to her.

“The ribbon presented a compelling argument,” he said, accepting the accusation with all the seriousness of a man testifying before a jury. “I had to follow the evidence wherever it led.”

His attention followed her as she turned back toward the cake and immediately proved her own point by taking another bite. The brief closing of her eyes didn’t escape him. Neither did the annoyance that followed when she realized the cake was somehow managing to be exactly as good as the situation surrounding it. Her complaint about meaningful desserts pulled a laugh from him, low and easy, because he understood exactly what she meant. There was something almost unfair about being ambushed from every direction at once. The flowers. The city. The music waiting to happen. The cake that apparently tasted like somebody had baked emotional vulnerability into buttercream.

When she caught him watching her, he didn’t look away. He rarely did anymore. Not because he was trying to make her nervous, but because he genuinely liked looking at her. The real version of her. The one that existed when there wasn’t a stage between her and the world. The one that wore exhaustion openly and forgot to perform. The one who could spend ten minutes making jokes only to accidentally reveal something honest in the middle of them. Watching her had become one of his favorite things, and no amount of teasing from her was likely to change that.

The champagne bottle appeared in front of him before he could say any of that. He accepted it immediately, his hand brushing hers as he took it. The contact lasted less than a second, but he felt it anyway. Those tiny moments had become strangely important over the last several months. Little reminders that distance wasn’t permanent. That she was actually here. That this wasn’t another airport goodbye waiting around the corner. He glanced down at their hands as they separated, watching their rings catch briefly against each other before she wandered away toward the record player.

His eyes followed her automatically.

They always did.

He watched her sort through the records with focused concentration, smiling to himself as she examined each sleeve like she was reviewing evidence in another ongoing case. The sight felt so familiar that it made something inside him settle. She looked comfortable. Comfortable enough to be curious. Comfortable enough to wander. Comfortable enough to let silence exist between them without filling every second of it.

When she found Disintegration, his smile widened immediately.

Of course she picked that one.

There had never really been another option.

He listened to her defend the choice before he’d even criticized it and shook his head with quiet affection. “I wasn’t judging until you started defending yourself before I said anything.”

The crackle of the needle filled the room a moment later. Then the music began.

The effect was immediate.

The suite softened somehow. The city outside the windows seemed farther away. The flowers became part of the atmosphere rather than decoration. The entire room settled into itself as the music threaded through it, and Blake found himself standing perfectly still for a second, watching her turn back toward him with the record already playing behind her.

The look on her face hit him harder than he expected.

Not because she was emotional. Not because she was smiling. Because she looked happy.

Not performatively happy.

Not relieved.

Not trying-to-be-fine happy.

Actually happy.

The sight of it tightened something in his chest.

When she crossed the room again, slower this time, he found himself wanting to reach for her before she was even within arm’s length. By the time she reclaimed her fork and announced that the ribbon had won the battle while they had won the war, he already knew what she meant. It wasn’t really about the ribbon anymore. It wasn’t about the cake or the suite or the champagne. It was about this. About being in the same room without counting down the hours. About not having to schedule affection around flights and obligations and impossible calendars.

He listened carefully as she spoke, hearing the gentler note underneath the sarcasm. When she called them disgusting people, he laughed outright, but the sound faded quickly as she stepped into his side and slipped an arm around his waist. His own arm settled across her shoulders immediately, the movement so instinctive he barely thought about it. Holding her felt as natural as breathing. It felt familiar and new at the same time, carrying all the weight of the months they’d spent apart and all the ease of finally being together again.

The silence that followed didn’t need fixing.

The music filled it.

Her warmth filled it.

The city beyond the windows filled it.

Blake rested his cheek briefly against the top of her head and let himself exist in the moment rather than race ahead to the next one. That was part of what made this feel different. Nobody needed anything from them. No one was waiting downstairs. No schedule was pulling them apart. For once, they were allowed to simply be where they were.

So when she admitted she loved this, the words landed with surprising force.

Not because they were dramatic.

Because they weren’t.

Because they were simple.

Because they were true.

His arm tightened slightly around her shoulders as she immediately clarified her feelings about the ribbon, and the smile that followed came so easily it almost hurt. She could never leave sincerity undefended for long. That was part of her charm. Part of her survival strategy. Part of the reason he adored her.

Then her fingers found the corner of his mouth.

The excuse was transparent.

He knew it.

She knew it.

Neither of them acknowledged it.

He simply leaned into the touch slightly and watched her watch him.

The comment about earning his satisfaction drew another laugh from him, softer this time, and before he could answer she was already rising onto her toes to kiss him. The kiss was brief and sweet and entirely different from the one they’d shared earlier. This one felt domestic somehow. Familiar. Like a promise folded into an ordinary moment.

When she settled back down and issued her instructions about the bottle, the cake, and their brief attempt at classiness, Blake shook his head and finally turned his attention to the champagne.

“That’s ambitious,” he said. “Twelve seconds might be asking too much.”

He worked the foil loose while she stood nearby, fully aware that she was watching. The wire cage followed. Then the cork. The pop echoed softly through the suite, and when he glanced up he caught the immediate satisfaction on her face. It made him laugh again.

The champagne poured smoothly into the waiting glasses, pale gold catching the last of the evening light. He handed one to her and paused briefly when their fingers brushed for the second time that evening, another tiny point of contact that somehow felt larger than it should have.

Lifting his own glass, he tilted it toward hers.

“To emotionally manipulative pastries,” he said. Then his eyes found hers again, warm with amusement and something much deeper. “And to the woman who spent an hour prosecuting a ribbon and still somehow won the argument.”

After they drank, he reached for the fork, cut off another piece of cake, and held it out toward her. There was something strangely satisfying about the simple act. No stage. No audience. No performance. Just feeding his wife cake in a hotel suite while The Cure played softly in the background.

The thought alone made him smile.

When she’d finished the bite, he set the fork aside and brushed a loose strand of hair behind her ear, his fingertips lingering for a second longer than necessary. The city glowed beyond the windows. The music drifted through the room. The flowers scented the air. And standing there with her tucked comfortably against his side, Blake realized he couldn’t remember the last time he’d felt this calm.

Not excited.

Not overwhelmed.

Not euphoric.

Calm.

The kind that came from finally reaching something you’d been moving toward for so long that you’d forgotten what it would feel like when you got there.

His thumb brushed lightly against her cheek.

“I know exactly what you mean,” he said quietly. “About this. About all of it.”

His gaze moved briefly around the suite before returning to her.

“The cake helps, though.”

Willa looked at him over the rim of her glass, and for one treacherous second, she forgot what she had been about to say.

That was becoming a problem.

A real one.

A legally significant one, probably, given the ring situation.

Because he was standing there with champagne in his hand and that soft, knowing look on his face, all black clothes and pale hair and inked skin in the golden Prague light, saying things quietly like he had not just walked straight into the center of her and started rearranging furniture. Like he did not understand exactly what she had meant before she finished saying it. Like he had not been doing that for years.

Reading her.

Seeing where the joke ended and the feeling began.

Knowing when she was performing for the room and when she was trying not to spill out all over the floor.

It should have irritated her more than it did. It did irritate her, technically, in the same way a favorite song irritated her when it hit too accurately. She could read him the same way. She knew the difference between the smile he gave crowds and the one that meant he was trying not to feel too much in front of her. She knew the way his voice changed when something mattered. Knew the particular stillness that came over him when he was listening with his whole body. Knew when he was teasing because he was happy and when he was teasing because the tenderness had nowhere else to go.

That was what happened, she thought, when two people loved each other this much, for this long.

You stopped needing subtitles.

You started hearing the truth in the pauses.

Unfortunately, the truth currently standing in front of her was unfairly attractive.

Deeply unfairly.

Like, formally unethical.

Willa lowered the glass and let her eyes move over him without pretending she was doing anything else. She had done enough pretending for one day. Enough pretending to be normal at the airport. Enough pretending not to stare in the elevator. Enough pretending the shape of him in this room — husband, lover, favorite disaster, perfect-for-her menace — was not actively interfering with her ability to make wise choices.

She was done pretending.

“The cake helps,” she repeated, tasting the words like she was considering them as evidence. “That is such a British sad-boy answer. Very atmospheric. Very tortured. Very I-have-feelings-but-I’ve-put-them-in-a-minor-key.”

Her mouth curved.

“You should be careful. Robert Smith has been my favorite British man for beautifully miserable love songs since I was old enough to make eyeliner mistakes on purpose, but you are aggressively campaigning for the title.”

She took a small sip of champagne, eyes still on him.

The bubbles hit her tongue, bright and cold, but they did absolutely nothing to settle the heat beginning to curl through her. It was in the closeness. In the music moving dark and lush around the suite. In the river going blue-black beyond the windows. In the way his gaze stayed on her like he knew she had just decided to stop being coy and was waiting, with entirely too much patience, to see what she would do with that.

Willa loved his patience.

She also hated it.

She mostly wanted to ruin it.

“You’re very annoying,” she said, softening the accusation with a look that made it impossible to mistake her meaning. “Do you know that? You stand there being all emotionally literate and pretty in a haunted way, and then I’m supposed to continue being charming and composed and not start climbing you in a hotel suite full of tulips. That’s an unreasonable expectation to place on your wife.”

There.

The word again.

Wife.

She liked the shape of it in her mouth more than she had expected to. Liked it especially now, here, with champagne and cake and The Cure and Prague dimming into evening around them. Liked the way it made his attention sharpen. Liked the way it made her feel claimed without feeling contained. Like a match struck in a dark room, quick and hot and illuminating everything.

Her body knew him before her mind had time to make a performance of wanting him.

It knew the distance from where she stood to where he stood. Knew how his chest felt under her palms. Knew the heat of his mouth, the weight of his hands, the particular kind of safety that somehow made her more reckless instead of less. Her attraction to him had always been inconvenient, but marriage had made it worse. Not softer. Not tamer. Worse in the best and most catastrophic way.

Because now wanting him had a name on it.

Now the ring on her finger flashed every time her hand moved, as if even her own body was conspiring to remind her that this man was not some crush, not some almost, not some fever dream she had to pack away before the next tour stop.

He was her husband.

Her husband was standing in their ridiculous unofficial honeymoon suite with champagne in his hand while a record spun behind them and a bed waited through open doors like a dare.

Honestly, she deserved an award for making conversation at all.

Willa set her glass down on the table with careful precision.

Then she stepped closer.

Not quickly.

Not accidentally.

One bare foot across the warm floorboards, then the other. Her pulse beat in her throat, but she did not hide it from him. She let him see the want arrive. Let him see that it was not replacing the softness; it was part of it. The romance had not cooled the fire. It had fed it. Made it steadier. More dangerous. Made every inch of him feel like something she had missed with an almost embarrassing physical ache.

She stopped close enough that the air between them became mostly theoretical.

Her hand lifted to his chest first, fingers spreading over the worn black fabric, feeling the heat of him underneath. Then higher, to the chain at his neck, touching it lightly, toying with it for one brief second before her gaze rose back to his. The music swelled around them, all ache and atmosphere, and she had the deeply inconvenient thought that if love was going to be this cinematic, she was allowed to be a little dramatic about it.

“You know,” she said, “I had a very full itinerary planned for this evening.”

She did not.

Her itinerary, up until ten minutes ago, had been cry about cake, accuse ribbon of crimes, drink champagne, possibly nap face-down for an amount of time that worried medical professionals.

But the way he looked at her made lying feel like flirting.

“Very ambitious. Very mature. We were going to eat the cake. Drink the champagne. Listen to The Cure like two emotionally stable newlyweds with excellent taste and unresolved gothic tendencies.”

Her thumb brushed the edge of his collar.

“Maybe sit on the balcony and stare at the river. Say things like, wow, Prague is beautiful, and isn’t spring romantic, and we should definitely sleep because we are adults with demanding schedules.”

Her eyes dropped briefly to his mouth.

A mistake.

A choice.

Same thing, really.

“Except now you’re standing too close, and I’m remembering that I married you for several reasons, some of which are spiritual and some of which are extremely physical.”

The honesty sent a spark through her own nerves. Not embarrassment. Not really. More like stepping into stage lights: heat, exposure, adrenaline, delight. She liked telling him. Liked not making him guess at this part. Liked the way desire could be another language they were fluent in, one built out of glances and breath and the slight tightening of fingers in fabric.

Her other hand rose, slower now, to the side of his head. She let her fingertips trace the short softness there without comment, only touch, only the quiet satisfaction of relearning him in person. Different texture, same man. Same pull under her ribs. Same impossible sense that he was both familiar and new, a song she knew by heart with a verse she had never heard before.

Her voice dropped.

“So here’s what’s going to happen.”

The line should have sounded bossier.

It came out intimate.

A little rough.

Entirely hers.

“You get two choices, because I’m generous and also legally adorable.”

Her smile flashed, wicked at the edge and warm underneath.

“Option one: we stay out here. We eat the cake like emotionally unstable royalty. We drink the champagne. We let Robert and his eyeliner feelings soundtrack our very glamorous, very delayed honeymoon. We behave like people who can be trusted alone in an expensive room.”

She paused, letting her fingers slide from his hair to the back of his neck.

“Option two…”

Her gaze held his.

The city lights caught along the sharp line of his cheek, the silver at his throat, the ring on his hand. He was so close she could feel the warmth of his breath, could smell champagne and cake and the clean, smoky trace of him underneath. Her stomach dipped, sweet and hot.

She leaned in, her mouth near his ear now, not hiding the smile in her voice.

“You carry me through those doors like we didn’t technically forget to do the honeymoon part until now, and I let you make an extremely convincing case for why the bedroom deserves our immediate attention.”

She pulled back just enough to see his face.

Her heart was beating too fast.

Good.

Let it.

She was tired of pretending not to be alive around him.

“And before you start looking noble about the champagne or the cake or the view,” she added, fingertips pressing lightly at the nape of his neck, “I am very clear on what I’m asking for.”

Her smile softened then, the heat still there but threaded through with something gentler. The thing beneath all of it. The missing him. The loving him. The comfort of being read and wanted and understood by someone who knew when the joke was a door and when it was an invitation.

“I want the honeymoon,” she said quietly. “All of it. The stupid cake. The sad songs. The champagne. You.”

Her eyes flicked once toward the bedroom, then back to him.

“Especially you.”

The words settled between them, simple and bold and dangerously honest.

Then Willa rose onto her toes, brushed her mouth over his jaw instead of kissing him properly, because apparently she still had some instinct for cruelty, and murmured against his skin.

“So choose wisely, husband.”