Torden nodded silently, winding his arms around my waist again. “I wondered what it would be like to live in a room that smelled like you instead of stinking soldiers. To wake up beside you in the morning.” One warm hand rubbed my lower back. Even through my shirt, his fingers burned my skin.

Down by the Bilröst, Torden had told me he saw that I was trying to be brave, to be open, to stretch, even when it frightened me. I realized now that he was doing the same thing.

When Torden looked at this room, he didn’t see sparse furnishings or gross boys; he saw his family. Marriage to me—a relationship apart from them—would be as strange for him as fitting in among the Asgard boys had been for me. In his own way, he’d been trying, too, the same as I had.

I wanted to kiss him well and thoroughly.

He cleared his throat. “You asked me once if I’d ever seen us side by side. The truth is, sometimes it is all I can think about.”

Pictures flooded my mind.

Torden coming into Valaskjálf for dinner, worn out but smiling, engulfing me in a hug. He’d want to hear about my day, and I’d listen to him talk about his.

Torden kissing me first thing in the morning before he left for his run, wide awake when I was still hazy with sleep.

Horseback riding and reading, training and lying in the sun doing nothing.

Special days and regular days. Anniversaries and children. A thousand other moments that would be perfect because we spent them together.

“That’s distracting.” His voice was uneven as he stilled my fingers against the carved planes of his chest. I’d been absently tracing the ink over his heart.

“Oh. Sorry.” But his ragged grin assured me he hadn’t minded much. I tapped my knuckles against the tattoo, shaped like a letter F with its arms broken. “Torden, what does this mean?”

“Ash,” he said. “It is Asgard’s rune. All our blood wear this over their hearts. And this”—he raised his left wrist, inked on the inside with a letter almost like an R—“is Reid. It means ride, the work and the journey of our lives.”

The tattoos were everything he held dear, everything that made him a mystery to me, everything I admired about him.

But they were also everything that tied him to this place. Everything that meant where I had to go, he could not follow; that he could never be mine.

My chest tightened.

I slid my palms to his shoulders, past two sets of tan lines to his wrists, and swiped my thumb across the soft skin there. “You make me want one, except I bet they hurt.” My voice was broken.

Torden took a pot of ink from his desk, face unreadable. “Can I?”