Tavin stared at her in disbelief. Then his shoulders began to shake. He threw his head back and let his laughter spill into the night. Fie grinned up at him from her bench, feeling tension slip from her spine like a straggling thread pulled free.

They’d both been afraid. They’d both been wrong. She supposed that meant they both were fools, at least this once.

Tavin closed the distance, knelt before her, and pulled her to him, still shaking with laughter and relief.

“I missed you,” he whispered into her hair. “Gods, Fie, I’ve known you a moon and a half, and I swear I didn’t know I could miss anyone that much.”

The hollowness in his voice had filled in.

Fie tried to answer through the lump in her throat. A sniffle gave her away before the tears did; Tavin only held her tighter as she buried her face in his shoulder. The weight of the last two weeks crashed in—every league she’d walked knowing it carried her farther from him, every hour she’d spent wondering if he yet lived while she kept watch in the dark, every time she’d waited for his laugh and nonsense only to remember where they’d gone.

She didn’t wait to stop crying before she kissed him. Salt stung her tongue, then faded as he kissed her back, careful at first, then spiraling into dizzy, feverish glee that somehow, someway they had managed to find each other once more. She’d forgotten how much she liked the way his chin brushed hers, the feel of his back shifting beneath her palms, the sharp, quick breath when she pressed her mouth along his jawline. She’d forgotten how he could light her up like her veins ran with flashburn, even with something as simple as fingertips tracing her hips.

Pulling back took more effort than she’d reckoned for; every time she caught her breath, he stole it from her again, and the worst part was that she didn’t want him to stop. Eventually she found a moment to gasp, “My room.”

She felt Tavin’s too-pretty grin. “How do you like having a room to yourself?”

“I’m about to like it a lot more,” she answered. “Once you help me figure out where it is.”

He laughed again and scooped her up in his arms as he stood. “Yes, chief.”

Fie woke in the soft half shadows before dawn, still curled against Tavin, still marveling that he was there.

And, by the creeping morning light, she allowed herself to untie the most painful knot in her head and heart, made all the worse by the boy at her back.