Turn 21 of 21

Tease him about being late

MC props herself up on one elbow, looking down at him. The mat is warm beneath her, the cooling air from the vents raising goosebumps on her bare shoulders, and Valko is sprawled on his side with his eyes half-closed, the last traces of transformation fading from his face like a tide pulling back from shore. His jaw has narrowed. The brow ridge has softened. He looks almost like the trainer who stood at the Smith machine and counted her tardiness to the second — except his hair is wrecked and there are scratch marks down his shoulders that won't fade by morning, and the crooked smile on his face is the first unguarded expression she has ever seen him wear.

"You know," she says, and her voice is still rough, still a little unsteady, but she pushes through it with the same stubbornness that got her through thirty burpees and into this mess, "I think I was actually on time tonight."

Valko's eyes open. The gold of his irises catches the overhead light, the vertical pupils contracting to thin black lines, and he stares at her with a expression that is caught between disbelief and something that might, in a different light, be called delight. His mouth opens. Closes. The canines have retracted enough that his jaw works normally again, and the look he gives her is so human — so utterly, helplessly human — that she almost loses it.

"You were thirty minutes late," he says. His voice has climbed back toward its normal register, still rough, still carrying that gravel texture she first heard when he warned her about the contract, but the words have lost their weight. He says them the way someone repeats a joke they already know the punchline to.

"I was thirty minutes late for the burpees," MC says, settling back down against the mat, facing him, her knee brushing his. "I was exactly on time for everything else."

Valko laughs. The sound is startled out of him — a single rough bark that shakes his chest and makes his shoulders jump against the mat — and then it keeps going, lower and warmer, until he is shaking with it, his forehead pressed against the mat, one hand still holding hers. When he looks up again his eyes are bright and his expression is open in a way that restructures his entire face, and MC realizes this is the first time she has ever seen him laugh. Six months of sessions, six months of rigid schedules and precise corrections and that careful professional distance, and she has never once seen him look like this. Like a person. Like someone who is allowed to be happy.

"I'm going to have to rewrite the disciplinary clause," he says. His thumb traces a slow circle against her knuckle, and his voice has gone quiet again, but the roughness in it is different now — not pain, not restraint, just the texture of a voice that has been used past its limits tonight and is settling into something new.

"Fifty burpees doesn't really cover the situation."

"What does cover it?"

He pulls her hand to his mouth and presses his lips against her knuckles, and the gesture is so gentle and so absurdly tender for a man who was growling into her throat twenty minutes ago that something in her chest folds in on itself. His mouth is warm. His lips are still rougher than they should be, still carrying the faint texture of a transformation that hasn't fully let go. But his eyes are gold, and his smile is crooked, and the cooling air of the gym smells like ozone and copper and the two of them, tangled together on a mat in a room that has become, somehow, theirs.