The knock on his door came somewhere past midnight.
Two quiet raps, deliberate. Not urgent. Lys was mostly asleep, but still wasn't fully. So he sat up almost instantly, sitting still for a second while his brain caught up. "Who is it?" He asked.
"It's me." Selene's voice came low, through the door.
He got up and opened it.
She was standing in the hall in her night clothes, arms crossed, not because she was cold but because it was the posture she defaulted to when she was annoyed at something.
"The window won't latch," she said. "The pin keeps slipping. The wind is loud and cold. I've tried to fix it three times."
He looked at her face. She was not scared exactly. Just annoyed, and a little tired, maybe even slightly embarrassed to be knocking on his door at this hour over a window.
"Alright," he said, while coming out of this room.
He followed her down the hall to her room. The window was a simple casement type, old hardware, the kind that developed its own personality over time. He looked at the latch mechanism. The pin had slipped out of its fitting, not broken, just displaced. He worked it back into position, tested the latch twice, and the window held.
It took him only three minutes. Maybe less. He turned around.
Selene was sitting on the edge of the bed. The room had one candle burning on the small table, enough light to see by, not enough to make anything feel sharp. She had her hands in her lap and was looking at the floor with the expression of someone who has been awake for a while and is now running out of the energy required to pretend otherwise.
He knows that he should go back to his room. But he just stayed where he was.
The room was warmer than the hall. Two people in a small space, while the candle was doing its small work. He thought about the window, about how easy it had been to fix, yet she said how long she'd said she'd been trying.
That gave him the idea that she might not have knocked on his door because she couldn't figure it out. She must've knocked because the room was new and the house was quiet, and the window wouldn't stop. So in other words, she was scared.
He didn't say any of that out loud.
Before he could start a conversation with her, she spoke first, with a question all of a sudden. "Where are you actually from?" she said, not looking up. "You deflect it every time someone asks. But you're not from anywhere near here. Most of the villagers here aren't. Most of them settled here after the village wall was built."
"Hmm, then you must've already known that we're settlers, right?"
"Yeah." She finally looked up. "You don't have to tell me tonight. But I want you to know that I don't mind any of that. Not now."
"Hmm, that's not an interesting thing to speak about. So maybe another time?" he said, trying to deflect the question, as he himself didn't know about it much from Lys's memories.
She held his look for a moment, checking. Then she accepted it, set it down, and moved past it, which was its own kind of trust. "Alright. Whenever you feel ready."
He looked at the chair by the window. Then at her.
"Can I stay?" he said suddenly. With a soft voice. But when she looked at him with the corner of her eye, he realized he might have talked about it too casually. "Ohh, not like that. I didn't mean it that way. Just for sleeping, nothing else. The hall is too cold to walk back to my room."
The hall was not cold. But this was the only excuse he could come up with. But he instantly regretted it after saying it, thinking, 'how dumb can I be, fuck.'
She knew he meant just sleeping. But seeing him get flustered made her feel a little at ease. She looked at him, and something in her expression shifted, not soft, just less defended. She moved to the far side of the bed and lay down, pulling the blanket over herself, facing the wall.
Seeing her lie down on the bed, he took it as her permission. So he sat on top of the sheets on the near side, back against the headboard. Not much close to her, as the mattress had enough room for both.
They looked at the ceiling. Both of them were wide awake, neither pretending otherwise.
"Father was strange today," she said.
"Yeah, he was."
"When he put my hand in yours." She didn't look at him. "I felt you go still. Why?"
"Well, not that I regret it or something. But I just wasn't prepared for it," he said. "How real it felt. That's all."
"Yeah, I get it. I wasn't either." She took a second and said again. "Though maybe for different reasons, I think."
He didn't push about what she meant by that. She also didn't explain it herself.
The candle burned lower. The village outside was completely quiet.
At some point, he got up, crossed to the window, and opened the latch of the window, not because the room was hot but because the moonlight came through when it was open and the room felt less sealed and fresher. Golden-grey of moonlight painted across the floor and the edge of the bed.
He sat back down on the bed.
"Thank you," Selene said. "For today. All of it. For making us feel like home. Not outsiders."
"Of course. You are supposed to be here, after all."
"Hmm, I know that now." She turned her head to look at him. In the moonlight, her face was quieter than he'd ever seen it. With an expression he had never seen on her face. "That's why I'm thanking you now."
The space between them on the mattress was a foot, maybe less. Neither of them had moved across it. But she was looking at him the way she hadn't looked at him before, with nothing between the look and what was behind it, and then she moved, not reaching, just closing the remaining distance between them and found his lips with hers.
It was quiet. Unhurried. The kind of kiss that doesn't ask for anything more than itself.
When she pulled back, her eyes were open, and she looked at him for one second. Then she turned back to her side, facing the wall, and pulled the blanket up. Like she was hiding herself from him.
He stayed stunned for a minute. Still feeling her lips on his lips, like she wanted it to be there when she kissed him.
After a while, when he felt she might have gone to sleep, seeing how her breathing had gotten even, he also lay back down.
He stared at the ceiling, with his focus on the moonlight that sat across the floor and didn't seem to move at all.
But without him knowing, she was still awake, trying to calm her heart, which might just jump out of her any second.