Page 117 of Resilience

“I love you, Frosie.” Gathering her up close, he rolled them, putting her on her back and hovering above her. “And I’m in awe of you. Always have been. Your strength and your will. Your fight and your grace. You’re tough, but you’re gentle, too. You never give up, but no matter how frustrated or tired you get, you don’t let it make you hard. It’s so beautiful to watch, and to feel.” He managed to say all that with only one hand.

She brushed her fingers over a beard that had become full again, the way she liked best. She combed back the wave of hair that flopped messily over his forehead again, the way she liked best. She used two hands to tell him, “You are the kindest person I’ve ever known. In some people, kindness looks like weakness, but not in you. In you, it’s strength, because you’re not afraid to do what has to be done. And you take people as they are. I’m so glad we finally saw that we were this.”

“Me too. This is forever. People would probably tell us we can’t know that, but I know it.”

“I know it, too. You and me.”

“You and me.” He brought his head to hers and kissed her.

For an infinite time, they simply made out, exploring each other’s mouths as their hands roamed over the rises and dips of their bodies.

Athena’s hands were more than appendages, more than tools. They were extensions of her very identity. Her hands were her voice, the way she was known to the world—and even to herself. She was so constantly aware of them, she wondered if they weren’t literally more sensitive, more sensing, than those at the ends of hearing peoples’ arms.

Right now she would swear that she could feel more than Sam’s mere skin as her hands traversed the planes of his back, his shoulders, his arms, as they slipped through his thick hair, brushed his beard. She would swear that she felt him, his essence, his soul. And through her hands, she knew him as deeply as she knew herself.

Her fingers slipped over the raised seam of the scar on his neck, the sign of how close she’d come to losing him before she’d had all of him. Sam lifted out of their kiss then and gazed down at her. His lips gleamed wetly; his eyes held steady and took in all of her.

Then he ducked away, moving lower. He trailed light kisses over one collarbone and then the other. He made a path down the center of her breastbone and then detoured to lavish attention on one nipple, until Athena writhed and stretched beneath him in gathering ecstasy, then he moved to the other to give it its due.

Then, when so much want and need flowed through her she could hardly keep still, he ducked lower and paid tribute to every scar on her abdomen.

Athena didn’t think much about those scars. They were old and faded, and they’d been there so long they usually had all the psychic baggage of a freckle. Lately, while she’d grappled with feeling weak after Hunter, and with her nerves about the abortion, she’d thought more about all the things her body had gone through just to make it to adulthood, all the things that had had to be repaired, or couldn’t be repaired and had to be accommodated.

It had made her feel weak in a way she hadn’t in a long time. But lying here now, with the past truly ended and the future truly beginning, she remembered something her parents had always taught her: her scars were signs of strength, not of weakness. Her small stature, her deafness, the surgeries to remove or repair the pieces of her that had not had a chance to grow properly, all the circumstances of her premature birth, they didn’t make her weak.

They made her strong. She had survived all that. Her mother had survived a brutal attack and, against massive odds, had persevered to give her life. Nothing about a life born of such fierce determination to overcome could be weak. Small as she was, Athena was a powerhouse.

Armstrong women were Amazons—even when they were less than five feet tall.

After Hunter, she’d forgotten that. He’d made her feel weak, made her feel powerless. He’d stolen her strength.

He’d tried to, at least.

She understood why Sam loved on her scars like he did, and she loved him for it all the more.

He knew her as deeply as anyone ever could.

He understood her, and he would never try to take her power away. Instead, he would honor it, love it, as he loved her. When she forgot, he would remind her. And she would do the same for him.

He was her person.

Forever.

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