That sensation of being stripped naked for someone else’s commentary came rushing back. “You’ve been telling some stranger about what we do and don’t do in our bed—”

“Kip, dammit! You think it was easy for me? Don’t you trust me at all? And she’s not a stranger now.”

It wasn’t just embarrassment, it was bigger than that. “Do you realize what could happen if my grandfather or your sister finds out? Orholam’s balls, Tisis, your cousin could take a quarter of our army away—”

“I wasn’t thinking about them! I was thinking about us!”

He didn’t say, ‘And you put everything at risk to do so!’

He didn’t say, ‘That’s the problem, you didn’t think at all!’

Instead he took a breath.

And in his momentary hesitation, she spoke again. “It was supposed be a surprise. A good thing, Kip. I can’t—I can’t live like this. I’m sorry you’re angry, but I’m not sorry I did it.”

“Great. So you’ve risked the entire war so that you can have girl talk with someone who—for all we know—could be an enemy agent. Do you feel better after talking it out?” Kip demanded.

He was being an asshole. He knew it; he couldn’t stop it.

“Gods! I don’t understand you at all sometimes. I don’t know how you can be that magnificent giant I see bending the world to his will one day and then the next day be this, this dwarf.”

“Oh, come, look at it another way,” Kip said. “If I were smaller—much, much smaller—we wouldn’t be having this problem at all.”

“Orholam dammit, Kip!” she said. “I don’t know why you’re embarrassed. You feel exposed, ashamed? It’s not even your fault! She told me all the things men often do and say that make it even worse, and you’ve done none of those. You’ve been perfect. This is all on me.”

And she was silent, and she was hurting, and Kip’s heart opened to her because he knew what being silent and hurting and trying to suck it up and not complain felt like when it seemed everything was your fault.

“Don’t be like that. Don’t do that,” Kip said.

“What?”

“There’s no your problem or my problem here. There’s only our problems. There’s only things we each have to do for our marriage to thrive.”

“Yeah?” she asked.

“Yes,” he said.

“I’ve been trying. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you, but… I thought you’d forbid it, and we’d just have to endure good for the rest of our marriage. I don’t want good with you, Kip. I want amazing. I won’t settle for less than that.”

“I just don’t…” He stopped. Tried again. “I appreciate that. And you’re right. I would have been an asshole, and I would have tried to stop you, and… and I would have been wrong.” Because the entire fucking war is totally worth risking for my personal happiness, right?

Shit.

No, it was because it’s never good to give up. He had, and she hadn’t, and he was wrong to ask her to be more like him in this.

“So what now?” he asked.

“So… I’ve been, um, practicing? Training?”

“Practicing? Practicing—wait, with who?”

“Orholam’s beard, Kip, no, come on! I haven’t been seeking out men with small penises.”

“Well, I… okay, maybe that was kind of stupid. What did you mean, then?”

She looked awkward. “I don’t really know how much you want to know. I mean, some wine beforehand and olive oil and, uh, graduated cylinders.”

“Graduated cylinders?” Then he thought of cones he’d seen in her luggage. And then he thought about them again. “Ooooh.”

“And with your constant late nights, I haven’t had much privacy to work on it.”

“Oh. Uh, sorry? That does sound… awkward.”

“You walked in on me once, don’t you remember?”

“Was that when you had the coughing fit?”

“And you came over to comfort me. I thought the smell would… Anyway…” She was blushing hard.

“I thought you Foresters were supposed to be unembarrassable with, ahem, matters of the root and cave.”

She ducked her head. “Clearly I didn’t spend enough of my youth here.”

“Oh yeah, seeing as my dad sort of took you hostage and all.” He grinned. “I am really, really blind, huh?” Kip said.

“Only wh—” She stopped herself.

‘Only where I’m concerned,’ she didn’t say.

Shit.

She was right. And she’d stopped herself from saying it because she was kind.

Somehow the ice was melting, and more than that.

“You do realize that I love you, right?” Kip said.

It was, now that he thought about it, actually the first time he’d ever said it. Somehow he’d thought his actions should have made it obvious.

She burst into tears.

Kip was no expert, but he didn’t think these were the good kind.

“You big idiot,” she said through her tears. “That’s not how you tell a girl you love her!”

“I thought it went without saying!”

“Those words never go without saying!”

“Well!” he shouted. Then he got quiet. “Now I know.”

She hesitated, uncertain where he was going next.

“First time I ever said it to anyone,” he said.

The future was a chasm, and her love was a plank, and he didn’t know where it ended. And he’d just run three steps blindly into the darkness.

“You know I love you, too, right?” she said.

“Well, now I know,” he said with a half grin.

“I’ve said it before,” she said. “Pretty much.”

You won’t accept a tacit ‘I love you,’ but you want me to? But he didn’t say it. It wasn’t exactly analogous anyway. “I didn’t believe it,” he said.

“Oh, Kip, you make me want to take this big knot of all these feelings I can’t even name and have gneas sáraigh.”

“That was… not clear,” Kip said. He could memorize foreign terms, but he didn’t think this was one he was going to want to ask anyone about.