He pulls me up to kiss him then, slow and deep, and there's something in it I haven't felt before, a kind of gratitude so profound it's almost grief, and I understand that no one has ever wanted to see the wolf, that his whole life the wolf has been the thing to hide or fear or drug into silence, and I'm the first person who ever looked at that part of him and called it beautiful instead of monstrous.
"I love you," he says against my mouth, and it's not the first time, but it lands like the first time, raw and total. "I don't think I've said it plainly enough. With everything happening, the plans and the fear, I don't think I've just stopped and said it. I love you. All of you, the way you love all of me. The fish girl and the wolf, we're the same kind of thing, aren't we. The parts of us
