Vish woke up to the unfamiliar weight of an arm around her waist.
She registered it before she registered anything else — the heaviness of it, the warmth, the fact that it was there at all. She opened her eyes slowly.
They were facing each other.
She went very still.
He was asleep. His face in sleep was different from his face awake — the intensity dialed down, existing rather than actively evaluating everything in its vicinity. The sharp lines of his jaw were relaxed.
His brows, which had carried the weight of forty years of imprisonment when she had first seen them, were smooth. He looked, in this light, in this stillness, like someone who had been extraordinary for a very long time and had finally been given a moment that did not require it.
His hair was spread across the pillow between them.
It moved very slightly with his breathing. It looked like it would feel like silk mixed with static, like running your fingers through almost-ordinary strands that weren't.
