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It doesn’t make any sense, this love of yours, this thing that fills you and nurtures you and makes you somehow more real, that grounds you and allows you to feel the full shape and weight of yourself for the first time in your life. You can hardly blame your friends for being slow to get onboard, for not understanding. You yourself would not have understood it before it happened to you.
You know, too, what his friends think of you. They don’t believe you’ve changed, or, even if they do, they don’t think it’s enough. It might not ever be enough, not for them. But it is for him, and that’s the most important thing. The only thing.
You think, sometimes, of inevitability. How it was always you and him, from that first moment on. Fate put you together in Madam Malkin’s, all those years ago, and made you enemies. Then, more than a decade later, fate put you together in a quiet, mostly empty pub, and made you friends.
Even as enemies, though, you both had tunnel vision. It was always him, for you. When you look back at your life, you think about how much of it orbited around the fact of him, around who you were compared to him, around what he thought. He’s consumed you always, in waking thoughts, in dreams. His green eyes were burned into your consciousness long before you ever knew you loved him, or even that you could. Before you even knew that you liked him.
That’s not true, though, not really. You always knew that you liked him, admired him. You always wanted him to like you, too. It was only the sting of rejection that kept you from admitting it for so long.
But it doesn’t do to dwell on the past. Not when the present is so beautiful. Not when he has come full-force into your life, like a tsunami, leveling everything, washing it all away, leaving you stripped bare and clean.
How can the two of you just forgive and forget, everyone asks.
But how can you not? How can you look right into the full humanity of another person, into their soul, inevitably light and dark in turns, and not forgive them? Not love them? We are, all of us, imperfect, the two of you no more or less than everyone else. We all have regrets. We all learn from our mistakes.
You would have to be very small indeed to let the past stop you from building this incredible thing, from stitching yourselves together into something that feels like it’s always been there, has always existed. You fit together perfectly, his hopefulness counterbalancing your cynicism; your logic leveling out his dreaminess; your ability to laugh pulling him through his darkest moods; his unwavering loyalty helping you move beyond your fear. He is strong when you are not, and you are strong when his strength runs dry, and together, there seems to be no limit to what you can do.
You love him at all times: when he is laughing and kissing you, and also when he is bitter and angry. You love him more now than you did that initial heady night, when you explored the expanse of his skin for the first time, when you mapped out the lines of him with your fingertips. Every day, even on the days that you bicker and stomp, you find more things to love about him. It is a bottomless well, and you are always pulling up fresh, cold water.
He stirs beside you and his calloused hand reaches out, finding a home against the skin of your stomach. His bright eyes blink open, and the corners are crusted with sleep. His hair makes no sense, defies gravity, just like this love that you share with him. He is best like this, you think -- raw and imperfect.
“Good morning,” he says, his voice a little rough. He shifts, resting his head on your chest.
“Good morning,” you say, holding him. You kiss his forehead and get a loose piece of his hair in your mouth. You’d usually shriek about it, tell him to get a haircut, but you can’t quite get yourself to say anything about it just now. Your heart is too full of other things, and there is no room for teasing, not this morning.
You pull the hair out of your mouth and toss it aside. “I love you,” you say.
“You trying to talk me into a morning shag?” he asks, and you feel him grin against your skin.
“No. Although I’m not opposed. But really, I just love you.”
He sighs, his breath tickling a little, and scoots closer. “I love you too.”