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“Nes?”
Nothing. Azriel’s met with quiet. He sets his keys in the bowl by the door, the one Nesta had picked out at a market last autumn, claiming she thought it was purely practical. When Eris had immediately called it beautiful, the both of them had pretended they didn’t see the flush and satisfied smile blooming on Nesta’s face.
He shrugs out of his coat, sets it over the hook, and moves through the hallway, cataloguing the small details. Nesta’s coat is on the hook. Her shoes are by the door. The kitchen is as they’d left it this morning, except there’s a cup of tea on the counter, barely touched and gone cold.
He takes the stairs two at a time.
“Nesta.”
The bedroom door is half open. He pushes it the rest of the way and stills.
Nesta’s on the floor between the bed and the window, curled onto her side, knees drawn up to her chest. She has one arm wrapped around her middle and the other pressed flat to the floor, face turned towards it too. She’s in her oldest, rattiest pair of leggings, and his jumper, the grey one she’d claimed without asking three months ago and which he has never once attempted to reclaim. Her hair is loose and spread in waves across the floor, around her face. She lies completely still except for her breathing, which is careful and controlled, deliberate in the way that he knows is her method of managing the waves of agony.
He hears the small sound she’s making, barely audible, bitten almost entirely back. A whimper. It cleaves his heart straight through the middle.
“Hey, baby.” He crosses the room and crouches beside her, his hand gently touching her shoulder. “Nes.”
She flinches at the contact, startling because she hasn’t been entirely in the room, floating somewhere in the haze of pain. Her eyes open and find his face, and she breathes out, slow and shaky. The flinch turns into a lean.
“Hi,” she says. Her voice is paper-thin.
“I’ve got you, love.” He slowly, carefully strokes her hair back from her face, mindful of her sensitive skin, and she closes her eyes again. “How long have you been down here?”
She has to think about it. That alone tells him everything. “I’m not sure. A while.”
He catalogues the pallor of her skin, the careful shallowness of her breathing, the arm still locked around her middle, and keeps his hand moving through her hair, steady, unhurried, giving her something to focus on.
“Where’s Eris, Nes?”
A small crease forms between her brows. “He’s not home yet.” A pause. “He’s late.”
Azriel glances out the window. The sky outside has gone the deep blue of early evening, the city lights beginning to blur softly against it. Eris is never this late without a message, and Azriel would have felt his phone go if he’d sent one. He doesn’t linger on it, deciding to think about it later. He has other priorities.
“Okay,” he says simply. “It’s okay.”
“I was going to start dinner.” Her voice has gone flat, laced with a chastising tone, and he can feel how she tenses. Despite being in pain, she’s angry at herself. He recognises it so well by now that it no longer surprises him, but only makes him desperately want to smooth it away. “I had bought everything. I was going to make the—”
“Nes.”
“—the pasta, the one Eris likes, I had the—”
“Nesta.” He says her name more firmly, and she quiets. “None of that matters.”
She presses her lips together. He watches her swallow against whatever she’d been about to say next, and then she nods, looking small. He can practically feel the effort it costs her.
“Can you sit up?” he asks.
“In a minute.”
“Okay, baby. Take your time.”
She breathes through another wave of pain. Azriel watches it move across her face, the clench of it, her knuckles whitening, and waits it out with her, hand moving in slow circles across her back until it passes. When she releases a breath, he helps her up to a sitting position. She leans against the side of the bed and drops her head back, closing her eyes.
“Bad one?”
She hums in confirmation. She looks exhausted. The endometriosis flare ups take it out of her every time, the cumulative weight of a body that turns on her with such viciousness and regularity forming bruises under her eyes and a deep frown between her brows. It pains him that even after all this time, she’s still being her stubborn self about it, which means enduring the episodes alone on the floor for what must have been more than an hour before anyone finds her.
He brushes his thumb across her cheekbone. She leans into it.
“I’m going to run you a bath,” he says softly.
“You don’t have to do that.”
“I want to. It’ll make you feel better, love.”
She opens her eyes and looks at him, and whatever she finds in his face settles her, because she looks away and says, quietly, “The salts are under the sink.”
“I know where they are.” He kisses the top of her head softly before moving to the bathroom. He runs the bath hot, the way she likes it, and tips in the eucalyptus salts, together with a few drops of the lavender oil from the shelf, the one Emerie had pressed into her hands during their last visit, with the instruction to actually use it this time. He sets the softest towel on the rail. He finds the small cup she uses for rinsing her hair and sets it on the edge of the bath.
He goes back for her in under five minutes.
He helps her up and walks with her to the bathroom, his hand on her back, and she undresses slowly with his help. His hands are steady, no fuss, no ceremony. She steps into the bath and sinks down into the water with a sound that cracks his heart just a little more.
“Oh,” she breathes. “That feels good, Az.”
“Yeah.”
He sits on the floor beside the bath, folding his sleeves up to his elbow, and leans against the edge of the tub, close enough that she could reach him if she wanted to. She doesn’t, for now. She lies back with her eyes closed, arms floating slightly, her face gone slack with the first real relief she’s probably had all afternoon, and he lets her have the quiet.
He watches the steam drift.
“It started this morning,” she says eventually, not looking at him, but talking to the ceiling. “I thought I could get ahead of it. I kept thinking it would ease.”
“It’s okay that it didn’t.”
“I had plans.”
“Nesta.” He says it gently. “The plans don’t matter.”
A long pause.
“I hate this,” she says quietly. “I hate that I have to fight my body attacking me almost every single day.”
“I know, love.” He reaches over and rests his hand on the edge of the tub, his palm up. She looks at it for a moment and then puts her wet hand in his. He folds his larger digits around hers and holds on. “I know you do.”
They sit like that for a while. After a few minutes, he reaches for the washcloth.
“You don’t need to—” she starts.
“I know.”
She doesn’t argue further, too tired to even try. She simply scoots forward and rests her cheek on her bent knees.
Azriel works slowly, moving the washcloth in long gentle passes across her shoulders, her arms, the back of her neck where the muscles have knotted from hours of bracing. He can feel the tension under his fingertips. He puts away the washcloth and takes his time there, thumbs pressing in careful circles until he feels something release. She makes a small, involuntary sound and he pauses.
“Too much?” he asks.
“No. Don’t stop.”
He moves down her arms, across her collarbones, her shoulders again, slow and unhurried, no particular destination in mind. He’s just steady, patient and attentive, making sure she feels like she is being cared for completely, that there is no part of this that is a burden. That he is glad to be here, and that he’s grateful that she lets him.
He washes her hair last, working the shampoo through in slow sections, fingers moving across her scalp with gentleness, careful of her tender skin. He knows he’s doing it right when she tips her head back into his hands and closes her eyes. He rinses with the small cup.
When he’s done Nesta stays where she is, not moving to get out despite the water beginning to cool. She is still and quiet in a way that tells him she isn’t ready, that the warmth is still doing its job, and so he simply stays.
Azriel watches her drift. He notices the slow rise and fall of her chest, the color coming back to her cheeks, the furrow between her brows finally smoothing. He hurts for her, but at the same time is filled with an all-consuming type of love he can’t quite suppress. He wants to wrap her up and keep her close, and if he could, he’d personally ward off any pain her body is causing her. He lets the feelings move through him.
Nesta slightly lists sideways. It’s not a faint so much as a lean, her body seeking him out, reaching for what it needs, and he moves without thinking. He sits up on his knees, rolls his already-damp sleeves higher, and leans over to get his arms around her. He drapes one across her back, the other along her side, and she turns her face into his neck. She lets him take some of her weight, her cheek pressed against his collar, and he feels her breath warm against his skin.
The water laps softly around them both. His shirt is getting wet. He doesn’t particularly care.
“I’m getting you all wet,” she says, muffled against his neck. It’s a flicker of her old reflex, the self-conscious apology, but she’s too tired to put much weight behind it.
“I don’t care,” he says.
“Your shirt—”
“Nesta.” He adjusts his hold, drawing her a little closer, her back more fully against his arm. “I don’t care about the shirt.”
She subsides. Her hand, loose in the water, drifts up and finds his shoulder. She curls her fingers into the fabric of his shirt, using him as her anchor, and he feels her breathe. In and out. In and out. The careful control of it is finally giving way to a more languid, easier, rhythm, her body finally finding rest.
He keeps one hand moving on her back, slow circles through the water, and rests his cheek against the top of her wet hair.
The mirror has fogged entirely. The lamp casts everything in soft amber. He relishes in the feel of the specific weight of her against him, the particular way she leans, like she is still, even now, testing whether he’ll hold, and he just hugs her a little tighter in response.
“Does it help?” he asks, quietly. “The heat.”
“Mm.” A pause. “It always helps more than I expect it to.”
“We’ll get you back into the bath first thing tomorrow if it’s still bad.”
She makes a small sound that might be agreement or might be the beginning of sleep. He smooths her hair back.
“Eris will fuss,” she says drowsily against the skin of his neck.
“Eris will draw the next one himself and add the salts in the wrong order.”
A breath that sounds a lot like a laugh leaves her. “He’ll figure it out.”
“He’ll ask me first.”
“He’ll make you do it and claim the credit.” She burrows a bit deeper, and he feels her smile against his pulse point. “Don’t tell him I said that.”
“Wouldn’t dream of it, love.”
The water cools by degrees. She doesn’t notice, or doesn’t mind. She’s warm where she is, against him, and he’s making sure he’s keeping her that way. Eventually, though, he feels the temperature drop enough that he shifts, just slightly, and she makes a small sound of protest.
“Come on,” he says, low and gentle. “Let’s get you out.”
She doesn’t argue. She lets him draw her upright, steadying her with both hands as she stands. He reaches for the large towel and wraps it around her before the cold air can touch her properly, tucking it securely at her side. He takes the smaller towel and presses it to her hair. He’s careful that he doesn’t pull, but just puts gentle pressure against her tresses until most of the water has been pressed out.
He dries her arms, her shoulders, and the back of her neck next. She stands still for all of it, compliant in a way that is so unlike her usual way it tells him more than she would probably want it to about how depleted she is. When he’s satisfied he wraps the large towel more firmly around her, tucks it, and crouches slightly to get one arm behind her knees and one around her back to lift her.
She makes a small sound of surprise. “Az—”
“You’ve been on the floor for gods know how long,” he says. “Let me.”
She hesitates for a beat before her arms go around his neck.
He carries her to the bedroom and sets her down on the bed with the towel still around her. She looks up at him in the lamplight with those mesmerizing blue-grey eyes that are soft and slightly glazed with exhaustion.
He brushes the damp hair back from her face and stays crouched beside the bed for a moment, just looking at her, making sure she doesn’t succumb to another wave of pain. She leans against his palm on her cheek and smiles, and he smiles back softly.
They’re interrupted by the sound of the door, followed by Eris’s voice, low and careful, calling for Nesta and Azriel.
“Up here,” Azriel calls.
The footsteps quicken on the stairs. Eris appears in the bedroom doorway still in his coat, his cheeks bitten red from the cold, his hair slightly dishevelled from the wind, and his eyes go immediately to Azriel, then past him to Nesta on the bed, and his expression fractures slightly.
“How bad?” he asks.
Azriel holds his gaze and simply shakes his head.
Eris frowns as he sets his bag down near the wall, unwinding his scarf and unbuttoning his coat. “I’m sorry I’m late,” he says.
“‘S okay,” Nesta murmurs, sleep trying to get a hold of her. Eris takes his coat off and walks towards where Nesta is sitting. He simply opens his arms, and she leans forward, letting herself fall into them.
Azriel moves away to find the heating pad and plugs it in.
Eris wraps around her completely, burying his face against her hair and closing his eyes. She tucks herself against his chest, relaxing completely, and he hums softly.
His eyes, over her head, find Azriel’s, and his gaze is filled with love and fear and gratitude. Azriel holds it and nods, smiling softly.
I’ve got her.
She’s okay.
You’re here now.
Eris exhales.
“I’m sorry I wasn’t here, baby,” he says into her hair.
“It’s okay.”
“It’s not.” He holds her tighter. “I should have gotten home sooner.”
“You’re here now.” She tilts her face up and he looks down at her. He kisses her forehead, the tip of her nose, her cheek, small and reverent and unhurried presses of his lips. His throat moves when she sighs contentedly.
He presses another long kiss to the top of her head, his eyes closing. He lingers for just a second, before he pulls back and carefully takes her face in his hands, tipping it up and reading it the thorough way he always reads her, and she lets him, which is its own kind of intimacy.
“I’m alright,” she says.
“Don’t lie, Nes.”
“I’m alright now. With both of you here to take care of me.”
He looks at her for another moment. Then he kisses her forehead and passes her carefully to Azriel, who tucks her into his side and settles her there, her head against his shoulder. Eris turns to Azriel, taking his face in both hands and kissing him deeply, and when he pulls back his forehead drops against Azriel’s.
“I’m sorry,” he says.
“You couldn’t have known,” Azriel murmurs against his lips.
“Still. I should have been here.”
“Eris.”
A breath. Then Eris straightens and squares his shoulders and becomes, very efficiently, a man with a task, which is how he handles most problems — by moving, by doing, by making himself useful to the people he loves so that the anxiousness has an outlet.
Azriel turns down the duvet at the same time that Eris makes his way to the kitchen. Azriel hears him rummaging around. He checks the heating pad on the nightstand, kissing Nesta on her cheek, and she sighs at the contact.
Eris walks back into the bedroom with her prescription tablets and a glass of water, which he holds for her while she takes them. He has the hot water bottle already filled, wrapped in the knitted cover Azriel made for her that blue Monday he thought knitting was a good idea. Eris takes the heating pad, moving it to her back, and tucks the hot water bottle against her abdomen so she has warmth on both.
He produces a bar of chocolate from his back pocket, the specific kind with hazelnuts and raisins, and sets it on the nightstand within reach.
She looks at it before she looks at him.
“Eris,” she says softly.
“It’s for later,” he says, already opening his side of the wardrobe.
He finds the softest thing he owns, a t-shirt so old it has no shape left, heathered grey, worn to something closer to silk than cotton, the one she always reaches for when she is at her most tired, and brings it to her. He helps her out of the towel and into the shirt with steady hands, easing it over her head, careful of her hair.
Azriel is already reaching for the comb from the nightstand.
Eris sits behind her on the bed and holds her gently while Azriel works through her damp hair in sections, slow and careful, no snagging, no pulling. Nesta sits between them with her eyes half closed, the heating pad and the hot water bottle on either side and the tablet beginning its slow work, giving in to the exhaustion. The room is warm and smells of lavender still, and Nesta looks, Eris thinks, like the most devastatingly beautiful woman he’s ever laid eyes on.
Azriel braids her hair in a loose plait and lets it fall over one shoulder. She reaches up and touches it briefly, the gesture so small and unselfconscious that both of him and Azriel smile at it. Without needing to say a word, they get her under the covers and settled between them.
Azriel lies down on her left, her head finding the familiar place against his neck. Eris settles on her right, lying close, his hand resting at her waist. She reaches down and covers his hand with hers. He turns it over and laces their fingers together.
They are quiet.
Eris reaches across and breaks a square of chocolate, offering it without ceremony. She takes it and he can just make out her smile in the growing dark.
“Enjoy, Nes,” he croons. She simply hums in response, and Eris kisses her temple, smiling against her skin.
Azriel’s fingers are threaded through her hair, lightly scratching her scalp, and Eris traces small absent patterns on the back of her hand. She lies between them and breathes, and they tend to her in the wordless way they have learned — the occasional brush of a hand, a kiss pressed to her temple, a murmured nothing, a blanket adjusted. Small and constant and exactly what she needs in times like these.
After a while Eris presses a kiss to her cheekbone.
She turns her face into it.
He kisses her properly, soft and brief, his thumb brushing her jaw. She makes a small sound against his mouth. He pulls back and looks at her in the soft lamplight, noticing that she’s already more than halfway to sleep, her eyelids heavy, the pain managed.
Azriel kisses her temple. She turns her face back toward him and he kisses her cheek, the corner of her mouth, and she exhales and tucks back against his neck.
“Sleep,” he says softly.
“I’m not—”
“You are, love,” Eris says.
She is. Her breathing changes within minutes, deepening, a release that moves through her all at once, every tense muscle letting go, and her hand goes slack in Eris’s and her face goes fully soft against Azriel’s neck. They both remain still until they’re certain she’s succumbed to sleep.
Eris looks at Azriel over her shoulder, his amber eyes soft.
Thank you, he mouths.
Azriel shakes his head. He looks down at Nesta and smooths a strand of hair from her face with one careful finger. She fully settles, letting out a deep sigh.
For one moment more, neither Azriel or Eris says anything. They don’t need to. They have been doing this long enough that whole conversations happen in the space between words, in the quality of a glance, in the particular way Eris is looking at him now.
“How was she when you found her?” Eris eventually asks quietly.
“She was lying on the floor, curled up in pain.”
Eris closes his eyes briefly. “How long?”
“She wasn’t sure. A while.”
A muscle in his jaw ticks. “I had my phone on silent. I was in a meeting that ran over and I had my phone on silent and I didn’t—”
“Eris.” Azriel’s voice is low and even. “We managed.”
“I should have been here earlier.”
“Yes,” Azriel says, simply, because he knows Eris doesn’t want to be consoled out of it, not really. “And next time you won’t have your phone on silent and you’ll leave the meeting.”
A pause.
“Next time I’ll leave the meeting,” Eris says.
He looks down at her, at the slack and sleeping line of her face, the loose braid over her shoulder, his shirt on her. He looks at the chocolate wrapper on the nightstand, and his stomach growls out of his control.
“She was going to make the pasta,” Azriel says, smirking. “Your favorite. She had everything prepared and ready.”
Eris is quiet for a long moment.
“Of course she was,” he says.
Neither of them says anything after that. There isn’t anything to say. There’s just the plain and enormous fact of her, and the plain and enormous fact of them, and how right it feels to be together, to share these moments, however painful they may be.
Azriel turns his head and presses one last kiss to Nesta’s hair.
Eris reaches across her and his hand finds Azriel’s in the dark. Azriel turns his palm up and Eris laces their fingers together the way she had done with his, and they lie like that, on either side of her, holding each other over her, the three of them a closed and quiet circle. They fall asleep like that, the only sound in the room that of their breathing.
Nesta wakes in increments.
The first thing she is aware of is warmth. Not the sharp, localised warmth of the heating pad, though that is still there, faint and faithful at her side. This is larger, ambient, the warmth of being surrounded on all sides by people who have arranged themselves around her with great care.
She doesn’t open her eyes yet.
She stays where she is and simply feels. Azriel’s chest is rising and falling in the slow rhythm of deep sleep beneath her cheek, his arm slung across her waist. She marvels at the particular quality of his stillness, the solid quiet of him. A deep river that’s still on the surface, but has a strong current running underneath. Behind her, she feels Eris. His warmth is different, less contained. He radiates heat generously, and in sleep, he curved toward her completely, his face pressed into the back of her neck and his breath slow and even against her skin.
She lies between them and breathes.
The pain is still there, a ghost of itself, a dull and distant ache, nothing like yesterday. She does a quiet inventory of her body the way she has learned to do on mornings like this, assessing with the dispassion of long practice. It’s manageable. Better in a way that, after a bad day like yesterday, almost feels like grace.
Nesta turns her attention to Azriel first.
His arm across her is a comfortable weight, his hand open and relaxed in sleep, and she can see the line of his jaw above her, the long dark lashes against his cheek, his face entirely unguarded in the way it only is when he’s sleeping. That careful, watchful quality is gone, replaced by a younger, softer version of him. She thinks about his hands in her hair last night, the patient thoroughness of his care, the way he had simply appeared and folded himself around her, quietly and completely and without making her feel like a burden.
She loves him so deeply and vastly it aches. She loves him in a steady way that language has no proper words for. She reaches up slowly, careful not to wake him, and touches his jaw with her fingertips. The lightest possible contact. He doesn’t stir, and she traces the line of it, thinking about how he’s one of the finest and most beautiful people she’s ever known, and he has no idea. She vows to spend every day of her life making sure he does.
She turns her attention to Eris. She can’t see his face from here but she doesn’t need to. She knows it, has it memorised in every configuration, the public one and the private one that is only ever theirs. His hand on her hip has shifted in sleep, resting gently against her stomach now. She covers it with her own hand, feeling him breathe.
She thinks about the way he’d fussed over her, with her medication and the warm water bottle and the specific chocolate. The soft old t-shirt that he’d put on her without a word.
She thinks about his attentiveness. The way he remembers every single detail of her. She loves him fiercely, a burning equal to the way he does her. The warmth of him, the wit and the brightness of him, the way he makes every room he enters feel more inhabited, and the private knowledge — hers, and Azriel’s, and no one else’s — of what he is underneath all of that. What he is when he isn’t performing.
She presses his hand more firmly against her stomach, just to feel him there.
She lies between them and watches the morning come through the curtains in long soft bars. She doesn’t reach for her phone or her book or any of the usual props of being awake. She simply stays, and marvels, in the quiet, private morning, at the warmth of her two greatest loves, the particularity of it, the sheer improbability of being this cherished by two people this extraordinary.
She never thought she would have this, and is so grateful to be proven wrong every single day. She exists inside the warmth of them, and lets herself feel the particular luxury of this, of being held so completely that there is no cold edge anywhere, no part of her that isn’t accounted for, known, tended. She had spent so many years cold in ways that had nothing to do with temperature. She remembers that coldness clearly enough that she never takes this for granted. Never.
Eris wakes first.
She feels the slight change in his breathing, the almost imperceptible tension of returning consciousness. His hand under hers moves, just a slight twitch, his fingers curling, and he lifts his head from her neck. She feels him register her, the wakeful quality of her stillness, and he takes stock.
“You’re awake,” he says in a low rasp, rough with sleep.
“So are you, it seems.”
He presses his lips to the back of her neck. Warm, slow, unhurried. Then again, slightly to the left. Then her shoulder, through the fabric of his t-shirt. Small morning kisses, gentle and deliberate.
“How do you feel?” he murmurs against her skin.
“Better.”
A pause. He is assessing her, she can feel it, trying to read her the way he always does. “Better like better, or better like I-don’t-want-you-to-worry?”
“Better like better.” She turns her head enough to see him, his amber eyes still soft with sleep, his hair disordered. There’s a crease from the pillow along his cheek. He looks, she thinks, unbearably handsome like this, undone by sleep, the finish worn off. She reaches up and touches the crease with one finger. He turns his face into her palm and closes his eyes. “I mean it.”
“I know you do,” he says. “And you know I’m going to fuss anyway.”
“I know.”
“Just so we’re clear.”
He kisses her cheek. Her temple. The corner of her jaw. She closes her eyes and lets him, his hand moving in slow circles on her stomach, careful not to hurt. She leans in and kisses him softly, his face still cradled in her hand, and he makes a low sound against her lips. He kisses her back with the particular warmth he always brings to her in the mornings, slow and sweet and entirely without urgency, like they have all the time there is. His hand moves from her stomach to her waist and he draws her in slightly, just to have her closer, and she goes.
“Eris.” Her voice is quiet, not a warning, just his name. He only hums in response.
Azriel wakes the way he always does, all at once, fully, with that seamless transition from sleep to wakefulness that she has always found both uncanny and reassuring. His arm across her back tightens first in an instinctive reach for her, before it relaxes as he reads the room. Reads her.
He presses his lips to her hair.
“You’re awake,” he says.
“Everyone is very observant this morning,” she says as she pulls back from Eris.
He huffs a laugh. She turns toward him and finds him looking at her with those brilliant hazel eyes that she has catalogued in every light.
His hand comes up and cups her face. His thumb moves across her cheekbone, once, very slowly.
“How bad is it today?”
“It’s not. I’m better.”
He studies her.
“Azriel.”
“I’m assessing.”
“You’re fussing.”
“I don’t fuss,” he says with great dignity, as he tucks her hair behind her ear and adjusts the duvet and checks the heating pad, proving himself immediately wrong. “That would be Eris.”
“You’re both fussing,” she says.
“Yes,” Eris says, from behind her, his hand moving in slow absent circles on her lower back.
“We’re allowed,” Azriel says, smoothing more hair from her face.
She looks at them both, captured by Azriel’s dark, steady gaze and Eris’s amber one, both of them sleep-warm and undone. They’re watching her with such plain and uncomplicated love that it moves through her like light through water, touching everything.
“I’m fine,” she says quietly. “I promise. I’m here, I’m warm, I feel—” She stops. “I feel very looked after. Cared for.”
Something moves across both their faces. Eris presses his mouth to her shoulder. Azriel brings her hand up and kisses her knuckles one by one.
She feels full to the brim with them.
“Come here,” she says to Azriel, and he meets her halfway and kisses her in an unhurried, soft kind of morning kiss. She gets her fingers into his hair and holds him there, and he makes a low sound against her mouth that she feels all the way down. She pulls back just enough to look at him, at the undone quality of him in the morning light, which she loves perhaps most of all.
Eris’s hand slides up her back and into her hair, loosening the plait Azriel braided last night, running his fingers through it slowly while she kisses Azriel. She sighs against Azriel’s mouth at the feeling of it and she feels Azriel smile against her lips in return.
She pulls back and turns to where Eris is waiting, patient, with his hand still in her hair. He cups the back of her head and kisses her with that particular thoroughness that still, even now, makes her feel like the only thing in the room. She presses her hand against his chest and feels his heart beating under her palm.
When she pulls back she rests her forehead against his and they breathe the same air for a moment.
“Better,” he says softly. His thumb strokes the back of her head.
“I told you.”
“I needed to verify.”
“Through kissing.”
“It’s a very reliable method.” He kisses her again, briefer, then pulls back and looks at her with determination clear on his face. “Bath.”
She blinks. “I had a bath last night.”
“And you’ll have one this morning. The heat will help, the salts will help, and you’ll spend the day in bed afterwards and not argue with me about it.”
She makes a sound.
“Don’t.”
“I feel fine—”
“Nesta.”
She looks at him. At the set of his jaw and the particular amber steadiness of his eyes, the love in them so plain and so undefended that it still, even now, occasionally takes her breath away.
“Eris,” she says.
“Let me do this, please,” he says, which is Eris for I need to do this for you, let me do this for you, it will help me as much as it helps you.
She looks over her shoulder at Azriel, who is watching this exchange with quiet amusement, his eyes soft. Told you, he mouths, before kissing her cheek.
“Fine,” she says. “But you’re both getting in with me.”
There’s a beat of silence. Eris raises an eyebrow.
“Those are the terms,” she says. “Non-negotiable.”
Eris looks at Azriel. Azriel looks at Eris.
“The bath isn’t that large,” Azriel says.
“We’ll manage,” she says, and Eris laughs, unguarded, the one she considers one of the finest sounds in existence, and Azriel’s mouth curves. Eris gets up to get the bath running, and Nesta lies back against Azriel’s chest. He wraps both arms around her and presses his lips to her temple and they listen to the water run.
The bathroom is filled with steam.
Nesta gets in first. The water is perfect, and she sighs at the heat of it, tipping her head back and closing her eyes.
She hears them behind her, the sounds of shirts discarded, the quiet unhurried efficiency of them, and then Azriel touches her shoulder and she scoots forward. He slides in behind her, his legs along either side of hers, his chest against her back. The water rises dangerously high. She leans into him automatically and he wraps his arms around her, holding her to him. She feels him exhale against her hair.
Eris gets in across from her. The bath is not, as Azriel had noted, that large, but they manage.
Eris settles with his legs alongside hers and Azriel’s, his back against the opposite end, and looks at her and Azriel, at the two of them together, which she knows is one of his favourite things to see, and his expression in the early light is so unguarded it makes her chest ache.
“Better?” he asks.
“Getting there,” she says.
He takes her feet in his lap and she lets him and he begins to rub slow circles against her arch. She makes a sound that Azriel feels against his chest and laughs, low and quiet, and she tips her head back against his shoulder. Azriel’s arms tighten around her slightly in response.
“Don’t mock me,” she tells him.
“I didn’t say a word,” he says.
Eris catches his eye over her head and something passes between them, something complicit, the easy fluency of people who have learned to love the same person and found, in doing so, that they have also learned to love each other.
“Still fussing,” she says to Eris as he continues his massage.
“Diligently,” he agrees, and presses his thumb more firmly and she turns her head against Azriel’s neck and gives up entirely.
Azriel’s hands move from her arms to her shoulders and he works the muscles there slowly and carefully, the same patient thoroughness as last night. She feels each knot release under his hands and makes no effort to contain the sounds she makes because it is just them. She doesn’t have to hide from them.
She opens her eyes and catches Eris watching her with an open and wondering expression, like he is still, even now, slightly stunned by the fact of her.
“What?” she asks softly.
“Nothing,” he says.
“Eris.”
A pause. “You’re beautiful,” he says. “You both are.”
Azriel presses his lips to her temple and murmurs something a soft “I love you” against her skin, and she feels it move through her, feels the truth of it. She reaches out and takes Eris’s hand under the water and holds it.
He holds back.
Azriel’s arms come around her from behind, fully, crossing at her front, and she puts her other hand over his. The three of them stay connected, a closed and quiet circuit, the steam rising softly around them.
Nesta doesn’t want to be anywhere else but here, held between her two loves in the warm water. She basks in the slow and soft morning, and does not rush a single second of it.
She closes her eyes and lets herself be held and loved and fussed over with great thoroughness, and she doesn’t deflect or diminish it.
She simply lets it in.
All of it.