Page 151 of The Words Beneath the Noise

“No. I like you terrible at it.” I set the notebook aside, turned fully so I could cup his face in my hands. “But yes. Bona omi. The best.”

Tom's smile went soft, private, the one he saved for moments like this when it was just us and the rest of the world fell away. He leaned down, pressed his forehead to mine, and we breathed the same air.

“Love you,” he murmured. “My brilliant, disaster boffin.”

“Love you too. My rough-edged, absurdly patient soldier.”

“Not a soldier anymore.”

“No. Thank God.” I kissed him, slow and gentle, tasting snow and biscuits and the future we were building word by word, day by day. “Just mine.”

“Just yours,” Tom agreed against my mouth. “Always.”

Outside, snow continued to fall. No sirens screamed. No bombs shook the foundations. Just the ordinary sounds of London at peace, and inside our small flat, two men who'd survived the unsurvivable, holding each other in the firelight.

We'd saved them, back at that frozen estate when the world was ending. The codes and the courage, the patterns and the bullets, the refusal to let terror win.

And now, finally, we were saving ourselves.

Not dramatically, not with grand gestures or public declarations. Just by waking up every morning and choosing this, choosing us, choosing to believe that love in the margins was still love, still worth fighting for.

Tom pulled me down onto the sofa, arranged us so we were tangled together, his arms around me and my head on his chest where I could hear his heartbeat steady and sure. The fire crackled. The notebook lay open on the trunk, our words mixing together on the page.

“Next year,” Tom said into my hair, “we'll go visit Bea. Properly.”

“You think we're ready for that?”

“No. But we'll do it anyway.” His hand traced patterns on my back, soothing, grounding. “And the year after that, maybe we'll get a better flat. One with heating that actually works.”

“Ambitious.”

“I'm full of ambition. Might even learn to cook.”

“Now you're just being unrealistic.”

Tom's laugh rumbled through his chest. “Fair point. But we'll figure it out. All of it. Together.”

“Together,” I echoed, and let my eyes drift closed.

The war was over. We'd come home. And in this small flat in London, with snow falling outside and Tom's arms around me, I finally, cautiously, let myself believe in the future.

Not the hypothetical future we'd promised each other in hospital beds and bombed-out libraries, but the real one. The one where we grew old and argued about silly things and built a life from borrowed Polari and stolen moments and the stubborn refusal to let the world tell us who we were allowed to love.

We'd cracked the codes. We'd survived the bombs. And now, in the silence that followed, we were learning the hardest skill of all:

How to be happy.

It was messy and imperfect and sometimes terrifying. But it was ours.

And that, I thought as sleep pulled me under with Tom's heartbeat steady beneath my ear, was more than enough.