They're still hand to hand, water tugging lace around their ankles, rain fretting the skin of the sea. The hotel sulks behind them and learns how to be building. The stain on the seawall waits like a sentence that wants to be read aloud.
"Terms," Mira says. Not ceremony—work list.
"Yes," Luca says, quick with relief because a good rule is a coat in bad weather.
"No more feeding on echoes," she begins. "You don't pull heat off other people's joy and call it kindness. If you warm, it's because your blood decided."
"My blood decides," he echoes, glancing at his own wrist like a student checking a clock. The pulse under her thumb answers for him.
"No more rooms deciding the temperature of our bodies," she adds. "If we're warm, we earned it. If we're cold, we put on coats."
"Agreed," he says, laughing once at the simplicity that feels like luxury. "If I shiver, I shiver for me."
"No performances," she says. "Sorrow, delight, desire—all at human scale. No selling any of it to rooms that like a show."
"Human scale," he repeats, as if rolling a band of metal over his knuckles and finding it fits. "No amplifying. No stealing applause. If I want more, I ask you, not the chandelier."
"Corridor, not box. Down, not out," she says, because old terms keep their tenure. "Ask, then touch. Stop means stop." She nods at the towel on Elara's arm. "Witness when we need it. And one more thing." She looks toward the hotel, then back at him. "We leave it. The ruins are not our altar."
He looks past her shoulder and chooses the sea over the façade. "I choose you over glamour," he says, deliberately ungilded. "When a room offers me its mirror I keep my eyes on your mouth and the knot of your wrist. If the world wants a spectacle, it can go buy one."
"Good," she says. "I choose 'us' over solitude." The word costs her pride a coin. She pays and watches pride survive. "Not just you and me—though, yes. Us is also Elara with towels, Adrien with chalk, anyone who will tell the truth in the room we're in. I will stop pretending I work best alone. I don't, not for this."
"Us," he says, honoring the size of it. He squeezes her fingers once, careful not to turn agreement into pressure. "Say when the ledger goes."
"Low tide," she says. "Sea caves. Not now. We don't feed it to drama. We return it to stone when stone is listening. We'll read the stain first. Then buns. Then the alley's clause. The ledger goes back after bread, before pride wakes up again."
He nods, accepting a schedule like a blessing. "Low tide," he repeats. "Not a funeral, a filing."
"Exactly." She adjusts the ledger under her arm; the silver strap creaks and settles; the key bumps her hip and minds its manners. Rain darkens the board to a color she trusts. "You may help carry it there later," she adds, and he glows like a man offered a broom.
"I will try not to polish the cave," he says.
"Elara will stop you," Mira says.
"I will," Elara says immediately, not lifting her eyes from the line the sea is drawing. "Terms noted. Also we don't run on wet rock."
Adrien, collar up, smiles into the rain. "No speeches," he murmurs, which for him is permission.
Corvi looks as if she has swallowed an invoice and found it dovish. She folds her arms tighter, silk taking the shape of a shield that doesn't like salt.
Mira turns her face back to Luca. "Any terms of yours," she asks, because equality is not the same as being polite.
"One," he says, cheeks wet with rain that isn't making a point. "If there's a day when the glamour reads as easier than us, you'll say it out loud before it eats you. You won't quietly go to a mirror and ask it to be a spouse. You'll give me the bad work and I'll do it with you."
She nods, grateful for the simplicity hiding inside the hard part. "If there's a day when our version of us feels like a stage, we stop and make a kitchen." She tips her head toward Elara. "Literally, if necessary."
"I will open a window," Elara volunteers.
"Two," Luca says, emboldened by being allowed one. "If I catch myself humming timing—if I find my fingers wanting to round up strangers' breathing like coins—I'll tell you, and Adrien, and, if she allows it," he glances at Elara, "her."
Elara raises the towel like a flag. "I am very good at humiliating men in small, survivable doses."
"Consent remembered," he says, delighted.
Mira's mouth softens into something too practical to call a smile. "Then we have our terms," she says. "We choose us. We leave the ruins to their accounting. We return the book to stone at low tide, not now."
A gust slants the rain; it rattles against their ears like a thousand tiny beads poured onto a tray. He leans into the weather without using it; she adjusts her weight with the tide the way one does when one has learned ankles.
"I would like to kiss you," Luca says, plain as a prescription. "Not as proof. As part of this list."
"On six," Mira says.
"On six," he says—glad to be told how to begin.
The wave lifts; they draw breath; it falls.
"Now," she says.
He steps in only the inch she gave him. He doesn't take his hand away from hers; he comes closer with what's left, the shoulder and chest and mouth, all of it at human temperature. He pauses, easy to count, at the distance where her forehead could meet his if necessary—remembered pane, remembered consent—and waits for the small nod that is her language for yes. She gives it, once, and tilts up only enough that the wind can't claim the first contact.
He kisses her.
Tender, yes. Hungry, yes. Not famine—appetite grounded where bodies live: pulse, breath, muscle that knows work. Salt is there—the sea on his lip, the old hour on hers. Warmth is there—his, hers, the small pooled heat you earn by staying still together in weather. The first shock is not romance; it is physics: pressure answered, pressure returned, without a room running numbers under them. The second shock is human: back-and-forth, the way a good question and a good answer pass the cup until both are better for the sharing.
He doesn't angle for drama. He goes once, slow, and receives what she gives as if it were a tool, not a prize. She answers with equal measure—a firm, honest heat that has nothing to sell to anyone—then breaks the contact by a breath because numbers told her how not to lose the hour to a trick. He rests his mouth a fraction off hers, breath mingled, waiting, and she lets him have the next beat too, because he waited.
Behind them, the gulls heckle the wind for its lack of mercy and decide to forgive it anyway. Elara turns her face toward the stain and hums something domestic as if to guard the kiss with housework. Adrien performs the miracle of being scenery. Corvi mutters "unsanitary" and gets rain on her eyelashes for her trouble.
"Again," Luca murmurs, promise-sized, not a demand.
"On six," Mira says, because she is generous, not foolish.
They breathe. They meet again. He deepens the contact an inch, not a mile, and brings his free hand no higher than her jaw, thumb on the coat seam, fingers open. She lifts the hand that has been at his wrist and sets it against his cheek, palm to skin, the rasp of salt-dulled stubble catching her life-line. The warmth there is specific; it is not the room, not the weather; it is him. He makes the small sound his throat makes when he is surprised to be given exactly what he asked for and nothing extra. His mouth changes as men's mouths do when they realize the old repertoire won't play in this venue. He adapts. He is better at this—unhelped, honest.
She nips him gently when he tries to rush a fraction; he laughs into her mouth—that little tremor of relief turning into want—and corrects his tempo. He gives back what he gets and then, because he is learning, slightly less. She rewards him by closing the gap the last half-inch, by letting the heat climb one rung and settle, not blaze.
He pulls back on his own before seven, eyes wide, as if he cannot believe the discipline feels like more. "Whole," he says, astonished to find the word fits in his mouth with her name. "I didn't know the feeling was allowed to do that."
"Allowed," she confirms. "Earned."
Rain threads their hair into honest lines. The wind makes a point and then drops it. The tide breathes. He leans his forehead against hers a moment because some old habits are simply accurate when the glass is gone. The touch is warm now, not cool. He holds, counts, and then lifts away first so she doesn't have to do the chore of teaching the end.
"Say the choice," she says, because speaking it lodges it where even weather can't dislodge.
"I choose you," he says. He doesn't look back at the façade. "Over glamour. Over being beloved by an appetite. Over being effortless. Over the kind of man who says 'after you' to a room and means 'applaud me.' I choose your rules, your ledger, your ugly truths, your buns without raisins, your 'on six,' your bad temper about machines that sigh. I choose us."
She hears the dangerous parts—effortless, beloved—and doesn't flinch. "I choose us," she says, answering like a colleague and a woman. "Over solitude dressed as virtue. Over the story where I'm the only adult in the room. Over clean escape that leaves the stain talking to itself. Over a mouth that would be easier if it were pretend. Over mornings where I don't have to explain rules. I choose your body as real. I choose our rules. I choose the work."
"Good," Adrien says softly, to the rain more than to them.
Elara wipes her cheek briskly with the back of her wrist and pretends it's only weather. "I have buns to bully," she announces, grateful for errands that understand vows.
"Not yet," Mira says, amused at herself for wanting to prolong the shore. "First the stain." She lifts the ledger a notch to ease the strap. "Then buns. Then the alley. Then—the sea caves at low tide. We will return this without speeches."
"No speeches," Luca vows, clearly about to give one and catching himself like a man braking before he runs a red. "Just—thank you. Later."
"Later," she affirms, letting his mouth earn the word.
Corvi takes a careful step down the wrack line as if the sea might invoice her for touching its hem. "If you walk away now," she says, wet and incredulous, "you will never get this back. The brand. The miracle. The bookings. You will reduce my life to—" she gestures at the ledger, at the towels "—laundry."
Elara grins at the horizon. "It's a promotion."
Mira doesn't give Corvi the dignity of turning. "We're leaving the ruins," she says to Luca, to Adrien, to the tide. "We will answer letters when we want to. We will not answer the lift." She tips her chin toward the seawall. "Ready to read."
"On six," Luca says—as if to tie the end of one thing to the start of the next.
They breathe. The wave lifts and sets. The rain thins to a silver itch. The shore gives them the next step's permission. He leans, not to claim, but to seal: a last, brief press of mouth to mouth, warmer now, truer now, with that small, mutual hunger that feels like health. Back-and-forth. He receives as much as he asks for and gives back without interest. When he leaves her mouth she can taste nothing that isn't earned: salt, heat, the clean edge where two people met and neither tried to borrow weather.
She keeps his hand, because that is also a term. He keeps hers, because he intends to prove he can hold without the room taking notes.
"Walk," she says.
"Walk," he agrees.
The gulls wheel. The hotel keeps its sulking to architecture. The stain on the seawall ripens one inch darker under the withdrawing wave. Elara shifts the towel under the ledger; Adrien sets his palm to the side of his flask to check that it is tin and not charm. Corvi mutters something about inspections and salt and is ignored by everyone present, including, it appears, the sea.
They move when the tide permits, still close, eyes still on each other enough to keep the rules alive, hands still joined because that is how you make "us" practical on wet stone. The ledger rides Mira's hip like a promise filed for later. The rain worries her hair into honesty. His shirt clings and cools and warms again where her shoulder touches his arm by accident and chooses not to apologize.
"Us," he says, tasting the plural like bread.
"Us," she answers, and keeps step.