By the time Aiden and I get back to Kent’s house, the storm has kicked up to an even more intense level. Icy droplets hammer against the roof, frost crystallizing on the lighted windows.

Ellen doesn't even notice when we walk inside perfectly dry. She just says hello, then goes right back to tracing pictures out of her science textbook. It’s the only time I’ve ever seen her use that textbook for anything. The papers spilling down from the coffee table are filled up with fish, flowers, seashells, trees, geodes. A tiny, crayon-based ecosystem. The little items I gave her for Christmas are scattered across the pages.

We go up to Aiden’s apartment, but I pause on the porch just outside of the door, looking around.

It’s a strange, inexplicable feeling, to stand at the center of a storm and go untouched by it. To feel safe and warm, even when surrounded on all sides.

It’s a feeling that only Aiden has given me, a feeling that only Aiden could give me, and he could do it even if he had no magic to speak of.

He gives my hand a gentle tug. “Don’t you want to come inside?”

I follow him in, looking back over my shoulder at the storm. Aiden watches me, his blue eyes thoughtful.

It's dark in his place, and I expect him to flip on the lights. Instead, he releases shimmering fireflies from his palms, lets them waterfall over the sides of his hands. They spread out to drift around the living room, and Aiden starts gathering up all of the loose cushions on the couch.

“Can you go grab the pillows from my bed?” he asks, striding past me. “The blankets, too.”

I have no idea what we’re doing, but I'm down for whatever, so long as I get to do it with him. I pull off my shoes and pad into the bedroom.

When I come back, Aiden takes everything from me. He uses the blankets and pillows to build a sort of nest on the carpeted floor. He sets it up right next to the sliding glass door, where we can watch the storm from up close.

He makes two cups of tea while I get cozy on the blankets, then comes back and snuggles up with me.

We sit in comfortable silence for a while, watching the sleet thrum against the glass. Then we begin to talk, about nothing and everything.

In this environment, doing this... I sink into a deep sense of tranquility.

The golden glow of Aiden’s fireflies, bathing us in dusky, intimate half-light. The softness of everything that surrounds me. The warmth of the places where our bodies come together, and the warmth of the mug in my hands.

The rumble of Aiden's strong, deep voice. His huffing laughter.

Now and then the moonlight breaks through the storm. Brilliant points of illumination. They spill onto the floor like scattered diamonds. They catch in Aiden’s sea-blue eyes as he speaks, as he listens to me.

I remember that night at Angie’s party, the first time that Aiden and I accidentally ended up talking for hours. The first time I was able to see his true nature, who he really is. Also the first time I felt a flutter of something for him in my heart.

We still do that a lot, all the time. Accidentally have these hours-long conversations, like the one we're having right now.

It’s not exactly a necessity. Aiden already understands me so well. He doesn’t need all these words to understand me better. I think that I understand him in the same way. Sometimes his eyes hold all the language I could ever need from him.

I’ve known you for thousands of years, I want to tell Aiden. That’s the only explanation.

Yeah, no words are necessary. But we talk like this anyways, because it feels good.

It’s a rarity to find someone you can speak to right from your heart, without overthinking or pretending for even a moment. Someone you have a natural, inborn ability to communicate with. With that person, it's as easy and effortless as breathing. There’s a deep, precious beauty in that, one that makes me feel whole, understood, fulfilled.

We sleep with our bare bodies intertwined almost every night, but this - these intimate talks about our lives - this is when we’re really naked.

I only hope that Aiden loves the hours we spend like this as much as I do, because I sincerely hope that we never stop.

Eventually we both grow quiet. Aiden leans back against the wall, and I curl up against his chest. The sleet falls heavily outside. We sit there together, cozy in our cocoon of shared warmth.

Are you as happy as I am? I want to ask Aiden.

I tip my head back to look up at him, and realize that he isn’t watching the storm. He’s looking down at me with shining, radiant eyes. Northern lights, but in his unique shade of blue.

He bends over me slowly. His eyes don’t break away from mine until he closes them to kiss me.

It starts off gentle and soft, but heat starts to gather between us. I twist in Aiden’s arms to face him, and friction fire seems to roll off of us as our mouths lock together again.

In his smoldering embrace, I almost forget to breathe.

We start pulling off each other’s clothes with silent, breathless urgency. Aiden drags me on top of him, then falls flat onto his back.

Straddling him, I drag his shirt up and almost off, but I twist it tightly around his wrists, pinning them together above his head. I keep him like that while I plant slow, thorough kisses all over his chest, punctuated here and there with a sharp bite.

Aiden has a full-body reaction to this. Even if I wasn’t sitting on him, and couldn’t feel it - I see it all go down in his eyes. His pupils are blown all the way out, his breath picking up with each movement of my mouth.

I release his hands, and he pounces on me from below, rolling us over into the blankets. It’s not long before I’m the one whose body is rippling with shivers of pleasure, and neither of us has even gotten our jeans off, yet.

It’s like I’m hardwired to love him, I swear. That must be why one gentle, caressing touch between us can set off a cosmic-scale explosion like this.

“Aiden,” I breathe, as he rolls the sensitive skin of my throat between his teeth. “I love you so much.”

He stops and draws back, lets out a sort of whimpering sound.

“No, listen…” He closes his eyes, swallowing. I watch the soft movement of his Adam's apple. “You can’t talk to me like that right now.”

“What do you mean?” I ask, concerned, smoothing my palms over his beard. “Did I say something wr-?”

“No, I just - everything is already so - I can’t - I can’t handle it. Can’t handle you.” Somehow Aiden’s deep voice vibrates peacefully through me even when it’s stumbling and stuttering like this. “You’re gonna kill me, man.”

“I was just-”

“No.” Aiden puts a finger over my lips. “I know that this is an impossible thing to ask of you, Keane, but I’m gonna need you to stop talking for a second.”

“Wow!” I prop myself up on my elbows, trying to glare at him. Really tough thing to do, with so much love held in my eyes. “You know what, Callahan? I don’t need this shit from you! And if you want me to stop talking, you better come up with a new strategy, because this one isn’t going to w-”

He cuts me off with a kiss so vividly, mind-numbingly intense that I shut up immediately. My entire body curls around him.

I fall deep into the sweet sensations of loving Aiden. All I can do is close my eyes and give myself up to the moment, to him. This, too, is so effortlessly easy. To share my body and soul with him, unreserved, nothing withheld. It’s how I sometimes find myself laughing from pure pleasure.

It’s a freezing winter night outside, but I have the sun on my body, wrapped up in my arms.

~~~~

Later, curled up in bed together - with all of the pillows and blankets from our little nest restored to their proper place - Aiden begins to talk, his soft-spoken voice rolling into every corner of my heart. He tells me about walking alongside the Seine when he was in France, how he thought of me there.

The thought of that lifts my heart up into my throat.

It’s not often that Aiden brings up his time away, but I’m coaxing small stories out of him with more frequency these days. I’m making a careful study of what kinds of questions he’ll answer without closing up, being sure not to push on any sore places in his memories.

I think it helps him, when we’re together like this. In the low, golden light of our room - his room, I mean - with no clothes, no one else around, nothing even beyond the windows, not with the storm blocking everything out… He opens up more easily, relaxes back into my arms, toys with a strand of my hair.

I reciprocate with my own stories, because I think it helps Aiden to have a little time to think in between each detail he tells me. But mostly I’m just listening, eating up the details of all these places I’ve never been to, from Sapporo to Sardinia.

Tonight, the conversation travels from France to the French Quarter.

“You’d like Nola,” Aiden rumbles.

His voice is still husky and unwound from what took place before we got into bed together.

I prop myself up on an elbow, so I can look down at him. “Nola?”

“New Orleans.”

“Oh, would I? Why?”

“Lots of hauntings to investigate,” Aiden says teasingly, trailing his fingers up the arm I have twined around him. “Everyone talks about Lafitte's and Lalaurie's, but if you get out of the Quarter - away from the tourists - you can find some seriously spooky places. It’s a really old city. Ghosts on every corner, supposedly.”

“Cool, perfect,” I answer. “We don’t already have enough ghosts in our lives, right?”

This draws a soft, huffing laugh from Aiden.

“Did you verify it?” I ask, bending to brush my lips against the side of his neck. “All the ghosts? You can hear spectral energy.”

“I can only hear spectral energy from Ketterbridge, dude. And I didn’t have the ghost goggles, at the time. Nor did I have a cute, stupid dumbass with the Vision hanging out with me. Like you, for example.”

“Fuck off,” I groan, and Aiden laughs again.

Smiling to myself, I rest the side of my face against his. He gets quiet, looking out through the window. The storm is still raging against the glass panels.

“You alright?” I ask, and feel him nod against my cheek.

“Just hope no one tries to drive through all that, or something.”

I follow Aiden's eyes to the torrential downpour going on outside, then turn my head to kiss his temple.

“If someone needs us, you’ll hear it,” I remind him softly.

He smiles, closing his eyes. “I like how you always say that. Every time.”

“Say what?”

Aiden presses a kiss onto my wrist.

“Us,” he murmurs. “If someone needs us.”

~~~~

Long after Aiden falls asleep, I stay awake, lost in my thoughts.

My mind keeps going back to what I nearly said to Raj when he asked me about the heist ring. Even feeling the way I do about Aiden, I shocked myself with that.

I vividly remember the way I recoiled when Roger asked me to move in with him, even though I didn’t have to, and I was about to break up with him. I can’t even imagine how I would have felt if he had pulled out a ring. I would have gone running for the fucking hills. And it used to be like that with everyone I dated.

But now all my love lives within this body stretched out beside me on the bed. In his body. In one being. It’s hard for me to wrap my head around.

I know that my Companion Plant sleeps deeply, so I know that I can work my knuckles into the knots in his back without waking him up. I think he’s sore from his early-morning trip to the gym with Ripley. I could tell by how he was sitting with his shoulders hunched when we first got back here tonight.

As I thought, Aiden doesn’t wake up, even when I sink in a little more pressure. He lets out a soft sound in his sleep, relaxing deeper into the comforters.

My eyes travel slowly over him, taking in every detail of his bronze body. A whole world of nuances. I discover something new to appreciate every time I blink my eyes.

The link that connects me to him is so strong that sometimes I wonder if we even need the connection, to reach that kind of harmony.

I decide to test it out.

I give Aiden some space, lay back with my cheek against the pillow. I hold still, just watching him sleep. The storm raging outside provides an easy-access blanket of white noise, and I let my mind go blank of everything except for Aiden.

Time passes. I don’t know how much.

At some point I realize that I’ve been so absorbed in Aiden’s breathing, watching so intently each rise and fall of his chest - that mine has synced up to it.

Slowly, so that I don’t wake him up, I fit my body up against his again. I begin very gently trailing my fingers down the broad span of his chest, all the way down his sternum, then back up again. Not headed in any particular direction, just following the path that my intuition takes them on.

Our breaths stay together, and our heartbeats follow, all of our energy flowing in tandem.

Aiden smiles in his sleep, curls his head towards mine.

I have this feeling of my love passing into his body, and with each wave of it, I sense an answer, a response. It all flows back into me, a current growing stronger and stronger the more time we spend like this. If my feelings for him are an ocean, we’re both being gently licked by the waves.

I could swear this thing that's grown between us is alive, breathing.

I’ve been so attentive to Aiden’s body that it takes me a minute to glance at his face and realize that I’ve woken him up. I’m not sure how long ago it happened. His eyes are open, but he’s holding perfectly still.

I can’t believe that the featherlight touches I’ve been giving him actually brought him out of his sleep. I usually have to give him a good hard shake, and I know that I didn't tickle him. He’s not ticklish. Besides on the back of his neck, that is.

“What are you doing?” he breathes, when our eyes meet.

I stop the movements of my fingers, biting my lip. My cheeks start to burn.

“I - don’t know, I was just…”

Aiden stares at me, very awake. “Feels… really…”

He fades off.

I think he can see in my eyes - or maybe feel through my hands - just how deeply I’m swimming in my love for him. And somehow he’s responding with all of himself, even though he hasn’t moved, has barely spoken.

I become aware that I’m telling Aiden something with my eyes, something that words can’t quite contain.

A small, shy smile turns up Aiden's lips. His cheeks turn a deep shade of burnt scarlet, and he blinks rapidly. Breaks his gaze away, like he's having trouble looking at me.

“Come here, dummy,” he murmurs, pulling me into his arms.

I smile to myself. I’m sure that he can feel it, with my cheek pressed to his chest. I close my eyes, listening to his heartbeat.

As the sound of it lulls me to sleep, I think again of what I started to say to Raj.

Sometimes my most honest moments sneak up on me, and what I know on the deepest plane of myself unexpectedly rises to the top. This one took me by surprise, but just one night spent with Aiden - with my Companion Plant - made me understand.

As far as my heart is concerned, this Sugar Maple has his roots in the infinite.

Infinite, forever, always. Those words are sounding less and less scary to me, with each night I spend in Aiden’s arms.