There was no thought in the way she turned, arms reaching out to clasp at him, pull the height of him into her embrace, only instinct. The ache in his heart, that laced his voice, tore at her. She tugged him down til his head rested on her shoulder and her hands linked behind his back. “Oh, darling,” she murmured, low and sympathetic, “still so very much pain. No, I can’t tell you with my gifts what you want, only that you do want.” One hand stroked, gently, over the soft shirt and hard muscles of his back. “If I were to guess, I would say you want what you have always wanted. To be seen, and wanted, as you truly are. To be believed in, and desired for yourself. Oh, darling.”
“Summer,” he breathed, like a sigh, or a word of praise, or one of relief. He allowed his eyes to close as he inhaled that familiar scent, brought back to a time when he felt like something tethered him to the realm of the living. Things could be like that again—no, not the same. Different, new, but still her.
“Allow me to go where you go.”
Any other time, she might have laughed, might have teased him — “What could stop you?” — but the moment was too fragile, the thing trembling between them too tenuous.
So she simply said, “Yes,” into his hair, voice a little choked.