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Nora plucked a Nuka-Cola from the broken vending machine just inside Joe’s Spuckies. The door was off its hinges, but the machine was tilted just enough that the Nuka-Cola inside hadn’t fallen from its shelf in two hundred years. She stepped over the rubble piled up, glass shards dulled by time, plastic panels and metal frames from the ceiling.
She reached over the counter to the little straw dispenser just by the cash register. She depressed the dispenser, and the white-and-red bendy straw fell out onto the counter. She wiped it off on her vault suit— not much cleaner, truthfully— and sat down in the booth by the hole in the wall that used to be the window.
She could see Nick from her seat in the booth. He was still crouched over the two bullet holes in the pavement outside where Jenny had died. He’d needed a moment, and Nora didn’t want to intrude.
She understood. Even a year on, sometimes she would go back to the vault just to sit with Nate. She couldn’t bring herself to bury him yet. Not until she found Shaun.
She hit the lip of the Nuka-Cola bottle on the edge of the table, knocking the cap off. “Still got it,” Nora said, if only to herself. It was an old party trick she’d learned from one of her sorority sisters in college, back in Rhode Island. She tucked the cap into her pocket, and dropped the bendy straw into her drink. She tucked her legs underneath her, crossed at the ankles.
It was still early— she didn’t bother looking at her Pip-Boy, but it was probably barely past noon. They’d probably want to have lunch before heading out again.
She looked up when she heard the bell on the door chime. Nick stepped inside, looking worn. She hadn’t noticed him heading back towards the sandwich shop. He took off his hat, tossing it on the table, like always. My mother always said it was rude to leave your hat on at the table, the old Nick used to say.
“Nick,” Nora said. “You alright?”
He sighed, sitting down across from her. He jostled the booth so their knees just barely grazed as he slid into the booth. “Yeah. I’ll be alright.”
She pressed her lips together. She’d always suspected his memories of Nick’s were stronger than he let on. The feelings that came with them, too.
His gaze was unfocused, looking out the window. One of the things she liked best about Nick was his ability to sit with silence between them. He never felt the need to fill the silence with chatter— he said that was a hangover from his beat cop stakeout days. Or rather, Nick’s.
Nora had grown used to the silence over the years. As much as she liked to hear Deacon or Hancock talk, sometimes all she needed was the company of another person. Of knowing she wasn’t alone.
“Can I ask a question that’s been bothering me for two centuries?” Nick asked, breaking the pleasant silence.
“Shoot.” She sucked at the Nuka-Cola. Even two hundred years on, it fizzed on her tongue.
“So,” Nick drew a cigarette from the front pocket of his battered coat, “was the kid Nick’s or your husband’s?”
She felt her stomach drop unpleasantly. Nora met Nick’s bright yellow eyes across the table.
“So, we’re talking about it, then?” she asked.
“Yeah, I guess so,” he said, chewing on the end of the cigarette. Just like Nick. “Seems like a fitting place, don’t you think?” he said, only looking away for a brief moment to glance towards the spot where Jenny had died.
Nora sighed. Standing over Jenny’s proverbial corpse? Sure. Only place more fitting might have been over Nate’s real one.
Nick reached into the pocket at his hip, pulling out an engraved flip lighter. She never got quite close enough to him to see what it said. Nick had one just like it. Was it— was it his? Or did all Nicks just have a penchant for gold flip lighters?
“You don’t have to answer me if you don’t want to,” Nick said, lighting the cigarette between his lips, cupping the embers from the wind. When he dropped his hand, he met her eyes again, “You don’t owe me that.”
“Don’t I?”
“Maybe the man these memories belong to, but not me.”
She looked down at the bottle in front of her. She wished it was cold. Sweating, even, so she would have something to do with her hands.
“I don’t know,” Nora admitted. “I didn’t want to know.”
His lips pressed together in a thin line.
“I’ve never said that to anyone,” she said. “I thought it would be harder to admit. But everyone who would care about that is dead,” she said. Nate. Nick. Her mother. Everyone except— this Nick. Would he judge her for not knowing, even though he had just as much of a memory of those nights as she did?
Of Nick taking her home to his crappy, subleased apartment he’d never lived in with Jenny, so Nora wouldn’t have to think about her husband away in Alaska? So that Nick didn’t have to think about his fiancée back in Chicago on his ever-longer stint with the Cambridge PD?
This Nick— he spent his days finding cheating spouses and jilted lovers. Did he feel some sense of remorse for a past life he had no real control over? Did he wonder if he possessed the memories of Shaun’s father? Did he have the same biological drive as the original, human Nick Valentine would have to know if he had a son?
He didn’t say a word.
Nick didn’t look anything like the old Nick. Nick Valentine, human, had been broad— dark hair on his chest, permanent five o’clock shadow on his jaw. He’d been barely an inch shorter than Nora. But sometimes— it was eerie, really, how much Nick Valentine, synth, acted like him. His movements— the way he tied his tie, the way he chewed on his cigarette— it was like watching a ghost. She’d known this Nick nearly as long as she’d known the other one, now. Not in the same way, of course, but—
Nora had never wanted to think about it. When Nate had come home from that final tour, she’d vowed to be a better wife. And Shaun had been just a baby when she’d held him last. He’d had dark eyes, just like Nora, and his hair had been peach fuzz. Now Shaun was— a child. But even seeing him at ten years old through the memories of a man she’d killed, she couldn’t tell. Nick had looked enough like her husband in shape and coloring she didn’t know if she’d ever really know.
“I got pregnant right around the time Nate got back,” she said, grimacing. “It was just too convenient. The last time with Nick was right before I was supposed to meet Nate at the Boston airport—”
He’d bent her over his desk, hadn’t looked at her the entire time. He usually used condoms, but that time he hadn’t. They’d already known it was the end. Nick seemed to remember well enough, nodding along.
“Sorry,” she said, “this must be uncomfortable for you.”
His brow furrowed. “You’re the one talking about being intimate.”
“I know, but you don’t want to know me that way,” she said, chewing on the tip of the straw. She eyed the cigarette held loosely between Nick’s fingers. She almost wished she hadn’t quit when she got pregnant. She could really use the rush right then. The cola would have to do.
“I never said that,” he said.
Her eyes flicked up to him. “What?”
“If we’re putting it all on the table,” Nick said with a sigh, “I used to think I was so damn slick.” He brought the cigarette to his mouth.“I had all of Nick’s brains and none of his vices. Didn’t drink, not once in these hundred years did I ever look at a dame and have it get this old tin heart beating.” He snorted. “Much less anything else. But then you walk into that damn vault. And I realize I’m no better than Nick. I’m lusting after a woman these clockwork hands have never touched, and she’s just lost her whole world.”
Nora stared at him.
“You never said anything,” she said.
“Neither did you,” he said. “You made it pretty clear to Nick that last time that it was the last time, your husband was coming home and that thing between you had to end.”
Nora bit her lip.
“Truth is,” Nick said, inhaling the smoke, “seeing you again scared the hell out of me.”
Walking out of that vault had been a nightmare. Codsworth was the only thing that seemed even remotely similar, and he barely even trusted her. When she’d ended up in Diamond City, seeing the sign, the name— she’d known he couldn’t be the same man she’d known two hundred years ago. Maybe if she’d known about ghouls back then she might have had— hope, or something— but she’d thought maybe a descendant if she were lucky. Nick had had a brother in Chicago, a few cousins in the country.
There’d been something Ellie wasn’t telling her, she knew, when she’d been sent out to retrieve the detective from Skinny Malone, but she’d never expected to find a synth with Nick’s memories.
“Yeah,” she agreed, “me too.”
“Nick Valentine?” she asked, as he stepped out of the shadows of the makeshift holding cell. His hat was tilted so she couldn’t see the glow of his yellow eyes. But the coat—
“Nora?” he’d asked, and she knew—
“As I live and breathe,” he said, a grin on his mechanical face, so eerily like the grin she’d known intimately. “Been awhile,” Nick said, stepping out of the doorway. “But I’m sure that’s a story for another day. Want to get the hell out of here?”
And that was it— a silent acknowledgement. They were— old friends, if anyone asked.
They sat in silence for another few minutes, Nora slowly sipping at the cola, Nick’s cigarette burning away. When it faded down to the filter— he always liked the filtered ones— he lit another one.
“Nick was about to call it off with Jenny,” Nick said.
“What?” Nora said, blinking.“But he—”
“Loved her?” Nick laughed hollowly. “Yeah. But what kind of man loves a woman and sleeps with another one?” She bristled. “It’s not a condemnation, Nora. Good people do bad things. He was in love with you.”
It didn’t make any sense. Their long nights at the Cambridge legal library, at the bar across the street, that wasn’t love. It had always been mutual loneliness, at best.
“He was gonna ask you to leave Nate for him. When Jenny came down from Chicago, he was gonna sit her down and break the news,” he sighed. “But a few days before her train was due, he went by your office and saw they were throwin’ you a baby shower. Didn’t even know you were pregnant before that. So he shut up, welcomed Jenny, and was gonna live with it. Then she tells him if no one’s gonna do anything about Winter, she’ll at least do a number on it for the paper. He was so fed up with the whole damn thing he let her do it.”
There was a painful twinge in Nora’s chest. She’d only seen Nick once after Nate came home that last time. She hadn’t meant to. She ran into him in the courthouse right after Shaun was born, before she was supposed to come back to work. She’d never did make it back— her start date was in November. But she’d been working on a few cases from home, just to get back into the swing of things. She’d bumped into Nick just outside of her boss’s office. He looked haggard, tired. She’d known about Jenny’s death, but it hadn’t felt right to offer her condolences.
“Piper reminds me of her sometimes,” Nick said. “Jenny. All that fire and no good sense.” He played with the flip lighter, opening and closing it with his thumb. He sighed heavily. “He knew he shouldn’t have let her go. But she goes and gets killed, right outside the diner where she’s meeting her source, and that puts any thought outta Nick’s mind of asking you to leave your husband. All that Catholic guilt. Spent too long trying to figure out if it was a setup, or if she just got unlucky. And then he got that call from CIT.”
Jenny had been killed just three or four months into Nora's pregnancy. This Nick probably didn’t even have the memory of their meeting in the courthouse. Of the hollow, shaken look Nick had then. He’d smelled strongly of whiskey. But Nora hadn’t said anything. She’d just looked away, taking the cases to her boss’s office, and sitting with her while she showed her the printed pictures of Shaun she kept in her wallet. Only partially to avoid running into Nick again.
“I wasn’t in love with him,” Nora admitted, looking away. “Nick, that is. It probably would have made it better, wouldn’t it? If I’d loved him? But I loved Nate. I was just— so lonely.”
Sometimes that ever-pervasive loneliness still hit her. But back then it was never-ending.
She still remembered taking that call in the kitchen of that big, lonely house Nate had insisted they purchase. So they could get that dog he always wanted. With the spare room for a baby. The baby he’d been promising her since they got married, right after she graduated from law school. He’d wanted to wait until he came home on a more permanent basis, so his son would never have to grow up without a father. Not like he had.
“Sorry, Nora,” Nate said, the line breaking up two or three times a minute. “CO says some of us have to stay. Avery’s got a kid on the way, and Leo’s mom is sick.” Another eighteen months.
What about our kids? Our future? she’d wanted to say. But she bit her tongue. He’d broken no promises to her. He’d always made it clear that serving his country came first. Just like his father, and his father’s father before him. He never lied. Nora’s expectations had just been too high.
“Will you be getting leave before then?” she asked instead. The line was silent. She’d pursed her lips. “No leave, then,” she’d said.
“No,” the line crackled. “CO says I get first dibs at the phone lines since I volunteered first, though.” She pressed her lips together, biting her tongue. First, huh?
Nora had started working later after that, just so she wouldn’t have to go home to that empty house, that big bed all by herself. Taking extra cases. Driving home so late at night half the stop lights were on a permanent cautious yellow, as if to say travel at your own peril.
She went home to visit her mother in the October after that call. Nate had encouraged it on their weekly phone call, saying, it’ll be good for you. You don’t call your mother enough. On her visit, her mother ran into the mother of one of her other sorority sisters at the Super-Duper Mart in Providence, and that Sunday Nora was shuffled out of her mother’s house to meet her sisters from Phi Delta Delta for Sunday brunch.
She hadn’t kept up with them like they’d all promised after graduation. Nora had moved with Nate to his little bachelor flat in Concord, and the rest of the girls had stayed put. Eileen was pregnant with her second, and Gloria and her wife had just closed on a condo. Maxine and Norma were back teaching at the university, and all of them lived less than three blocks from the place they were born.
After brunch, sipping on mimosas and eating flavored gelatin, they hugged and kissed and promised to make the trip up to Boston some time. They never did make it.
She went back home feeling more isolated than ever.
All her coworkers were married men, with wives and husbands and children at home. On days when she wasn’t working, when the courts didn’t meet, and her boss shooed her from the office, she went to the legal library. It had been a place of refuge for her in university. She’d sometimes chat with the librarian, Esther, who was old enough to be her mother, and helped some of the local college girls with their papers.
One night, after hours spent by the phone waiting for a phone call from Nate that never came, she took up the girls’ offer to get a drink with them at the bar across the street. But sitting there, with them in the booth, she could feel the age gap so wide between them it was like a chasm.
When she slipped away to the bar to get something a little more substantial than the fruity cocktails the girls were ordering, she ran into Nick Valentine.
Nick Valentine, Chicago PD, on loan for the Eddie Winter case. Her office wasn’t handling it, but she was close enough that she knew all about it. He was alone at the bar, his hat on the counter, his dark hair and coat ruffled from a long day.
“Nora Pendleton, as I live and breathe,” Nick Valentine had said. “Didn’t think this would be your usual joint. You seem like the classy type.”
Nate would apologize on the phone the week after. Patrol gone late, sorry babe, but—
Nora spent the next week thinking about the way Nick had bought her a drink, calling it a professional courtesy.
Nora was just so tired of being alone.
“Yeah,” Nick said, pulling her out of her memories. She wondered if Nick was remembering the same things she was. “I figured. That’s how it started with Nick, too. The long hours at the station, Jenny unable to come down and leave her job at the paper for what was supposed to be a three month stint, tops,” he snorted. He gave her a knowing look. “You know how that went.” Nora knew it. The Winters case dragged on and on. Eventually Cambridge PD offered Nick a permanent spot on the force after one of their detectives got killed. He always said he wasn’t considering it.
“But Nick was too damn in love to see it,” Nick said. Nora winced. She really hadn’t known. “But when I woke up on that trash heap, all that grief was fresh and raw. Jenny, you—” he snorted. “With enough time and distance, I knew you’d never leave your husband. Not for an old cop halfway to alcoholism. The point was moot by then, of course. You were a hundred years dead and gone, even if you’d survived the bombs.”
Nora pressed her lips together.
“Nate deserved better,” she said. He deserved a better wife. He deserved to live. And that’s how Nora knew karma wasn’t real. All Nate had ever done was be a good man, a loving husband, a good soldier. If karma were real, she would have died in that pod, and Nate would be out here. If Nate had been the one to survive, she knew he’d have saved Shaun by now.
“So did Jenny,” Nick said. “Doesn’t change what happened, though.”
Nora watched Nick. There was something wistful in his voice, careful in the way he watched her. It reminded her of those early days with Nick, right after she and Nick had gotten so drunk they’d kissed in that alleyway before Nora had stumbled into a cab and headed home alone. Before they talked about it— not that they ever really did, not other than, don’t think too hard about it, doll.
This Nick had said he’d felt something for her when he saw her again. It made that part of her that she thought had died in that vault stir again. Hope, maybe. Maybe something else. She thought about what Nick had told her just a little while ago, crouched over the bullet holes in the pavement. If that’s the only thing in this world I can claim as mine.
“You do have something Nick never had,” Nora said, taking a chance. She reached out over the table, taking Nick’s hand. “Me.”
He snorted, looking down at their hands. “Might be remembering wrong, but I’m pretty sure he had you quite a few times, doll.”
She kicked him under the table. “Nick!”
He laughed, and when he spoke it was with cautious optimism. “I’m not exactly the man he was.”
“I like you better,” Nora said truthfully. “You got a lot from him. The best parts, really,” she said. His sense of justice, and the smarts to get him through this wasteland. His kindness towards strangers, and— towards women who broke Nick’s heart. “But you’re your own person. You have your own sense of morality, and your own ideas, Nick.” She squeezed. “I would have fallen in love with you, I think,” she said. “But am I wrong in thinking you’re not the type of man who would step out on his fiancée?”
“No,” he said. “I wouldn’t have.” He flipped their hands so his was on top, covering hers. She’d long since taken off her ring. “But you’re not that woman anymore, either.”
He said it with a sort of finality. His mouth was pressed into a thin line.
“Ah,” she said, disappointment leaking from her chest. “I’m not.” She’d learned to bear loneliness better. The sound of her own thoughts. Before she’d moved in with Nate after they got married, she’d never really been alone before. She’d gone straight from her mother’s house to Nate’s. She was a grown woman, a lawyer, and yet she’d never learned how to be by herself.
Leaving the vault had been a hell of her own making. She’d felt for so long that it was god’s punishment for what she’d done. Maybe she had been the one to die in that vault, and she was living out her own worst nightmare with a shade of the man who helped damn her. Nate would have saved Shaun by now, she knew. He would never have had to learn how to use power armor on the fly, how to mod a gun, how to rebuild a power station. He’d done it all before, in the biting cold of Alaska, fighting for their country, while she stayed home and fucked someone else.
“It’s not a bad thing, Nora,” Nick said gently.
“But isn’t it?” Nora said, a tightness forming in her chest. “I’m not the woman Nick loved. The woman you loved. And that’s— that’s alright,” she said, pulling her hand back. She closed her other hand around her own wrist. “We’re good friends, aren’t we, Nick? Despite all this?”
“Nora—” Nick sighed, but she got up and out of the booth. She couldn’t bear to hear the rejection. The pervasive loneliness was back, but this time she wasn’t going to take it out on people she loved. Maybe she’d leave Nick’s side for a while, just for long enough that her feelings might fade, and either bring Dogmeat along, or just— be alone. For once.
She had friends now. Piper, who showed up at Sanctuary, calling it a sad-sack town, dragging her away for a story. Hancock never let her ride alone. He would sit between her parted, fully-clothed legs, resting his head on her knee, a platonic intimacy she’d never known before, watching the stars with him while high on Jet. Preston, a straighter shot than she was. Didn’t drink, didn’t do chems, but liked to gamble a few caps on cards on those long nights on patrol at the castle. The others— Mac, Cait, and so on— they all knew what it meant to be alone.
Nick caught her wrist. “Nora,” he said, stepping out of the booth, looking down at her with yellow rings, “you’re not the woman Nick loved, not anymore,” he said, like salt in the wound. “Do you think that woman would have picked up a gun to kill the man that took her child? Killed her husband?”
“No,” she said. Back then, before Shaun was born and she looked at his sweet face, she’d never known she could love another person as much as she did. She’d never known what kind of violence she was capable of when her own life was threatened, when it came down to defending someone else.
“But I never loved that woman,” Nick said. “I love you.”
“Oh,” she said. “How could you? I’m— me,” she said. She wasn’t a good person. She knew that. She’d been a terrible wife, a terrible affair partner, and a worse friend. A bad mother, too. Shaun was still out there, waiting for her.
“Nora, haven’t you listened to a damn thing I’ve said to you?” He took her face into his hands. She felt the cool metal of his exposed hand on her cheek. “You’re the best partner I’ve ever had. You care about the things that matter. Sure, I’d be damned heartbroken if you stepped out on me, but I think you’ve learned your lesson there, haven’t you?”
She nodded. She’d learned to bear it better. She’d promised to be a better wife. This time, she’d do it right.
He leaned down to kiss her. It was funny— Nick had always had to lean up, just a little. The texture of his mouth was like overworn plastic, almost too soft, but with a rigidity that didn’t make sense. She was almost afraid of breaking him.
He laughed into her mouth, like she’d spoken aloud. “I’m not going to break, if that’s what you’re thinking. Worse people have tried.”
“How do you know what I’m thinking?” she protested.
“I’m a goddamn detective, doll. Now why don’t you kiss me like you mean it? I know you know how.”
She stepped up on her toes, tugging him down by his tie, licking at his bottom lip. He made a noise, deep in his throat. She’d been right in her gamble— he still liked the things Nick used to. It might have been cheating, but she hadn’t been touched by another’s hands in two hundred years, and she was willing to bet Nick hadn’t either.
She pressed him back, leading him by his tie, up against the table, pressing herself up against him so he could feel her through his coat. She kissed him thoroughly, exploring the strange concaves of his mouth, her free hand exploring his jaw and throat. She led his hand to her breast, the metal making her shiver.
She rocked against him, until she felt a familiar hardness between his legs. She hadn’t been sure if he’d been equipped, as a midpoint between the Gen 2s and 3s, but she hadn’t cared either way. Nick had always been good with his mouth. She pulled back, just briefly, to see his face. She knew he couldn’t blush, but she thought if he were human, he might have. The dark, metallic irises were blown wide.
When she pressed back, she pulled him close to her with her hand on the back of his neck, moaning openly into his mouth. She felt him groan through his whole chest, his leg sliding between hers. He kissed like Nick, too. His mouth had always been one of her favorite things about him. His wit, and his tongue.
She pulled back, trailing kisses down his throat, popping the buttons of his collar, loosing his tie as she went. She kissed past the mottled plastic of his chest plate, where three distinct bullet holes were present. She worked back up to press open-mouth kisses to the flesh-covered parts of his neck, and reached for his trousers.
“Slow down, doll,” he panted, “it’s been a while for this old bucket of bolts.”
Nora looked up, meeting his eyes, daring him to say something else as she popped the button for his trousers. She wrapped her hand around the synthetic cock, feeling the strange weight of it in her hand. He made a guttural sound, throwing his head back, gripping the edge of the table. Had he ever been touched by another hand? She had no doubt he’d touched himself before. That part of Nick surely had come through, especially when the memories were fresher in his mind. She’d watched Nick stroke himself off more than once. He made it seem like an art.
Nick’s cock wasn’t like a human’s. It was rudimentary phallic in shape, but without the usual details that defined one. No veins, no distinct head. The same gray shade as his skin. She doubted he could even come the way a human could. But she was damn well willing to try.
She dropped to her knees, taking the cock into her mouth. He groaned out her name, and his hand was in her hair. She hummed pleasantly around him— he seemed to remember the things she liked as well. She rubbed her thighs together, feeling the wetness gathering there, as she sucked experimentally on his cock.
It seemed to react the same way a normal penis would. She wrapped her hand around the base, tugging where she couldn’t fit the whole thing in her mouth, her tongue swirling around the head. It pulsed like a real cock, too, she noticed. She kept at it, sucking and pulling until his hand tightened in her hair, and his body shuttered. He stilled against the table, and when she looked up, her mouth still wrapped around him, he was looking at her fondly.
“Damn,” he said. “Just like old times.”
“Hopefully better,” she said, standing up, dusting off her knees. She went to reach for his cock, to tuck it into his trousers, but he caught her hand, pulling her into a kiss.
“Not yet,” he said. “What did you just say about better?”
And then he was using some of that synth strength she rarely saw him use, and she was flat on her back on the table, the wind knocked out of her, in a good way. She gasped up at him as he unzipped her suit with his teeth, eyes not leaving her as he did it.
He sucked her tit into his mouth, rolling it between his teeth like Nick always had. She bucked her hips up, but he had her pinned down to the table, leaning over her. Without even fully unzipping her suit, he worked his plastic hand into her suit, taking her clit between his fingers and rubbing. “Nick!”
He worked his hand against her sex, her tits in his mouth, until she was just on the verge of coming. And then he pulled back, pulling down her vault suit until it was down, and she was exposed.
She didn’t shy away from his gaze. While Nick’s body had changed, so had hers. Some places were softer than when Nick had seen her last, some muscles harder. She had silver-white stretch marks all across her abdomen, and her nose had been broken by raiders twice. There was still a noticeable bump, even after Nick had set it for her.
But his gaze was appreciative, and she tilted her head back, invitingly, as she spread her legs. “Come on, Nick,” she said, “don’t you want to have me?”
“It’s damn near all I’ve been thinking about for months,” he said, settling between her thighs. She felt the tip of him press into her, and she made a punched-out sound. She wasn’t nearly as ready as she might have been if they’d been at this longer, but she’d had to have him.
He rocked his hips experimentally, his cock still as hard as when she’d sucked him off. She wondered, when her brain could function, if that was his own doing, or a flaw of the Institute. A mechanical man with a cock that could stay hard for hours.
But Nick didn’t give her much time to think. He wrapped his metal hand around her throat, just a bare, loose touch, his thumb pressed against her jugular. Just to feel something, she’d always said. She’d never asked Nate to do that. Only ever Nick. He rocked his hips into her, his other hand pressing against her clit until she was nearly sobbing, her thighs shaking.
When she came, it was with a shutter through her whole body. Nick kissed her, open mouthed, through it, and then, after a few more thrusts, she felt as his body wracked, too. He pressed his forehead against her, and when she opened her eyes, his followed shortly.
“I love you,” she admitted. “I’ll be better this time,” Nora said. A better wife. A better partner. A better person.
“That’s all anyone could ever ask of you, doll,” Nick said, and pressed a kiss to the side of her head.