The woman at the art supply shop in town sold me a kit for kintsugi. The Japanese art of mending broken pottery with gold, she told me, as she rang it up. Lacquer and powdered gold and a set of fine brushes. You don’t hide the cracks, she said. You make them the most beautiful part.

I drove back up the mountain in the dusk with the kit on the passenger seat, and I didn’t let myself think about anything else.

I laid it all out on the card table in the parlour. The little pots of lacquer. The paper twist of gold powder, so fine it moved like smoke when I breathed. The brushes. Gran’s sewing needle, which I’d sterilised in the kettle.

Gold and something given.

I’d thought about that line all the way down the mountain and all the way back up. I didn’t know what Gran had meant. Not exactly. But I knew what he’d always needed. What he’d been starving for, for two hundred years.

Something freely given. Something of me.

I pricked my thumb with the needle and let three drops of blood fall into the lacquer. Then I stirred in the gold.

It glowed. Faintly, in the lamplight. A soft, warm shimmer, like the inside of a shell.

Then I lit the fire, and went around behind his chair, and wound the key.

He woke slowly. He was so cracked now. Fine dark lines ran across his hands, up his wrists, along his throat and jaw, across his cheekbones. One ran from the corner of his mouth almost to his ear. They’d spread even since the afternoon. Some of them were almost touching.

His eyes found the card table. The gold. Then me.

“You meant it,” he said quietly.

“I always mean it,” I said. “With you.”

Something broke open in his face.

I held out my hand. He took it, and rose from the chair, and let me lead him to the rug in front of the fire.

“I need to reach every crack,” I said. My voice was shaking. “Every one. I don’t know where they all are.”

He looked at me for a long moment. Then he lifted his cracked hands to his cravat and began, slowly, to untie it.

I’d never undressed him before. In three weeks, I’d given him every inch of my own skin, and I’d never once seen his. I helped him now with fumbling fingers. The cravat. The tailcoat. The green brocade waistcoat, button by button. The fine linen shirt beneath, which I drew up over his head.

His chest was porcelain. Pale and smooth and beautifully made, every muscle carved and glazed with loving precision. And cracked. Fine dark lines spread across it like frost on a windowpane, crawling out from his heart in every direction.

I didn’t let myself look any lower than his waist. Not yet.

“Lie down,” I said. “Please.”

He lay down on the rug in front of the fire. I knelt beside him with the little pot of lacquer and gold in my hand, and picked up the finest brush.

Then I began.

I started with his hands. The first crack, on the back of his wrist, where I’d kissed him on that very first night. I painted it slowly, carefully, following the line with the tip of the brush, and the gold went on warm and shimmering.

Aurelian gasped.

“Does it hurt?” I whispered.

“No.” His voice was hoarse. “Nell. No. It feels— it feels like you.”

I painted every crack.

It took hours. I followed each dark line with the brush, from where it started to where it ended. Over his knuckles and up his wrists. Across his collarbone and down over his chest, tracing the frost-fine web that spread from his heart. Along his throat, where his pulse beat faint and slow beneath my fingertips. Up over his jaw. Across his cheekbones. Over his lips, where the first kiss had opened them.

Everywhere I painted, the gold glowed. Warm and soft and alive.

And everywhere the gold went, he grew warmer.

He lay still beneath me the whole time. He didn’t speak. He just watched me, with his dark burning eyes, while the fire crackled and the gold spread across his body like sunlight across a frosted field.

When I’d done every crack I could see, I sat back on my heels.

He looked like a god. Like a painting of something holy. Pale porcelain veined all over with molten gold, glowing in the firelight.

But I could see the cracks still running down past his waistband. Disappearing under the fine wool of his trousers.

Aurelian followed my gaze. Then he looked back at me, and the corner of his golden mouth curved.

“It seems,” he murmured, “we’re about to find out.”

I laughed. I couldn’t help it. My face was flaming and my hands were shaking and I laughed so hard that I had to put the brush down.

Then I unbuttoned his trousers, and drew them down.

Whoever Ambrose Fell had been, he had been a very thorough man.

I painted the rest of the cracks with my face on fire. Down over his hips. Along his long thighs. Up the smooth porcelain length of the rest of him, where the fine lines ran almost to the tip, and he made a sound so raw and broken that I nearly dropped the brush.

“Nell,” he gasped. “Nell, I can’t—”

“Almost done,” I whispered. “Almost. Hold on.”

There was one crack left.

I’d seen it from the start. The longest of them all. It ran from his heart, straight across his chest, towards the crack that came up from his wrist. The two ends were almost touching. A hair’s breadth of unbroken porcelain between them.

As I watched, the gap closed a little more.

The circle was closing.

I dipped the brush in the last of the gold. My hand shook so badly I had to grip my wrist with my other hand to steady it. I leant over him. I touched the brush to the crack above his heart.

And as I painted the last line of gold, the two ends of the crack met.

Aurelian went still.

Utterly, completely still. The glow in his eyes went out. The warmth drained from his skin in a single breath. The gold on his body stopped shimmering and went dull, flat, cold, like paint on a plate.

He was porcelain. Just porcelain. Glazed and still and silent on my grandmother’s hearthrug.

“No,” I said.

I dropped the brush. I put my hands on his chest. Cold. Hard. Nothing.

“No. No, no, no— Aurelian. Aurelian.”

They have to mean it.

I’d meant it. I’d meant every stroke. I’d given him my blood and my hands and every hour of three weeks.

But I’d never said it.

I’d never once said it out loud.

I took his cold face in my hands. I bent over him until my forehead touched his. I let my tears fall onto his golden cheeks.

“I love you,” I said. “Do you hear me? I love you. I’m giving you that too. Take it. Please. It’s yours. I love you.”

I kissed his cold golden mouth.

For a long moment, nothing happened.

Then, under my lips, I felt it.

Warmth.

It started where I was kissing him and spread outward. Not slowly, the way it always had. All at once. Like a door flung open onto summer. The gold on his skin flared bright. It ran through every crack I’d painted like fire through a fuse, blazing out from his heart to his fingertips, to his feet, to the crown of his head. The porcelain beneath it shimmered and softened and changed.

The fire roared up the chimney. The lamp burst into light. Every candle in the house, every bulb in every room, flared at once. And the man beneath my hands drew in a long, ragged, desperate breath.

A real breath. A human breath.

I lifted my head.

He was looking at me. His eyes were the same deep tea-brown they’d always been. But they weren’t glass anymore. They were wet and dark and alive, with real lashes, and real tears running out of their corners.

His skin was warm under my hands. Soft. Flushed with heat. Not porcelain. Flesh. And all over it, running in fine bright lines wherever the cracks had been, the gold remained. Glowing faintly. Woven into him like veins of sunlight.

He raised one hand. It shook. He touched my face.

“Nell,” he said.

His voice came from his mouth. From his throat. Hoarse and cracked and wholly, unmistakably human.

I burst into tears.

He pulled me down to him. His arms wrapped around me — warm, real, strong arms — and he held me against his bare chest while I sobbed. I could hear his heart. Not slow and strange anymore. Fast and hard and human, racing as hard as mine.

“I felt it,” he said into my hair. “When it closed. I felt the cold come back. I thought, this is it, this is the glaze, I’ll never feel her again. And then—” His voice broke. “And then you said it.”

“I should have said it weeks ago.”

“You said it when it mattered.” He drew back and looked at me. His hand cupped my cheek. His thumb, gold-veined and warm, wiped my tears away. “I love you, Nell Ashby. I have loved you since you sat down across from me and dealt me a hand of cards.”

I kissed him.

His mouth was warm and soft and real. He kissed me back with two hundred years of hunger, and three weeks of learning exactly how I liked to be kissed, and something new besides. Something wild. He rolled us over on the hearthrug until I was beneath him, and his weight pressed me down, warm and solid and human, and I wrapped my arms around his neck and never wanted to let go.

He undressed me with his own hands. Not waiting for me to guide them. Not anymore. He drew Gran’s dressing gown off my shoulders and the nightdress over my head, and then he simply looked at me, naked in the firelight, as if he’d never seen me before.

In a way, he hadn’t. Not with eyes like these.

“You’re flushed,” he said wonderingly. He touched my cheek. My throat. The pink heat spreading across my chest. “I never knew. I could feel it, but I never knew you went pink.”

“Don’t,” I laughed, mortified, and he smiled — a real smile, wide and crooked, that I’d never seen on his painted face — and bent his head and kissed the flush on my breastbone.

Then he kept going.

He’d learned my body with his hands for three weeks. Now he learned it with his mouth. He kissed my breasts slowly, one and then the other, and when he drew a nipple into his mouth and his tongue curled warm and wet around it, I arched off the rug with a cry. He made a low sound against my skin, as if the taste of me had surprised him. Then he did it again. And again. Until I was squirming and gasping and tugging at his hair.

He kissed down my belly. He pressed my thighs apart with his gold-veined hands. And then his mouth was on me, and I stopped being able to think at all.

He’d never done this. He’d never had a mouth to do it with. But he went about it the way he’d gone about everything else — with total, devoted attention — and he listened to every sound I made. When I gasped, he did it again. When my hips jerked, he held them down and stayed exactly there. His tongue was slow and warm and relentless, and the rough new stubble on his jaw scraped my inner thighs, and the fire was hot on my bare skin, and I came apart under his mouth with my fingers twisted in his hair, sobbing his name.

He didn’t stop until I pushed him away, shaking.

When he lifted his head, his mouth was wet and his eyes were wild. “Nell,” he said hoarsely. “I could taste it. When you— I could taste it.”

I dragged him up and kissed him, and tasted myself on his lips, and he groaned into my mouth.

Then I pushed him onto his back on the hearthrug, and it was my turn.

I’d painted every inch of him with gold. Now I touched every inch of him with my hands, and felt him feel it. The gold lines across his chest, which made him shiver. His throat, where his pulse raced under my lips. The flat warm plane of his stomach, which jumped when I kissed it. And lower.

When I wrapped my hand around him, he cried out.

He was hot and hard and heavy in my palm, and so sensitive that he arched off the rug at the first stroke. The gold lines that ran down his length glowed under my fingers. I stroked him slowly, and watched his face — his eyes squeezed shut, his mouth open, his hands fisted in the rug — and felt a heady, fierce rush of power and tenderness.

“Nell,” he gasped. “Nell, stop, I’ll— I don’t know what will happen, I’ve never—”

I let go. He lay there shaking, chest heaving.

“Then let’s find out together,” I said, and climbed astride him.

I took him inside me slowly. Inch by inch, sinking down while he watched with his lips parted and his hands gripping my hips so hard I’d have marks in the morning. He filled me. Stretched me. Every gold-veined inch of him, hot and real and his. When I’d taken all of him, I stopped, and we stared at each other in the firelight, both of us breathing like we’d been running.

“You’re so warm,” he whispered. His voice cracked. “Oh, Nell. You’re so warm inside.”

I began to move.

Slowly at first. Rolling my hips, rising and sinking, finding the angle that made sparks race up my spine. He moved with me, clumsy for a stroke or two, then not clumsy at all. His hands slid from my hips to my breasts, my waist, my thighs, everywhere, as if he couldn’t stop touching me now that he could feel all of it. The gold beneath his skin glowed brighter with every stroke, until he shone beneath me like a man made of firelight.

Then he sat up, wrapped both arms around me, and rolled us over.

He took me on my grandmother’s hearthrug with two hundred years of hunger. Deep and hard and desperate, his forehead pressed to mine, his breath ragged against my mouth. Every stroke drove a cry out of me. I wrapped my legs around his waist and dug my heels into the small of his back and pulled him deeper, and he groaned my name like a prayer.

I came a second time, so hard my vision whited out. I felt myself clench around him, again and again. And I felt him feel it.

He broke.

He drove into me one last time, buried as deep as he could go, and his whole body went rigid. Then he spilled inside me — hot and sudden and pulsing, wave after wave of it — and he cried out against my throat, a raw, astonished, utterly human sound. The gold in his skin flared so bright the whole parlour lit up like noon.

I held him through it. Every shudder. Every gasp. Until he slumped against me, boneless and trembling, his face buried in my neck.

It was a long time before either of us could speak.

“I didn’t know,” he said at last, into my skin. His voice was wrecked. “That I could. That I’d be able to— That it would feel like that.”

I laughed weakly and stroked his sweat-damp hair. I could still feel him inside me. Still feel the warmth of what he’d given me.

“Mr Fell,” I said, “was a very thorough man.”

Aurelian lifted his head. He stared at me. Then he started to laugh — helpless, shaking, wonderful laughter — and buried his face back in my neck, and laughed until we were both crying.

Afterwards, we lay tangled together in the firelight for a long time. I traced the golden lines across his chest with one finger. He shivered every time.

“Does it feel strange?” I asked softly. “Being flesh?”

He was quiet for a moment.

“It feels,” he said at last, “like being out in the rain after two hundred years indoors.” His hand moved slowly up and down my spine. “Cold and wet and overwhelming. And I never want to go inside again.”

I pressed my face into his chest and laughed.

I woke in the morning on the hearthrug, wrapped in Gran’s old dressing gown and a crocheted blanket from the sitting room. The fire was burning low. The curtains were open, and pale sunlight was spilling across the parlour floor.

And there was the smell of tea.

I sat up. Aurelian was in the doorway, holding two cups. He was wearing his shirt and trousers from the night before, rumpled and half-buttoned. His hair was a mess. The gold on his throat and hands glinted in the sun.

He’d made the tea himself. With his own two hands. Walking on his own two feet. No key.

I looked past him at the wingback chair. Lying on its cushion, small and old and worn, was the brass key with its bow like a curling leaf. It must have fallen out of him in the night.

Aurelian followed my gaze.

“I found it this morning,” he said. “I thought I’d keep it. For the cribbage table.” He handed me my tea. Milk, no sugar. “As a reminder.”

“Of what?”

He sat down beside me on the rug, warm and real against my side.

“That I’m only here because someone meant it,” he said.

We drank our tea in the sunlight. Then, because some things don’t change just because you’ve become flesh and blood, he dealt us both a hand of cards on Gran’s card table.

And he cheated. Outrageously. And so badly that I caught him every time.

I didn’t go back to the city. I sold the flat and kept the house. The solicitor was very confused. The village was even more confused, when a tall, beautiful, old-fashioned man with gold scars on his hands started doing the grocery shopping and paying off my grandmother’s debt.

But they got used to him. People do.

And every evening, we sit in the parlour by the fire, at Gran’s card table, with the brass key between us. He reads to me. He cheats at cribbage. He’s a very poor loser, and I find it very funny.

Sometimes, when we’re laughing, I could swear I hear her laughing too.