How do you really describe what love feels like? Tommy ponders this as they lie in bed together, her head reclining on his lap, a musty book dangling from his fingers as he reads.

Other fingers- slender and quick and rough and scarred and beautiful- begin to prob his sides, looking for weak spots (they're searching in the wrong place, his weak spot is lying across his lap, smiling up at him with cracked lips and white teeth, faint freckles stretched across a sunburned nose) and the book falls as she reaches up farther, pulling his lips down to greet hers once more. She tastes like everything he wants and everything he needs; warmth and fire after a storm, summer sun after a long winter. Healing his frostbite, warming him up from the inside out.

The polar ice caps melt when she looks at him like that.

Love is the curve of her lips and the hollow of her collarbone. Love is everything he wants her to be, everything she is, and everything she doesn't want to be.

It's wisps and tendrils of smoke and the scorching heat of fire; untouchable and burning and beautiful and so bright it hurts his eyes.

It's Lady Luck personified; elusive and frightening and awe-inspiring and perfect.

The grown man inside- the devil on his shoulder, his personal Jiminy Cricket; a loathsome bug- tell him that his luck will slip through his fingers and he has to hold on tight and never let her go.

The gambler inside- the addict, the monster, the little boy who breathes optimism and feasts on happiness and make-believe riches- goes all in.

Lady Luck is a fickle bitch and he turns his back, disavowing books and warm kisses and the Irathient who brought summer back to his world.

She pulls his lips to hers through the bars and the only thing he can think is 'oh shtako, not again'.

They meet, and time slows to the weakened pulse of a breaking heart as spring is blown away in a blistering gust.

Defiance is back.

God help me, season two is amazing.