“Don’t fish,” I say, but heat crawls up the back of my neck anyway.
She laughs under her breath, victory small and smug. “Fine. We set new rules, then.”
“We already have rules.”
“Those were ‘no kissing’ and ‘no touching’ and ‘no fun.’”
“I never said the last one.”
“You implied it with your face.”
I work my jaw.
“Honesty,” she says immediately. “If we’re going to do this for the town, then inside the little bubble we fake, we tell the truth. We say when we’re comfortable and when we’re not. We say when we want to—” She breaks off, eyes flicking to my mouth. Then back up. “When we want to revise the terms.”
I hold her stare until my pulse slows down. “What else?”
“Protection,” she says. “I don’t want to get blindsided by reporters again. If you need to leave a thing early, you tell me. I’ll run interference. If I need to duck out, you?—”
“I walk you out,” I finish, voice rougher than I mean.
“Yeah.” She wets her lips. “That.”
“And when this ends,” I add, working a burr out of the wood grain with my thumb, “we end it clean. No pretending after. No ghosting town events. We can both walk into the diner without Betty and everyone else whispering.”
She flinches like I touched bone. “Right. Of course. End clean.”
The air between us cools a degree. My chest registers the drop. I want to fix it. I don’t know how without making a mess.
“Ember,” I say.
She looks up.
“You’re joy,” I hear myself say. It comes out like a confession I didn’t mean to give, like a flare in a dark tree line. “I didn’t know I remembered how to be near it. So if I—” I shake my head, frustrated with the words. “If I step back, it’s not because you’re too much. It’s because I’m slow.”
She stares at me, throat working. Then she smiles, small and real. “Okay,” she whispers. “We’ll move at your pace.”
“You say that now,” I warn.
She grins. “Oh, I’m going to break your pace like a wild horse.”
“Absolutely not.”
“Absolutely yes.”
The furnace breathes warm through the vents. Outside, Copper Mountain settles into the kind of cold where the sky snaps clear and the stars eavesdrop. Ember pushes her mug aside, runs her fingers along a hairline crack in the tabletop like she’s deciding whether to mend it or let the flaw sing.
“Do you ever think,” she says, “that the worst thing happened, and then you survived it, and then everything after is just…living in the outline?”
I swallow. I know exactly what she means. “Every day.”
She nods, like we just shook hands on truth. “Then maybe,” she says, “we redraw the outline.”
“You don’t redraw a fire scar,” I say. “You learn where it is and walk it.”
“Or,” she counters, sly and gentle, “you plant something that grows around it.”
“You going to plant marigolds in me, Ember?”
