"Okay," I whispered.
"Callie."
"Yeah."
"Leave the door open."
His truck was in the driveway in fifteen minutes.
I heard the engine cut. The door. His boots on the walkway — three strides, four, the sound of a man who was not walkingslowly. The porch boards creaked under his weight and then he was in the doorway and the porch light was behind him and his face was in shadow and all I could see was the shape of him — big, solid, filling the frame the way he filled every room he entered, the way he'd filled my kitchen and my mornings and the spaces between my daughter's questions.
He stepped inside. Into the light. And my breath left me.
The circles under his eyes were dark, deep, the kind that come from lying awake staring at a ceiling for seven nights. His jaw was clenched so tight I could see the muscle jumping. The lines at the corners of his mouth were deeper, sharper. He looked like a man who'd been running on nothing but willpower and had just reached the end of it.
His eyes found mine, and something in his face broke open. Not a collapse. A release. Like he'd been braced against a door for a week and someone had finally opened it from the other side.
"I was doing the thing again," I said. My voice was shaking. My hands were shaking. Everything was shaking. "Making myself small. Climbing back into the box. You were right. Bev was right. Everyone was right and I — "
He crossed the hallway in two strides.
His hands caught my face first. Both of them. Palms against my jaw, fingers in my hair, tilting my face up to his. He looked at me — really looked, his eyes moving across my face like he was checking that every part of me was still there — and his thumbs brushed the tears off my cheeks and his breath came out ragged and uneven, and his whole body was trembling.
"Don't do that again," he said. His voice was wrecked. Raw. The voice of a man who'd used up everything he had. "Don't shut me out. Fight me, yell at me, throw things at me — I don't care. But don't go quiet. Don't turn the light off."
"I won't."
"Promise me, Callie, because I can’t survive that again.”
"I promise."
He kissed me.
Not soft. Not careful. His mouth found mine, and the sound he made — low, broken, desperate — vibrated through my whole body. His hands slid from my face into my hair, and I grabbed fistfuls of his flannel and pulled him into me, and the week collapsed. Seven days of silence and empty boots and closed doors and cereal instead of eggs and my daughter's face and the dark porch and all of it — all of it — poured into this kiss.
I couldn't get close enough. I pressed against him, and it wasn't enough. I pulled at his shirt, and it wasn't enough. My hands found the skin at the back of his neck, and he groaned against my mouth, and it still wasn't enough.
"I missed you," I said between kisses, the words broken apart by his mouth and my mouth and the lack of air between us. "I missed you every single day and I did it to myself and I'm so — "
"Stop." He pulled back just enough to look at me. His eyes were the darkest green I'd ever seen them, wet at the edges, burning. "Stop apologizing. Just be here."
"I'm here."
He kissed me again. Deeper. Slower. His hands moved down my back, and I felt the shift in him — from desperate to deliberate, from holding on to taking in. His mouth moved to my jaw. My neck. The spot below my ear that made my knees buckle, and he knew it, because he'd memorized me months ago and hadn't forgotten a single thing.
My back hit the hallway wall. His body pressed against mine, and I could feel his heart hammering through his chest into mine, both of us racing, both of us shaking. I pulled at his flannel, and he shrugged it off without breaking the kiss. Then his t-shirt — I dragged it up, and he pulled it over his head, and I put my hands on his bare chest and felt the heat of him, andthe hammering under my palms, and something inside me broke wide open.
"Take me to bed," I whispered against his mouth.
He didn't hesitate. His hands slid down to my thighs, and he lifted me like I weighed nothing. I wrapped my legs around his waist, locked my ankles behind his back, and his hands gripped tight beneath me and I felt the breath punch out of him. I buried my face in his neck and breathed him in — cedar and hay and the specific warmth of a body I'd been sleeping next to for months and aching for every night since.
He carried me down the hallway. His mouth on my shoulder. My fingers in his hair. He walked past Maisie's closed door, and I felt his arms tighten around me, protective, reverent, like he was carrying everything that mattered to him through this hallway, and he knew it.
My bedroom. He laid me down and stood over me and looked at me and the way he looked at me — like I was the answer to a question he'd been asking his whole life — made my chest crack open.
"Get down here," I said.
He lowered himself over me. Slow. His weight settling onto me and the relief of it — the physical, visceral relief of his body against mine after seven days of nothing — made my eyes sting. I wrapped my arms around his neck and pulled him close, and pressed my forehead against his.
