I nodded. “The table folds out double with the leaf. We could really spread out, get down to it.”
He tried to say shut up, but his laughter ruined it.
And somewhere between the spilled sauce, our tangled hands, and his quiet, breath-stealing smile, it hit me.
This was the eighth minute.
Not the dramatic ones we used to bleed for, or the unforgettable ones that shaped our lives. Not the seven he replayed while unconscious, that were so full of love they brought him back to me.
But the extra one—the one we built with trust, slowly, carefully, touch by touch.
The one where he didn’t doubt me walking through the door.
The one where I didn’t doubt our future.
A single, ordinary minute where we chose each other without hesitation.
Every day.
Every time.
And one day, when it was my turn to watch my reel at the end of a long, well-lived life, I wouldn’t ask for those seven minutes back. Not if I’d spent every day living the eighth one loving him.
I never claimedto understand interior design. Half the time, I couldn’t tell a backsplash from a backboard. But when Eli stood in the hardware store with his hands on his hips, studying tile samples like they were holy scripture, I knew one thing with absolute certainty: whatever made his eyes light up like that, I was going to make happen.
Which was how I ended up spending an entire weekend in paint-splattered scrub pants while our kitchen looked like a crime scene where drywall had gone to die.
Plastic sheeting crinkled under my socks as I stepped around the unplugged stove sitting uselessly in the middle of the room. The new cabinets were half-installed, which meant they hung on the wall like crooked teeth. Eli stood beneath them, stretching up on his toes to reach the top corner with a paint roller.
His shirt rode up, exposing a thin strip of skin above his waistband. My favorite strip of skin. And just like that, my focus was gone.
“Hand me the roller?” he asked, not looking down.
I passed it over and bent to kiss the warm patch of skin before he could pull his shirt down. He shivered and shot me a look over his shoulder.
“You promised not to distract me.”
“I promised to try,” I said. “You knew what that meant.”
He dipped the roller back into the tray, then flicked paint directly at my chest. A perfect, deliberate streak of pale blue splattered across my scrub top.
“Oops,” he said, failing miserably to suppress a grin.
“Uh-huh.” I caught his wrist gently and tugged him closer. “Purely accidental."
Eli opened his mouth to defend himself, but I kissed him before he could finish. He melted against me, soft and warm and familiar. The roller slipped from his hand and clattered to the drop cloth with a wet splat.
“Now look what you did,” he murmured against my lips, smiling.
“Still pretty sure that was your fault.” I kissed him again, slow and deep, a kiss that made the half-finished room around us disappear. We stumbled a little, bumping the unfinished counter frame. The whole thing wobbled alarmingly.
We froze. Then burst out laughing.
“This kitchen is a death trap,” Eli said.
“Worth the risk,” I answered. “You’re getting the kitchen you always wanted.”
His gorgeous face softened. The laughter faded into something quieter, something that tugged at my heart.
