I stopped, not anticipating the way the first part would feel coming out. I’d been afraid saying the words would be hard, but they weren’t hard, just new. I made myself keep going.
“You belong with me. I'm done pretending you don't.”
She bit down on her bottom lip and held my gaze. What I saw in her eyes gave me the strength to go on.
“You're mine, Soleil. And I’m yours if you'll have me.”
Silence crashed down around me and I waited.
I hadn’t let myself plan past that. All I could do was stand in the kitchen and let her decide if I was worth the trouble.
She slowly set her hand on mine. Her thumb moved against my knuckle. Then she stepped around the corner of the table and pulled my face down to hers.
She kissed me first.
She kissed me with the coffee still on her breath and the cold of the kitchen still on her skin and her sweater bunched up against my chest, both hands flat against my jaw. She kissed me the way I’d hoped she would but didn’t deserve. And when I kissed her back, she made a sound against my mouth, somewhere between a laugh and a sob, and I pulled her closer.
She didn't say yes. She didn't have to.
For a long time we stood there with my hands at her back in the cold of the kitchen with Biscuit on the porch step waiting.
After a while she stepped back half a step. “I found the first one on the bench. Then I found the rest. I never said anything because they didn’t belong to me, they belong to you.”
“I know.”
“I drew the table because I had to draw it. I didn't draw it to —”
“I know.”
“You said —”
I ran my thumb over her bottom lip. “I know what I said. I know what I said and I know why I said it, but I was wrong.”
She nodded.
“I'm slow,” I said.
“You're not slow.”
“I'm slow with this. I was slow in the cabin with the storm. I was slow at the bench. I was slow last night. I would have beenslow this morning if I hadn't started working at midnight and let my hands do the work I was too afraid to say out loud.”
Her mouth curved into something not quite a smile. Something better. She put her hand on the carving. On the columbine at the center.
“They're yours now,” I said. “All of it. The carving. The shop. The cabin. The dog, which you already have. The ridge. You don't have to take it. You just have to know it's yours if you do.”
“I want all of it,” she said. “I want a winter up here. I want to know what your ridge looks like in February. I want to be cold with you. I want to know what you carve when there's nothing on the bench.”
“I'm going to need a minute to catch up to that.”
“Take it.”
I pulled her in against my chest and she let me, her forehead against my collarbone the way it had been at the storm shelter, her hands closed in the back of my shirt. We stood by the kitchen table with the carving on it and the boxes by the door and the coffee getting cold and Biscuit waiting for us to catch up to what he knew all along.
Her heart was going too fast. After a beat, mine was matching it.
“Soleil.”
“Yeah.”
