We don’t move for a long time. He’s still inside me. Our hearts are hammering against each other, and his hand is in my hair, and I am crying.
Not dramatically. Not sobs. Silent tears, leaking from the corners of my eyes and sliding into my hair. I can’t stop them because my body has decided this is the appropriate response tobeing loved this thoroughly by someone who sees every single part of me and wants them all.
He lifts his head, and the concern on his face is immediate. “Hey—oh, Beth—are you?—”
“I’m fine.” I laugh, wiping my eyes with the heel of my hand. “I’m so fine. It’s just—a lot. You’re a lot.Thisis a lot.”
His expression softens from concern to understanding, and he pushes a tear away from my temple with his thumb and kisses the spot where it was. “Too much?”
“The perfect amount.” I pull his face down and kiss him. It’s salty and slow and full of every word I’m not ready to say, but that he can probably taste anyway. “The perfect amount of a lot.”
He rolls onto his side, pulling me with him, and we lie tangled in his sheets. His sheets, in his bed, in his house. His hand traces lazy patterns on my back. My head rests on his chest, his heartbeat returning to normal, and I know this is what Dana meant.
Let him take care of you. That second part is just as important.
“I want to stay like this,” he murmurs into my hair, and I know he’s not talking about tonight.
“I’m not going anywhere,” I whisper back, and I’m not talking about only tonight, either.
I wake up at 3 a.m. to his breathing and the unfamiliar geography of a bed that isn’t mine. His arm is heavy across my waist, and his nose is pressed against the back of my neck. He’s so deeply asleep that his exhales come out in soft, warm waves against my skin.
I don’t move. I don’t want to. I want to memorize this in a way I didn’t think I needed to the first night we spent together. The weight of his arm, the texture of his sheets, the moonlight through the window turning everything silver and strange. I want to remember what it feels like to choose to be here. Not because I had to, not because it was expected, but because I wanted to. Because staying now feels more like me than leaving ever has.
My phone lights up with a notification I don’t read on the nightstand. It doesn’t matter. Nothing outside this bed matters.
I press against him, and his arm tightens around me in his sleep. An unconscious pull. A reflex. Even asleep, he reaches for me.
I close my eyes. And for the first time in as long as I can remember, I fall back asleep without a single thought fighting for attention. Just warmth, and weight, and the steady rhythm of someone breathing beside me.
Staying.
CHAPTER 45
RIDICULOUS, BUT MAGNIFICENT.
DARCY
In the last few days, I have become a man who smiles at his coffee.
Not because the coffee is particularly good—though it is, since I’ve finally dialed in the ratio on the machine I bought specifically because Beth drinks coffee like it’s a competitive sport—but because there’s a toothbrush next to mine. A purple one. It’s been there since Saturday. Every morning when I see it, I smile like an idiot, and every morning, I tell myself to stop, and every morning, I don’t.
Yesterday, she burned toast.
Not a little.Catastrophically. The kind of charred that sets off the smoke detector and sends us both scrambling—her waving a dish towel at the ceiling, me opening every window in the cottage. When the alarm finally stopped, she stood in the kitchen holding two pieces of what could generously be called carbon and said, completely deadpan, “I think these need another thirty seconds.”
I laughed so hard I had to hold onto the counter.
We ate cereal instead, standing at the island, and she handed me my meds without looking up from her bowl. She slid the bottle across the counter with one hand while scrolling through her phone with the other. I slid her pill case back, and neither of us acknowledged the casualness of it. The fact it’s become as automatic as pouring coffee brings me a level of joy that can’t be normal. I should probably discuss that with my therapist.
She left for work with wet hair, wearing my T-shirt. She kissed me at the door the same way you kiss someone when you know you’ll see them later. Quick. Easy. A period at the end of a sentence, not an exclamation mark.
I’ve been useless ever since.
I tried to review the marina’s financials. Read the same paragraph four times. Opened my laptop, closed it, opened it again, then spent twenty minutes staring out the window, replaying how she looked in my kitchen the other morning in bare feet, a messy bun, that specific wrinkle between her eyebrows when she’s concentrating on not destroying a piece of bread. And I decided, productivity is overrated.
So now I’m on the back deck with my second cup of coffee, smiling at it. I’ve made peace with the fact I am a deeply unserious person when it comes to Elizabeth Cameron.
The morning is cool and bright, so quiet you can hear the water from half a kilometer away. I close my eyes, tip my head back, and let the sun warm my face. I am thinking about absolutely nothing important when I hear it.
