He kisses my lips softly. “Beautiful.”
He insists that I stay laying there. Cruz gets up and gets a warm washcloth and he cleans me. I didn’t know men could be like this. It’s… new.
And too much.
And then I cry.
Quietly, unexpectedly, not dramatically— just a few tears sliding sideways into the pillow with my back to him while I process the fact that I didn’t know I needed that until it was over, all of it. The dinner. The beach. The hands finding each other in the dark.
And this, especially this.
I feel him go still behind me.
Then he pulls me closer, rolling me toward him. Not making it a thing, not asking me to explain or reassure him or performthat I’m okay. He just gathers me in against his chest with one arm and puts his chin against the top of my head and lets me be exactly where I am.
“You don’t have to explain,” he says quietly.
Which makes me cry a little more, briefly, and then stop.
We lie there in the dark with the ocean doing its steady work outside and I feel his heart under my hand —solid, present, a little fast, the same as mine— and I think about what I said on the beach:I needed to find out if I still knew how.
How to want something for myself.
How to be a person who takes up space in her own life.
Turns out I still know how.
Turns out it just needed the right conditions.
Later —much later, the kind of later that’s nearly early— I tell him about the years after David left.
Not the legal facts of it, not the case I built and won, but the other part. The part where I sat in my car in the school pickup line and felt the specific terror of being forty and starting over and not knowing whether I was enough on my own.
“I decided I had to be,” I tell the ceiling. “There wasn’t another option. The girls needed me to be and so I was.”
Cruz is quiet for a moment. “And then you just… kept being?”
He’s so right.
“And then I just kept being.”
“Until you forgot to check whether you still wanted to.”
I riase my head to look at him in the dark. “When did you get this perceptive?”
“I’ve been paying attention,” he says simply.
I look back at the ceiling. Outside the window the sky is doing the pre-dawn thing, the darkness going slightly gray at the edges, and it occurs to me that I have been awake all night for the first time in years and I feel— not tired. Something else. Something lighter and more complicated than tired.
“My rental ends in five days,” I say.
His hand, resting on my waist, doesn’t move. “I know.”
“Yours too.”
“I know.”
Neither of us says what comes next. The question hangs in the pre-dawn gray and the ocean fills the silence and I don’t try to build the case or stress-test the structure or prepare the counterargument.
