"And now you wish you had."
"Now I wish I'd known there were a million things I should have asked.”
She set her glass down but didn't reach for me. She just held the space between us in a way that made it easier to keep talking than to stop.
"I've been doing it the same way," I said. "With Rory. With you."
"I know."
I pinched the bridge of my nose. I’d underestimated her, again.
"I knew yesterday when you stood on a ridge and told me you weren't doing this halfway. I knew this morning when you put the journal page in front of Claire instead of locking it back in the storage unit. I knew tonight when you came up these stairs with a piece of paper instead of a reason." She paused. "I've been waiting to see whether you knew."
"I know tonight."
"Okay."
That was all she said. Okay. The same word she'd said at the library when I'd apologized in front of Rory and Claire. The same word that meant I hear you and we are not done but we are also not going backwards.
I didn't reach for her right away.
I sat across the table from her with the whiskey untouched and the lamplight playing off the highlights in her hair, and I let myself look at her the way she had been looking at me for weeks. Without a lens. Without a job. Without a frame.
She let me look.
"I've been photographing you for a while now," she said. "I keep wondering when you’ll let yourself be seen without managing the angle."
"Tonight." I stood up. The table was between us for one more second, and then it wasn't.
I put my hand against the side of her face the way I had on the ridge. Her pulse beat under my thumb where her jaw met her neck. Mine was going even faster than hers.
"I don't know how to do this halfway either," she said.
"I'm not asking for halfway."
"I know."
She kissed me first. There was something about letting her make the first move that mattered. She was the one who was afraid to stay. She was also the one stepping toward me now, and I needed both of us to know that.
Her hands went to the front of my shirt and stayed there.
I kept my hand against her face for a long second after the kiss had moved past being a question. Then I let it slide down to the back of her neck, into her hair, and the kiss got quieter in a way that meant we were both done making decisions.
She led me into the small bedroom. The loft had a double bed under the slope of the roof, a chair by the window where she edited photos, and a lamp on the nightstand she'd left burning.
She turned the lamp off before I asked her to.
I understood without her having to say it. The woman who photographed light for a living had chosen the dark for this. That was a kind of restraint I hadn't earned and was going to have to live up to.
She sat down on the edge of the bed. I sat down next to her. Our shoulders touched.
"Tell me what's off the table," I said.
"Nothing's off the table." She turned her head toward me. "I want all of you, Jace.”
I put my hand against her ribs through the soft shirt. I could feel her breathing slow and even, the way Bella always breathed when she was about to take a shot she'd been waiting for. I pressed my thumb against the bone at the bottom of her sternum, just to feel her pulse there, and her hand came up and covered mine and pressed it harder.
We undressed each other in pieces. Not fast. Her shirt first, mine after, the rest in a quiet sequence that didn't require either of us to look away. I thought I would have something to say but I didn’t. The room was small enough that we couldn't hide from each other, and I’d spent so much of my adult life hiding that the absence of any place to do it from felt unfamiliar in a way that wasn't bad. It was just unfamiliar.
