“Why?” she asks.
“Because last night you said you didn’t want safe,” I say. “And that scares me a little because I haven’t wanted safe since we were in the barn together. Because I walked into my house under construction and decided I’d drive to Boulder and tell you that, and a beam tried to make sure I never said it.”
She goes still. The quiet of the storm outside the windows has nothing on the silence between us now.
“You were coming to Boulder,” she says. “To see me.”
She says it like a statement. Like she already knows.
“To say I fucked up,” I answer. “To say the way I slowed it down after the wedding wasn’t me changing my mind, it was me trying to be a better version of myself than the guy who couldn’t see straight for twenty-four hours. To say I’m not proud of anything right now except the part where I want you and I’m done pretending I don’t.”
Her throat works. “You told me we had no future.”
“I told myself we had no future,” I snap too fast. “I told you what I thought would protect you from me. I was wrong. I may be a fucked-up mess, but you don’t need protecting from me. You need the truth.”
She takes a step forward, her lips parted. “What truth?”
“That the morning after the wedding, I left you in my bed because I didn’t know how to say any of this without breaking something I didn’t think I deserved to touch. That in the hospital I asked for you because you were all I wanted in the whole damned world. Because I woke up and counted what I had and what I almost lost, and the list didn’t make sense if your name wasn’t on it.”
Her eyes shine. Not tears. Heat. Fight. The thing in her I fell for because it matches the meanest part of me that still wants good.
She looks at the face-down phone and then back at me. “You don’t get to be mad about a text from a man who helped me when you weren’t there.”
“I’m not mad at him,” I say. “I’m mad at a beam that fell. I’m mad at myself for not wearing a fucking hardhat when I know better. I’m mad at time. I’m mad at every second I gave away because it was easier to be a ghost than a man who says what he wants.”
Tabitha’s gaze burns into me. “And what do you want?”
“You,” I say. “I want to build you a kitchen drawer that never sticks. I want to learn how you take your coffee. I want to be the one you text when your hands won’t stop shaking after lab. I want to be the name that lights your phone, and your heart.”
A tremor goes through her, visible in the way she presses her lips together like she’s holding something back. “You sound sure,” she whispers.
“I’m terrified,” I admit.
Something breaks in her posture. She loosens her shoulders, drops her chin a fraction.
The smallest surrender.
It’s enough for now.
I move. Not fast, not slow. Just straight.
She doesn’t step back.
Her breath hits my throat. Mine hits her cheek. The kitchen narrows to two bodies and a counter and the space between a question and an answer.
She closes her eyes. “I don’t want to compete with whatever lives in your head when the lights are off.”
“You’re not in competition,” I say. “You’re the only thing that ever felt simple and impossible at the same time.”
She exhales sharply. “That’s not simple.”
“It is to me.”
I touch her wrist. Her skin is like the softest silk. I feel the flutter of her pulse.
“Henry…”
“Tell me to stop.”
