His eyes went wide, then soft, then scared, then something I didn’t have a name for. His hand was still holding the spoon. A drop of sauce fell on the floor, and neither of us looked at it.
“I love you, too.” His voice cracked on the last word. “That terrifies me.”
“Why?”
“Because what if I’m not good at this?”
The question hung there, naked and so perfectly Ellis that my chest ached with it. Not “what if I don’t mean it” or “what if it goes wrong”—what if I’m not good at this. Like love was a skill he hadn’t trained enough, a project he might fail if he didn’t execute it correctly.
“You’re already good at this. You’ve been good since you made me coffee the first morning you stayed over. You remembered I take it with too much sugar.”
“That’s just paying attention.”
“Yeah. That’s love. Paying attention.”
He set the spoon down on the counter. Turned off the burner. Looked at me with those hazel eyes that had hooked me under fluorescent gym lighting and held me every day since.
“Say it again.”
“I love you.”
“Once more.”
“I love you, Ellis. I love your color-coded watering schedule, your sprint reviews, and the way you argue with recipes when they’re wrong. I love that you bought a plant humidifier last week and didn’t tell me because you thought I’d make fun of you.”
“You would have.”
“Absolutely. But I would have loved you while doing it.”
He crossed the two feet between us, cupped my face in both hands, his palms still warm from the stove, and kissed me. Like he’d decided I was his and he was mine and the math finally worked.
The kiss didn’t end. It drifted, the way sleep drifts in, no clear moment of crossing over. His hands stayed on my face. Mine found the small of his back, his hip, the place his shirt rode up over the waistband of his jeans where his skin ran warm.
He pulled back enough to look at me. Not for permission. For something else. Like he wanted the picture of this before anything else happened.
“Bedroom.”
I nodded.
He took my hand and led me. Not like the other times we’d ended up in his bed. Not the ones that started with him pinned to a wall, or me on the couch with his thigh between mine; the kind of want that didn’t bother with rooms. This had no urgency in it. He walked me down the short hall like he’d been waiting all night for the right song to come on.
His bedroom held the last of the marigold light through the slatted blinds. The plants in the corner threw soft shadows across the duvet. Sandalwood from the candle on his dresser. The faint green smell of his apartment under everything else.
He sat on the edge of the bed and pulled me to stand between his knees.
His hands moved up under the hem of my t-shirt. Slow. Palms flat against my ribs, learning the shape of me like he hadn’t already learned it a dozen times. He pushed the cotton up over my chest, and I lifted my arms, and the shirt landed somewhere behind him. His eyes traced the line from my collarbone to my shoulder to the place my jaw met my ear. Then he leaned forward and pressed his mouth to my sternum.
Just there. The warmth of his lips, the faint scrape of stubble, the slow exhale of his breath against my skin.
My hand went to the back of his head; his hair shorter than mine, soft under my fingers. He stayed there a long moment. Like he wanted to listen to my heart from the outside.
“I love you.” Quieter the second time. Said into my chest, not into the room.
The words landed somewhere deeper than my ears. Lower. The place words go when you don’t have a defense ready.
“I love you.”
He pulled me down with him.
