“Yeah.”
“Oh.” I laugh nervously. “Cool. Love that for me.”
His lips curve against my skin. “You get cute when you’re flustered.”
“I do not,” I protest immediately. “I get verbose. There’s a difference.”
He kisses just below my ear, and my words scatter.
“You make everything look like it matters,” he whispers.
My fingers falter on the trackpad. “It does. I… sometimes I get scared I’ll miss something. Like if I don’t capture it, it’ll disappear.”
His arm tightens slightly. “I’m not disappearing,” he murmurs.
I lean back into him without thinking as my head rests against his shoulder. “Good. Because I already put you in like… three different clips.”
“Guess I’m committed now.”
“Deeply,” I say, then add quickly, “Artistically. I mean. Unless—” I stop myself, laughing. “Wow, okay. I’m spiraling.”
“I’ve got you,” he says softly, kissing my shoulder again. “Babble all you want.”
The footage keeps rolling, sunflowers, laughter, light,but now there’s warmth at my back, and a quiet promise in his voice.
I hit play again, smiling. And for once, my nerves don’t feel like a warning.
They feel likehope.
The timeline inches forward as my fingers hover, indecisive, over the trackpad. I nudge a clip half a second to the left. Pause. Nudge it back. The sunflower field sways on the screen, yellow blurring into gold, and my chest tightens in that familiar way, like I’m holding something fragile and don’t want to drop it.
“I’m being annoying about this part,” I murmur, my words tumbling out before I can stop them. “I know I am. I just—if the cut is wrong, it changes the whole feeling, and I don’t want it to feel rushed, because it didn’t feel rushed when we were there. It felt?—”
Reed’s lips brush my shoulder again.
My sentence dissolves.
“You’re not being annoying,” he whispers, his lips warm against my skin. “You’re careful.”
I swallow, nodding even though my eyes are glued to the screen.
His hand rests at my waist, not gripping, just there as his thumb moves in the smallest circle, slow enough that I almost miss it, except my whole body notices.
I keep editing because if I don’t, I’ll lose it.
A clip of the bar fades in; low light, wood grain, the quiet clink of glass. I let the ambient sound breathe rather than cutting it clean, and something in my chest eases as I finally let out an exhale.
“That,” I say quickly, babbling again. “That sound. It feels important. Like… like a heartbeat.”
“It is,” he murmurs.
His lips drift again, this time along the slope of my shoulder to the delicate spot where my shoulder meets my neck.
He presses slow kisses, taking his time, a groan escaping between each kiss.
My shoulders drop, tension melting out of places I didn’t realize were clenched.
I scrub forward, trimming, aligning, telling myself to focus—only for Reed to lift my hand gently from the keyboard.
