"You're going to hear one more thing. I'm not coming back into your bed tonight or any night this week until you've earned it. Earning it means a few things. You stop hiding from me when it's hard. You tell me before I have to ask. The next time you want to know how I am, you call me. Yourself. We do this together from now on, or we don't do it at all."
She steps once toward me. Her boots are quiet on the kitchen floor.
"I'm choosing you, Kane. That's what I came back to say. The rest we figure out together, you and me. If you want that too."
For years I've kept anyone from getting close enough to do this to me, and for nine days I've held myself at the edge of doing it back. The wall I built held against everyone else, but it had no hope against her.
I find the words. They come quieter than I expected.
"You're the first thing I want to stop punishing myself for."
She doesn't move.
"I don't know how to do this yet. I've never let anyone close enough, but I'm going to learn. I won't spend the rest of my life shut down."
I take a breath.
"I'll do what you said. All of it. I don't know how fast I learn, but I will."
She crosses the rest of the kitchen.
She stops in front of me. Her left hand finds the place on my chest where I tucked the letter. Her fingers settle over the corner.
She almost smiles.
"No more excuses now, Kane. You have to take care of me."
"I will. For the rest of my life if you'll let me."
She doesn't move her hand and for the first time in years I don't step back.
Then she rests her forehead against my collarbone.
I put my arms around her slowly, with the same care I tried to use with her last night, because it was her first time and I wanted her to know what she meant to me in the only language I had.
The fire pops in the next room.
She breathes against my throat and I breathe against the crown of her hair.
The rest of it is for later. Right now this is the first thing I've earned, and I'm not going to talk while I'm receiving it.
Chapter 12: Callie
I wake up in the guest room.
The light is already coming in flat through the windows, late-morning angles I haven't seen in days because I slept through the early hour for the first time in a week. The first thing I feel, before I'm fully awake, is the lightness. Whatever I was carrying at the creek yesterday is gone.
I told him last night what the conditions were. Not into his bed this week. He didn't argue. He walked me to this door and stood at the threshold long enough to make sure I closed it behind me, then went back to his own room. I lay awake for an hour listening to him not move on the other side of the wall. The wanting to get up and cross the hallway to him was loud enough that I almost did it twice but I know the terms I'd set were the right ones, so I held them. I felt him from twelve feet away regardless.
I get up, put on the clothes still on the chair from yesterday, and open the door.
The house smells of coffee. He's already poured two cups, and he turns from the sink when I come in: fresh shirt, dark grey, sleeves pushed to the elbows. The envelope is on thekitchen table beside his keys, square in front of the chair he hasn't sat in yet.
"Morning," he says.
"Morning."
He hands me the mug. Black, how I take it now. The pull to put my arms around his neck and kiss him is right there under my collarbone, the same one I held off all night, and crossing six feet of kitchen would put my mouth on his in two seconds. I take the cup with both hands instead. He waits until I've had two swallows before he speaks again.
