He flips open the little pocketknife he always carries and presses the blade carefully into the bark.
Realization hits me immediately.
“Holden—”
He grins while shaving away part of the M.
“You don’t need to do that.”
“I know. But it has a different meaning now, doesn’t it?”
I watch him reshape the letter slowly until the M becomes a K.
H & K.
Something emotional catches unexpectedly in my throat. It’s stupid. Just an old carving in a tree. But it doesn’t feel stupid. It feels like something circling back around. Something finally settling where it belongs.
Holden wipes the blade clean against his jeans before glancing up at me, and immediately pauses.
“What?”
I hadn’t realized I was crying. I wipe at the tears quickly.
“Nothing,” I mumble.
“Korie.”
I laugh weakly, covering my face for a second. “Okay, rude. I was just having a moment! Apparently this tree has emotional significance now.”
“Yeah? You gonna write one of your poems about it?”
I shove him. “I might.”
His expression turns unbearably fond.
Behind us, Hattie comes jogging back up the trail. “What are you guys doing?”
“Preserving history,” Holden answers solemnly.
Hattie squints at the carving. “You guys are weird.”
She wanders back toward the lake again, oblivious to how her brother just made me fall even more in love with him.
The second she’s out of earshot, Holden steps closer. Close enough that my breath catches a little. The evening light filters through the trees around him, catching gold in his hair. He looks warm and familiar and entirely mine in a way that still startles me sometimes.
Holden reaches up, fingers brushing along my stubbled jaw. And then he kisses me. Right there in the middle of the woods beside our ridiculous childhood tree carving.
I melt into him instantly, hands bunching in the front of his shirt as everything blooms even wider.
When he pulls back, he rests his forehead against mine, smiling softly. “You okay?”
I exhale a quiet laugh. “If by okay you mean dreamy and perfectly happy, then yes. I’m definitely okay.”
He chuckles and hugs me.
I think about the last few weeks and how quickly everything changed. And instead of panicking, I’m excited to move forward now. I’m ready to go home. We still have things to figure out, like combining our apartments someday, but I trust us to do it together. More importantly, I trust Holden to stay beside me now instead of running ahead.
We’ll need to make time for our friends again too. For city weekends and game nights and all the people we accidentally disappeared from while we were figuring ourselves out. Maybe we can get one more trip out on the water before it gets too cold. But for the first time, none of this feels overwhelming. It feels real. Like we’re building something.
