It was tentative at first. Careful, the way he did everything that mattered. His hand stayed on her face, and his other hand found her waist, and she could taste rainwater on his lips. She kissed him back and the tentativeness turned into certainty. She put her hands on his chest, feeling the damp cotton and the warmth underneath, and leaned into him.
When they pulled apart, she kept her hands where they were. His heart was hammering under her palm.
“I’m terrified,” she finally said.
He nodded. “Me too.” His thumb traced her jaw. “But I’m more terrified of not trying.”
She looked at him. Rain streaked the windows behind him. The lighthouse beam swept through the kitchen, one slow pass of light across the counter, the wall, his face.
“Okay, we try,” she said.
He pulled her close. She pressed her forehead against his collarbone and felt his arms around her, solid and warm even through the soaked clothes. The wind rattled the windows. The rain kept coming. The lighthouse beam came around again, steady as it had been for a hundred and forty years, and this time they were both standing in its light.
She closed her eyes and let him hold her.
Chapter 25
She didn’t know how long they stood there. Long enough that the rain outside shifted from hammering to steady, long enough that the warmth between their bodies replaced the chill of soaked clothes. Clint’s arms stayed around her, and her forehead stayed pressed against his chest, and neither of them moved because moving meant deciding what came next.
His heartbeat was the steadiest thing in the room.
When she finally pulled back, his hands dropped to her waist and stayed there, like he wasn’t ready to let go completely. She looked up at him. His hair was plastered to his forehead and his eyes were the clearest she’d ever seen them. No guardedness. Just Clint, standing in her kitchen, looking at her like she was something he’d been afraid to want.
“You’re shivering,” she said.
“So are you.”
She stepped back. The air between them went cold immediately, and she almost stepped forward again just to fix it. “I’ll get you a towel. And something dry.”
She went to the bathroom and pulled two towels from the cabinet. In the mirror, she caught her own face. Flushed. Wide-eyed. Mouth still tingling. She looked like someone who had just done something terrifying and didn’t regret it yet. She pressed the towel against her cheeks and took a breath.
Don’t overthink this. Don’t ruin it by thinking.
She changed quickly in the bedroom. Dry jeans, a cotton pullover, her hair squeezed into the towel and then let loose, damp against her shoulders. She grabbed one of the oversized T-shirts she slept in and a pair of sweatpants with a drawstring waist and brought them out with the second towel.
Clint had taken off his jacket and hung it over the back of a kitchen chair next to hers. He was standing by the counter in his wet T-shirt with his arms crossed, and when she held out the clothes, he looked at them and then at her.
“I’m not putting on your pajamas.”
“They’re not pajamas. They’re clothes that happen to be dry.” She pushed them into his hands. “Bathroom’s on the left.”
He went. She heard the door close and stood alone in the kitchen, listening to the rain and the muffled sound of him moving behind the bathroom door.
She put the kettle on because she needed something to do with her hands. She found tea bags in the cabinet and two mugs that didn’t match and set them on the counter. The ordinary ritual of making tea while a man she’d just kissed changed into her clothes in the next room. The absurdity of it almost made her laugh again.
Clint came back in the sweatpants and T-shirt. The pants were too short by several inches and the shirt pulled tight across his shoulders and he looked completely ridiculous and entirely himself.
“Don’t say anything,” he said.
“I wasn’t going to.”
“You were about to.”
She bit the inside of her cheek. “Tea?”
“Sure.”
They moved to the couch. The couch, where you sat close and stayed.
