I stared at her, at the woman who could apparently see straight through every defense I’d ever built, and then I laughed quietly and looked away for a second, because there wasn’t adamn thing left to hide behind. When I looked back, she was still there, still waiting, still choosing to stay in the chair.
“I love you.” The words came out rough — not practiced, not polished, just true. “I’ve loved you for so long I don’t actually remember when it started.” Emotion crowded my throat and I pushed through it. “I love the woman who burns toast and pretends she meant to. I love the woman who takes in every stray thing in Copper Creek and somehow finds room for one more. I love the woman who sat in my garage and asked questions nobody else would’ve asked.” My eyes didn’t leave hers. “I love the woman who walked away from me when I gave her a reason to.” Sophia’s lips parted, and I kept going, because I’d spent too long not saying it. “I love every stubborn, kind, impossible piece of you, and I should’ve trusted you with the whole of me a long damn time ago.”
The room went quiet with the kind of silence that happens when something important finally gets said. Sophia’s eyes filled, and she didn’t look away from that either. Slowly she lifted her other hand and cupped my jaw, her palm cool against my skin, and the touch nearly undid me.
“You idiot.” The words came out thick with tears and affection, and a laugh escaped me before I could stop it. Sophia smiled — small and beautiful, the kind of smile that felt like coming home. “I never needed you perfect.” Her thumb brushed my cheek. “I just needed you honest.”
For a moment neither of us moved, morning sunlight stretching across the floor between us. Then she leaned forward and closed the distance herself.
32
Sophia
His mouth was warm and certain and tasted faintly of the coffee gone cold between us, and for one whole second, I didn’t think about anything at all.
That was the part that took me apart. I’d spent two weeks running a continuous background calculation — where he was, what he wanted, how much it would cost me to want it back — and the moment my lips met his, the whole machine went quiet. No exits. No math. Just Caleb, finally close enough to reach, his hand coming up to cradle the back of my head like he’d been waiting his whole life for the permission and meant to use every second of it.
When we broke apart, neither of us went far. He rested his forehead against mine, and the morning kept coming up gold and indifferent through the kitchen window, the same light that had been climbing the whole time we talked.
“Okay,” I said, which was not a sentence, but it was the only word I had left.
“Okay,” he agreed, low enough that I felt it more than heard it.
We’d been at it since before the sun came up — every ugly room of him, every locked door I’d finally stopped pretending I didn’t want opened — and somewhere in the last stretch of it, the weight of all of it caught up with both of us at once. I sagged into him, and he caught me without apparent effort and without comment, like catching me was the easiest thing he’d done all morning.
“Don’t,” I mumbled into his shirt.
“Don’t what?”
“Don’t say anything else. We’ve said everything. I’m full.”
His chest moved under my cheek, the rough huff that was as close as Caleb came to laughing when he was this wrung out. “Full.”
“Capacity reached. No vacancies. You’ll have to love me silently for a while.”
“I can do that.”
And he did.
He stood and drew me up with him and walked me back down the little hall to my room.
The morning sun was climbing higher outside the windows, bright and indifferent to the fact that my whole world had just shifted on its axis.
Caleb touched me like a man holding something he'd been certain he had lost. No hurry in it. Nothing to prove. Just his hands and his mouth and the quiet certainty of someone grateful for every inch he was allowed to keep.
The worship of it nearly undid me.
Every touch felt like a promise. Every kiss felt like relief.
By the time the light turned bright and gold at the curtains, we were tangled around each other, wrung out and peaceful in the same breath, the weight of two lost weeks finally gone.
Then we slept like the dead, clear through the afternoon.
I surfacedto the specific indignity of a dead arm — his, not mine — and the whole warm length of him down my back. He was still out, his face slack in a way I’d never once caught it in daylight. He looked younger asleep. I’d half expected a man who’d spent a decade in the Teams to sleep with one eye open, and instead he looked like a boy who’d finally been told he could stop standing watch. I could’ve looked at him for an hour. I’d earned it. Two weeks of swearing up and down I was over it, and here he was in my bed with his hair a catastrophe and the only word in my head a clean, ridiculous, top-to-bottommine.
His eyes opened. Found me. Didn’t panic.
“Hi,” he said, gravel all the way through.
